Work ✿ Identity system
Team Fusion 364
The largest system I’ve built: a complete visual identity for a competitive robotics team, from the atom mark through to the button pins. Designed so that people who are not designers can keep it looking right after I hand it over.
The brief
A robotics team is a brand with an unusually hard job. It has to work on a competition robot, a recruitment poster, a sponsor deck, a t-shirt, a sticker, and a technical binder — produced across a season, by rotating students, most of whom have never opened Illustrator.
So the real deliverable was never the logo. It was a system durable enough to survive being used without me.
The mark
The wordmark sets TEAM FUSION 364 in a condensed geometric sans, with an orbiting atom sitting in the gap between FUSION and 364 — so the mark reads as a name and a symbol in one pass, and the atom can be lifted out and used alone at small sizes.
It ships as a proper suite rather than one file: an atom mark, a horizontal lockup, a simplified horizontal lockup for tight spaces, and a vertical lockup — each in black, white, and orange, so there is a correct file for every background someone will ever put it on.
The idea: the guide is a login screen
The brand guide cover is built as a retro sci-fi terminal. Username field: Brand Guide. Password field: TeamFusion364. HUD brackets frame the page, a [LOADING…] tag sits in the corner, and the whole thing is laid over a grainy navy field.
That conceit gave the rest of the system its grammar: bracket corners, dotted connector lines, terminal-style labels, and a grain texture that keeps flat orange-on-navy from feeling sterile.
Two guides, on purpose
The full brand presentation covers the reasoning — construction, clear space, colour values, type hierarchy, misuse. Nobody reads it twice.
So there is also a single-page guide: logo, colours, fonts, the three rules that matter. It is the one that gets printed and pinned up, and it is the reason the identity held together across a season of students making things at 11pm before a competition.
Where the system had to live
- Logo suite Atom mark, horizontal, simplified, and vertical lockups • black / white / orange
- Sub-brands Rocket mark, Fusion City, Fusion Diner
- Brand guide Full presentation plus a one-page field guide
- Technical binder Multi-section InDesign document, season documentation
- Presentation PowerPoint template with a matching Office theme and five backgrounds
- Stationery Letterhead and business collateral
- Recruitment Poster
- Apparel & swag Season t-shirt, buttons, charms, stickers
- Pattern Repeating atom pattern for fills and backgrounds
Apparel
The season shirt had to work in one-colour screen print, read from across a competition field, and still look like something a teenager would choose to wear in public. That last constraint is the strict one.
What I’d keep
Splitting the guide in two. The long document justifies the decisions; the one-pager is what actually enforces them. Every identity I build now ships with both.