Biyiblip

Building a Brand from Scratch

synths

The Challenge

Biyiblip started with a product ambition but no brand.

There was no name, logo, visual system or defined communication territory. At the same time, the company was entering an established international modular synthesizer market populated by brands with strong communities and recognisable visual codes.

The challenge was therefore not to decorate an existing business. It was to determine what the brand should stand for before deciding what it should look like.

Information about Soma Laboratory in Warsaw, Poland, including its founding in 2016, 16 employees, ecological projects, a laboratory, and a retail store. Contains photos of people linked to Soma, laboratory equipment, and a video thumbnail.

A split-page layout with a light blue background. On the left, black text in Spanish discussing target audience, including middle-aged men with higher education interests like music experimentation, social media, and hobbies. On the right, a collage of nine images showing outdoor scenery, a man with glasses and a grey beard, a cat lying on a red cushion, electronic music equipment, and wiring panels.

A collage of various jazz album covers arranged in a grid pattern.

A collage of digital art and products related to 'Kino Arcad,' featuring pink, blue, and purple hues, including a cassette tape, a pile of pink cassette cases, a pink keyboard, and stylized text images.

Research & Strategy

I structured the project through a custom branding methodology combining questionnaires, workshops, audience analysis, competitor benchmarking, keyword exercises and visual research.

We examined the modular synthesizer market and brands including SOMA, Bastl, Intellijel and Erica Synths.

A recurring pattern emerged: strong use of black and white, technological or techno/Bauhaus aesthetics, restrained palettes and relatively serious communication.

This created an opportunity for a different position.

Cards with words placed on a wooden table for a game or activity, including words like 'creative,' 'emotional,' 'fun,' and 'mysterious.'

Three book covers with geometric and abstract designs, each with a title in Spanish: 'fotos + formas geométricas,' 'degradados de líneas,' and 'abstracción, formas g.'

Six vintage VHS cassette tapes with colorful designs and text, arranged in two rows.

Top image shows a professional audio mixing console with numerous knobs and sliders. Bottom image depicts a modular synthesizer setup with various interconnected electronic modules, a small keyboard, and a plant, all on a wooden surface.

Defining the Brand

A series of workshops progressively reduced approximately 120 initial descriptors to five core attributes:

Creative · Analog · Exclusive · Islander · Passionate

These became the foundation for the brand strategy.

The purpose was defined around bringing the sounds in our imagination to life, while the wider communication territory focused on enjoyment, experimentation and the pleasure of making music.

That idea ultimately became:

Happy People Synths

Graphic design for a product called 'I'm Gibber V3' featuring an illustration of a 'kaotic voice synth' manual with a red circle background, a small star, and horizontal stripes.

Image of the product manual. An audio synthesizer module named 'I'm Gibber V3' with various control knobs, switches, and input/output ports, including pitch, phonemes, singing, pauses, mantra, range, chance, and stutter.

The Visual System

The identity deliberately avoided the cold science-fiction aesthetic common in the sector.

Instead, we built a warmer and more Mediterranean language through typography, colour, photography and graphic composition.

The primary palette included colours named:

Charcoal Black
Sand White
Sta Ponça Sun

supported by salmon and tomato tones.

Sofia Sans provided a large and flexible typographic family capable of moving between expressive headlines, technical information and long-form manuals.

From Brand to Product

The system was designed to work beyond communication.

It included specific rules for applying the identity directly to synthesizers as well as packaging, manuals, e-commerce, photography, campaigns, social content, clothing, posters and motion.

This allowed the identity to remain coherent as Biyiblip expanded from its first product, Gibber, into later instruments including Blipulator and BlippoBox.

My Role

Creative Direction · Brand Strategy · Research · Workshop Design · Benchmarking · Naming Process · Visual Identity · Logo · Typography · Colour · Illustration · Photography · Brand Book · Motion Graphics

The project demonstrates my ability to move from ambiguity and research to strategy, identity and execution, and to turn that identity into a system capable of supporting real products and communication.