Since 2019, the psychedelic industry has witnessed a surge of startups entering the market. Some of these startups have already secured funding, despite not having a product yet. It's been a tumultuous journey filled with ups and downs.

One noticeable aspect from a visual standpoint is the need for compelling brand identities within an industry that must handle visual representation with care, as it revolves around a deeply personal topic: mental health.

By Alexandra Plesner

Drawing on my background in brand, communication, and design, I explored the current state of the psychedelic space, both visually and conceptually. To gain further insights, I spoke with Bruno Maag, the founder of the Dalton Maag type foundry in London (now retired). Our conversation delved into the psychology of typography and the intricacies of designing for health.

In this article, I share my findings and delve into the fascinating world where visual narratives and mental well-being intersection. Join me as we explore the significance of typography and design in the context of the psychedelic industry.

Form and function

Looking at the colour wheel and existing logos in the psychedelic landscape, we can see a clear tendency towards darker colours, mainly blue. We see everything but 'funky' typesetting and a little bit of 'extra' when it comes to slightly overloaded icons, images and symbols which will appear on websites and across marketing paraphernalia. When used correctly, they convey big ideas without using a single word. They occasionally do not support the story a brand wants to convey, or even worse, add confusion or take away from their credibility.

Maag has extensively researched the neuroscience of comprehension of type and explains that "investors tend to be highly conservative, and therefore you will not want to have anything that would ever want to rock the boat. Big institutional shareholders hold sway." All these investors are ultra-conservative, so you have to speak with a conservative voice. This might explain the branding style that is very conservative in its type but then tries to break free in icon design and the choice of colours on websites.

Also, speaking in typographical terms, readability in healthcare is key. There is only so much you can do before things become unreadable and illegible. Then Western companies use the Latin alphabet, and an alphabet has a specific construction. And that's what we have learned to read; that's what our brain has empowered us to decode. So the moment you start moving too far away from that or from the established parameters, the reader would automatically shut off and not interact with the content anymore. Lastly, emotional aspects come in.

“Louis Sullivan’s famous axiom, “form follows function,” became the touchstone for many architects. This means that the purpose of a building should be the starting point for its design. Now functionality is not necessarily the first thought people have regarding branding. Mostly as designers, we hear “like it/don’t like it” and “looks good/doesn’t look good”. ”

However, if something is functionally terrible, you have an adverse emotional reaction, even towards brand design. Maag explains: "Meaning, that if the functionality is poor, you disengage with it emotionally, and if you disengage with it emotionally, you don't even try to see if you can make the functionality work. I can now say to a client, 'If you pick this design, it will affect legibility this way.'"

The meaning of typestyles

Culturally and historically, certain typestyles have been associated with specific industries. They are related to certain functions, and they have specific emotional attributes. This is something that has grown over time.

"The advent of advertising in the 1800s started seeing a much wider variety of type styles. We were used to a functional purpose and express different ways to express different things." Maag continues: "Albert Theodore Poffenberger wrote about a psychological study in advertising in 1927 where they presented several different types of styles, to a fairly broad audience, both male and female, and found that pretty much everyone reacted emotionally more or less the same to certain type styles."

Humans like stories, and we are culturally and psychologically conditioned to like or dislike certain shapes and forms.

In terms of branding - style examples that convey messages

Branding has always been storytelling. “You could even argue that 2000 years ago when the branding of the entire Roman Empire was in full force, they had a couple of different typography styles; one was the 'Imperial capital', and the other a 'Rustic capital'. The 'Rustic capital' was used primarily for informal communications, whereas 'Imperial capital' lettering was more for official and formal use. Then the Latin alphabet spread in the fourth century when Constantine made Christianity the official religion. Lowercases, for example, were not properly established until about the seventh or eighth century," Maag explains.

Every industry also has a particular style parameter. If you look at the fashion industry and their mastheads, they tend to use quite a thin and high contrast type, which tends to be generally very light, quiet, generous and caps only. Overall the lettering is not overly condensed, and they have an almost ethereal appearance.

Now, classic pharma does their research and has their products in a broad spectrum of conditions–meaning you then need to have a brand, and you need to have a visual expression that has to be ultra neutral. It has to show reliability, and it has to convey trust. You can't be all out and funky when it comes to drugs or risk being associated with the counterculture lifestyle, which might compromise your integrity as a brand.

Maag explains that "companies in the medical sector, in general, have to tread quite carefully because you are talking about health, and health is very close to people. This means the branding has to show a degree of seriousness. You can have a degree of creativity, but that is still on a narrow path. You are not sending out a party invitation; you are talking about health and need to convey the feeling of trust."

