Carbo Culture

Communicating complexity

As a studio, we are focused on guiding companies through moments of transformation, using tech and design as tools to explore, establish and develop new business territories, while making complex systems more accessible to the many.

Carbo Culture combines natural processes with advanced engineering and novel business models to restore balance in a complex system that we are all dependent on: the Earth’s climate.

With the carbon removal industry gaining more traction, we partnered up with the Carbo Culture team to translate their unique knowledge, expertise and ambitions into a compelling brand identity and narrative that would help them stand out.

Climate change solutions are often communicated as political, scientific, technological or corporate governance issues, as abstract concepts. We wanted to bring the conversation back to earth.

Drawing on photosynthesis

To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we need ways to look beyond emission reductions and actively draw carbon down from the atmosphere by storing it away safely — for good. Carbo Culture has built a rapidly scalable carbon removal solution with the aim to remove 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, decarbonising energy and soil inputs in the process.

While the solution Carbo Culture has developed is highly tech- and science-driven, their methods draw on a powerful force of nature. Instead of developing completely new methods, they recognise that photosynthesis is the fastest way to draw down carbon from the atmosphere. It offers us an affordable and attainable way to repair our exhausted ecosystem before we run out of time — it’s basically the most powerful ‘net negative’ technology we have at our fingertips right now.

Balancing narratives of nature and tech

Based on multiple interviews with the team, we started to outline the main pillars on which the Carbo Culture narrative leans. First of all, it was important to cater to specialists and laypersons alike, making it possible for readers to unpack and access information at different scales.

While one visitor to the website might be interested in the benefits of biochar as a soil fertiliser, another might be there to read more about the technology that generates it. We built a digital narrative that intuitively invites a wide range of readers to dive deep into the details whenever they need to, allowing them to unfold the story from different angles.

Secondly, we wanted to visually balance the tensions between nature and technology. The new visual identity we designed pays tribute to the molecular drawings of carbon and its hexagonal structure, while the logo mark pulls the words “Carbo” and “Culture” together to emphasise the cultivating aspects of carbon. Like in the word agriculture, “culture” here literally means “to tend, to care, an honouring”.

Combining scientific, technical and industrial languages, such as diagrams, 3D renders and data visualisations, with media that allowed us to emphasise human- and nature-focused aspects, like photography and film, we further developed the productive juxtaposition between nature and tech across Carbo Culture’s communications.

Lastly, we had to balance the most tangible aspects of Carbo Culture, the processes, products, people and partners that push the business forward today, with the more abstract notion of climate change and the global-scale impact that the company aims to have — thousands of years from now.

By combining documentary-style imagery and concrete data with more high-level and poetic metaphors and visualisations, we impressed the realness and nowness of Carbo Culture while maintaining a sense of the larger whole and the scale of impact.

The new identity marks a shift for Carbo Culture as they scale up their operations towards a full commercial roll-out — we are excited to have contributed to this milestone.

Tech Stacks

• Next.js + Typescript + Emotion + Framer Motion (frontend)
• Headless CMS

Collaborators

• Federico Barni (BTS+nature footage Finland)
• Rob Fraebel (BTS+nature footage California)
• Alexandros Mavrogiannis (CGI biomass+products)
• Shestakovych Studio (CGI reactors)
• Remy van der Winden (diagram animations)
• Gianluca Alla (logo animations)