Crafting a New Brand for the Future of Life Science

Last year, we decided to launch a complete rebrand. The company turned ten, we were extending the scope of our projects and services beyond neuroscience, and started expanding our product suite into MetaCell Cloud. Rebranding is exciting but is also hard work! This short article highlights some of the key milestones.

Firstly, this wasn’t a change for the sake of change. We loved our old logo and look, and we know our industry values aesthetics only to a certain point. An impressive brand is important but not essential to succeed in the world of life science software. However, one of our roles is also to effectively communicate what we do and what we believe in. And we believe that technology and user interfaces for life science are in need of better design.‍

Essentially, we wanted to use our brand design to showcase our software design.‍

But the future comes from the past, and MetaCell is complex. We’re not a startup, neither a big company, nor an agency. We’re a mix of all this. We’re about life science, neuroscience, but also technology and the wider pharmaceutical and healthcare space. We deal with highly secure medical data and confidential drug discovery pipelines from the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, and collaborate with extremely talented researchers at the best universities. And the people who work here are some of the best and brightest in our industry. We’re a complex company, building complex software for a complex industry and we felt now is the time to turn it all into a brand design that has to be modern, inspiring, open and long-lasting.

‍So, how do you wrap 10 years of MetaCell into a new brand identity?‍

Rebranding was an opportunity to start again from scratch. We drew new lines, but also looked back on who we’ve always been, what we’ve always looked like. Our logo has always been a cell and its nucleus.

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We noticed two issues. First – the colors: too bland, not modern enough for a tech firm. Second – the lines were very thin, not bold enough.

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After several trials, we ended up with our new icon, The Cell. Electrical blue, perfectly circular!‍

The lettering was another challenge. Lowercase, uppercase, both? MetaCell has always been written in two parts but with no space. It’s our story, how our clients and the industry came to know us. But in terms of design, the different casing makes the logo unbalanced. The idea was to keep the two-part MetaCell name when writing, but to use only one style for the logo: either all lowercase or all uppercase. All lowercase is an active change. Unconsciously, people would think ‘it is all lowercase now’, which we wanted to avoid. Instead, we found that all uppercase would be clearer and bolder.

And so we had our new, fresh, complete MetaCell logo.

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Illustrations needed updating, too. For several years, MetaCell’s visuals had been based around a system of isometric illustrations that included the colors of our logo. These posed several problems: first, they are often technical and time consuming to create, and so we opted to buy them from illustration banks. And here comes the second problem: in time these kinds of illustrations became very common.

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So we decided to create our own visuals, the only way to establish a strong, unique identity. We listed three identifiable characteristics: fine lines, subtle gradients, and depth thanks to blurs and shadows.

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Finally, we wanted to update our website.

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The priority was to reorganize the content around three main sections: products, solutions and services, and in fact the new homepage serves as a summary of these three offerings. The goal was to create a clear, accessible and easy-to-use site, while adding subtle animations and interactions to make navigation more enjoyable. 

Before implementation, there was thorough research into the design of the new site. There were dozens of attempts, failures, doubts, glimmers of hope, aha moments, delight.

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We have done our best to make the new MetaCell identity something that will last and that will effectively and proudly carry our mission: enable clinicians and researchers to make the most of their life science data.‍

We hope you'll like the new MetaCell site and that you’ll enjoy our new visuals.