Ambiguity is the enemy of accessibility

For example, the whole Grotesk typography genre has neutrality about it. So you can't really go wrong with that kind of type style expression, at least for the general European. That kind of type style conveys stability in an environment where longform reading is not necessarily required. The typeface Aktiv Grotesk still has a couple of quirky little design elements that the average consumer doesn't even notice or would register as being off.

“The moment you have to go into reading hundreds of pages in something like an Aktiv Grotesk or an Attica, you’re struggling to live”

— Bruno Maag

For type and other design work, there are certain things such as functionality, coming back into play. In the case of fonts, it is the effort it takes to decode the information, aka the individual letterforms, without getting fatigued. In all the Grotesk style typefaces, the letter shapes tend to be close, the apertures very small and that creates much ambiguity across the letter shape. Ambiguity is the enemy of accessibility. The more clear and concise, the easier it is for the brain to decode the individual shapes and the easier it is to extract the meaning.

Reading and writing are some of the most complex and involved activities a human can do, requiring a large number of resources from the brain, yet we take it all for granted. Bruno Maag wrote about the visual system illustrating the many places where things can go wrong, resulting in access to written information being impaired or denied altogether.

For longform digital reading, you want to have a typeface that has, in itself, relatively little contrast. If you look at BBC Reith – a bespoke font family designed by Dalton Maag and named after the BBC's founder John Reith – it can be regarded as more or less monolinear. It reads well, is smooth and works well offline and online.

In an online environment, you also have all the technical accessibility issues, like how the typeface renders on screen. Has it been prepared and engineered to render well on various screens?

Maag says that "accessibility can broadly be divided into three pillars: emotional, functional and technical. Each pillar must be accessible in itself, but all must be considered together. You need to think of a Venn diagram and in the middle of it, you have the sweet spot."

You have to make compromises, and you have to understand your audience. You can't design for everyone and hope for a strong result, which is impossible to achieve.

Tying it back to the industry

Returning to the little excerpt of the psychedelic brand identity landscape, you must have emotional accessibility.

“Emotional accessibility is the first impression a person experiences when presented with a service or product. Does that person react positively or negatively? Do they feel invited or rejected; in short, does the reaction meet the expectations of the original intent? Emotional accessibility and acceptance are crucial incentives for the person to engage with the service or product. Without it, functional and technical accessibility is largely redundant.” — Magg

Considering all these companies need investors, they must have varying degrees of conservatism. They also need to speak to a particular audience, maybe an audience with neurodiversity needs; you need a typestyle that clearly shows that you can rely on them, which doesn't go off from the facts. Because the direct consumer audience may be slightly vulnerable, you must have something solid, clear and trustworthy.

Industry examples and colour

Suppose I look at the US-based digital media and educational platform Psychedelics Today. The icon is an abstract relation to an iris of an eye, the neural network in the brain, or the imprint of a mushroom. "For anyone with autistic needs, this image is probably very upfront and disconcerting, and they wouldn't understand what to do with it. This is when you have the typography as a balancing component, being a very humanist Sans Serif design, regular enough, a little bit on the lighter side, bringing across warm feelings, and it reads reasonably well," says Bruno.

Iconic icon design of Psychedelics Today. Image Source: Alexandra Plesner

Osmind, a US Public Benefit Corporation, launched its new look earlier this year, letting go of its icon, going all in on the modern gradient graphic trend, dialling up the colour contrast, leaning on to the Instagram brand colours, from candy pink to scarlet red. It sits right within a colour spectrum that we have seen developing more lately.

Brand Refresh Osmind. Image Source: Alexandra Plesner

On the other spectrum, Numinus, delivering best-in-class therapeutic protocols across their clinics, recently relaunched their brand, deep diving into symbolism, committing to a very earthy colour palette – bringing a perfectly progressive, Gen-Z aesthetic to the table whilst equally touching on 1970's luxury aesthetics.

"Our new updated identity will be instrumental for Numinus as we expand our market presence, drive increased brand awareness, and, ultimately, advance as a leader in psychedelic-assisted therapy and mental health care across North America." Payton Nyquvest, the company's founder and CEO said in the press statement.

Brand Refresh Numinus. Image Source: Alexandra Plesner

Colour is an interesting one. Maag mentions for example red-green colourblindness, which affects something like what is 8% of the Caucasian male population. "With the spectrum of colours, you also run into functional issues; for example, a light yellow or green makes foreground and background colour contrast weak, which means that many people wouldn't be able to access it if presented on a white background. The visual acuity of a 60-year-old is only 20% of that of a 20-year-old, and that is the natural age-related deterioration."

