There is much that a logo can say about a place. An intentionally designed logo is a story – and it can be as much an emblem of our present, as it is a record of the past, as well as a charter for the future.

For us, looking at our first logo is a bit like traveling back in time. When Duality was born, our focus was solely trained on robotics through a Digital Twin and Metaverse lens — and our logo reflected this. Mechanical. Industrial. Grounded, yet with a clear momentum. And singular in its interpretation of the name “Duality.” When this logo was drafted, we couldn’t yet know the exciting directions in which Duality would evolve.

While robotics simulation remains core to Duality’s work, our scope has expanded to include a broader world of Digital Twin applications, a more diverse customer base, and a more comprehensive approach to working with Digital Twins. Our logo, however, remained in the past. In late 2022, we could no longer ignore the feeling that it was time for our logo, and our broader look, to evolve with us. 

There is a lot of trust and collaboration that goes into crafting a new brand identity. The synopsizing nature of this process compels a team to reexamine the questions of “who we are” and “do we all share that same vision?” At Duality, our multidisciplinary team is our foundation and one of our greatest strengths as a company. So it was especially meaningful that our new logo identity was crafted by those who know us best – our own team.

For Mia Rincón, the visual designer who created Duality’s new logo, the process was about distilling the essentials. 

Mia: “It was always about what my team and I asked ourselves back when I first joined and was trying to understand Duality: What is a Digital Twin? What is the ecosystem we’re trying to build? What is our place in this metaverse space? Even after getting clarity on these questions, I still revisit them regularly. Duality has gone through real growth stages in the past year during which we had to explore and define what our values are, where we’re going as a company, and what we are ultimately building. While it can be easy to overthink how new branding can reflect this growth, I always want to approach design as something that can symbolize and summarize – and be accessible to everyone.”‍

At the outset, the Design Team delineated three key criteria that the new logo had to fulfill:

1. Represent a vision of Duality beyond solely robotics
2. Express a human-centric approach
3. Invite curiosity with just one shape

Mia started with the distillation of the core structural element of the Digital Twin 3D mesh – the triangle:

‍Mia: “This was the kernel of the idea, but there were a lot of options to work through. How can we give it a more human touch? How can we encapsulate the Item, Space, and System twin ideas in a shape? We define ourselves as the Enterprise Metaverse, so our logo needs to look modern and future-minded, but it also needs to connect with customers from more traditional sectors.”

‍Mia: “Imbuing shapes with meaning and function through visual variation has always been a thing I love to do. In this case, roundness became an important quality to explore. Roundness in a triangle created a welcoming softness and opened broader interpretive possibilities.” 

While exploring these new design directions, Mia kept a key feature of modular Digital Twins in mind: reusability in different contexts. 

Mia: “With rounded features we opened the door to all kinds of visual adaptation. We can use it variably across our UI – in the buttons, in the corners of imagery, and beyond. I wanted to try it first with the symbols for our company values, and then use this shape throughout our whole system.”

At this point, the logo shape solidified as a version of the Reuleaux Triangle: an equilateral triangle with curved sides derived from the intersection of three identical circles. Reuleaux triangles owe their name to Franz Reuleaux, a 19th century German engineer who pioneered the field of Kinematics (often referred to as the “geometry of motion”), and used these triangles in his designs for translating one type of motion into others. Since then, diverse industries have leveraged this shape for unique purposes. It is found in iconic architecture and it is at the heart of the elegant rotary engine. People continue to find new ways to use it, and so it remains traditional and yet eternally new. The more we learned about this shape, the more we saw parallels with the expanding scope of Falcon and Digital Twins, and the more we discovered our own alignment with it.

The colors of the logo further support the idea presented by the shape – a Duality rooted in its core capabilities and continually expanding towards new possibilities. The green color in the logo is the original green adopted for our first branding, but now it creates the source of a gradient. Transitioning from green to indigo, this gradient carries meaningful color psychology interpretations. The green side references growth, creativity, and balance; while the indigo side is imbued with intention, wisdom, and helpfulness.

The last element introduced was the three-dimensional style of the logo. A simple triangle, becoming a 3D structure. Solid, yet fluid – it was the last missing piece to complete the connection to our Digital Twin work. But a Digital Twin is much more than just a 3D model. Intrinsic to it are levels of data organization that encapsulate meaningful properties and relationships. And the logo twins this quality.‍

Mia: “My favorite part about this logo is the duality of perception it invites. The shape can look like it is sunken into the plane, or like it is protruding out of it. It allows for a 2D and 3D way of seeing it. To me personally, it encapsulates the three types of Digital Twins: in one way it looks like a stage (space twin), while also looking like a tangible object (item twin), and its triangular shape, derived from the interaction of three circles, hints at the third (system twin). When I could see all these qualities in one shape, I knew that we finally had the logo that felt true to today’s Duality, and the company we aspire to be.”