Earthy Colour Trend. Image Source: Alexandra Plesner

We got a lot of darker purple and blue tones and some adventures into colour grading and the candy colour spectrum. What we have seen now is that the psychedelic industry at the moment has much uniformity but tends to experiment with brand icons and web design.

“For example, Maps, relatively dark blue hues are hyper accessible. On the other hand, both the landing page and logo of the Beckley Foundation are more difficult to access. Altogether, in the last 20 years, many icons, logos and symbols have become complex and complicated compared to the logos in the 1950's, the 1960's", Maag compares. He adds that everything was much more stylized back in the days of Paul Rand and Saul Bass. "Simple without being simplistic. It could work in different environments without losing any of the brand messaging. Hardly any of the icons that you can see on the excerpt; you could take it into a range of environments. The moment it goes small, the design collapses."

Screenshots Maps and Beckley Foundation. Image Source: Alexandra Plesner

Fireside Project is also one of the few brands currently sitting in the warm colour spectrum. Their mission is to help people minimize the risks of their psychedelic experiences, offering a psychedelic peer support line through their app. Their colour is bold orange, and their icon to the point, well, it is a fire. It emanates the warmth of a campfire and the primal human desire to be among like-minded people. On the other end of the spectrum sits Doubleblind Magazine, which embraces the new wave of nostalgia with design elements from the 60's and 70's with a contemporary and fun twist, candy colour grading and a bubble font for extra dimension.

Screenshots Fireside and Double Blind Mag. Image Source: Alexandra Plesner

Candy Colour Trend. Image Source: Alexandra Plesner

Colour influences our emotions profoundly, with a single colour having a series of meanings and interpretations to various people in various cultures globally. But let's get back to the core of branding.

Gradient Trend. Image Source: Alexandra Plesner

Messaging-what are you trying to say?

For many instances, you may have a startup company, but you aren’t an expert in everything and don’t know about the power of a clear brand positioning. Sometimes this leaves the designer, in turn, with a short brief, which must be fulfilled fast, and that sounds like “Make us a nice logo”.

The design delivered might be without much regard to the audience requirements, for example, or what the company is trying to communicate. Of course, there is an understanding of the product's first approach, however, people buy into stories, and good brands tell stories.

This is where brand positioning and development come into play, expanding on a human-centred approach to innovation that integrates the needs of people, technological possibilities, company values, and business requirements. It is vital to ask important questions such as what does your brand stand for, what's your mission, what are your values, and what are the personalities of the people who engage with your product/service/experience?

Abstract Graphic Trend. Image Source: Alexandra Plesner

As designers, we often find that the brief has completely changed by the end of some client workshops because we've taken them through the journey of what the brand expression can be.

So what does your brand say about your mission, values and business model? Generally speaking, when it comes to psychedelia, most companies in the current landscape are trying to avoid going down the 'groovy' graphic design path. They try to be profound, classic and timeless, considering that psychedelia has potentially negative connotations.

Design – functionality and conveying emotion

Design goes beyond making stuff pretty. The reality is that design is a process that can add huge value to your work.

“For the last 20 years, design has tried to make itself art. If you’re a designer, you’re not an artist, you are artistic, but you have a different job from an artist.”

— Bruno Maag

Maag’s vision for the future of design is also down to business: “The lines between art and design have become blurred and almost impossible to untangle. Design has everything to do with functionality and emotion.”

Price is perhaps the biggest barrier in terms of allowing designers to go through a full on brand positioning piece. However, investing in good design is an investment into the business.

“There's an evolutionary reason for our immediate emotional response to specific visual shapes and forms,” he says, “and everyday decisions will always be taken on an emotional basis first.”

Lockett, E. (n.d.). What do colorblind people see? Types, images, and more. Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/eye-health/what-do-colorblind-people-see
Maag, B. (2021, March 17). The three components of accessibility. Medium. https://medium.com/the-readability-group/the-three-components-of-accessibility-86075e14f46f
Maag, B. (2021, April 1). Typographic accessibility in more detail. Medium. https://medium.com/the-readability-group/typographic-accessibility-in-more-detail-4a11a0ef1cc2
Maag, B. (2021, May 4). The visual system — a brief guide to anatomy and physiology in the context of typography. Medium. https://medium.com/the-readability-group/the-visual-system-a-brief-guide-to-anatomy-and-physiology-in-the-context-of-typography-b29718389f16

The design system — on typography and branding in the context of psychedelics