One of the most fun (and difficult) things for ANTE when starting out and even to this day, is the development of our visual identity. Ever an evolving thing, we are keen to start on the right foot. This, however, is especially difficult when ANTE Collective begins its life as a broad spectrum creative group. As per our collective’s guiding statement,

“The ANTE Collective is a community of individuals realising products and bringing them into the world. The breadth of products ANTE will deliver is not restricted to any specific medium, genre, language, or form.”

We still to this day actively try not to pigeon-hole ourselves into one thing, one style, one voice because we respect, equally, each of our partners’ and collaborators’ opinions. We want to constantly learn, through successes and mistakes. 

Although amorphous, the collective still had some concrete starting blocks: Our name, ANTE Collective; Our Ethos and guiding principles; Our founding partners’ areas of expertise and passions. Naturally, we started with the thing everyone will interact with first – Our name.

“ANTE Collective”

Typeface is a particular area of intrigue for me. Everyday we interact with a myriad of fonts, be it in front of our work laptops, waiting for the local bus, walking to your routine coffee shop on the high street. Fonts not only spell out the word you’re looking for but also presents an aesthetic fundamental to the brand. Like logos, you are able to recognise the visual identity of the brand before you ever see letters or words.

What font makes the best fit for ANTE? We knew that Script, Handwriting and Decorative font types are not appropriate because although beautiful and full of character, it sends a message to our audience which we can’t easily control because of the nature of interpretation required to read. Legibility and readability is also important to us as we strive to make our creative products as accessible as possible. Aesthetically, it commits to something we’re not ready to commit to. This leaves us with Serif, Sans-serif, Display and Monospace font types.

Display and Monospace fonts didn’t fit our range of needs, as we knew we wanted to have a font that is versatile. Knowing we wanted to write articles and use the font as our collective’s standard, they fell off our list. The debate between Serif and Sans-serif was a difficult one. Both have good legibility and readability. Both types are very versatile. Aesthetically however, we knew ANTE would have a significant digital presence and would want to maintain a modern feel. Something that we can rely on for years to come. San-serif font types were our answer.

Clean lines, a sense of formality, cross functional, and “something slightly different to the norm” became our criteria when trawling through Sans-serif fonts. This is when we landed on IBM Plex Sans Arabic.

In the foundry’s own words,

“Plex was designed to capture IBM’s spirit and history, and to illustrate the unique relationship between mankind and machine—a principal theme for IBM since the turn of the century. The result is a neutral, yet friendly Grotesque style typeface that includes a Sans, Sans Condensed, Mono, Serif, and several other styles for several languages, and has excellent legibility in print, web and mobile interfaces. “

I felt this fit our criteria as well as our fledgling ambitions.

The Logo

Font – chosen. Now came the fun part – Logo design. A recognisable logo is a simple one, or one with heritage. Heritage is not something we yet have the privilege of having. So we then need to lean on simplicity. Not to be confused with minimalistic, simplicity in design can be tethered to familiarity. If something is familiar to you, you will naturally find it easier, faster to understand. As with before, we started to play with our name, ANTE. Our choice in font made us notice the simplicity in the straight lines used to construct each individual letter. The four letters itself that spell out ante, was another layer of simplicity. Adopting first principles thinking, rudimentary shapes, the simplicity of a square, a triangle became our starting point and we drew out a matrix of shapes to each of the four letters.

This 4, 4 matrix became the fulcrum in our exploration. Each element corresponds to the letter of that row and column with the manipulation of triangles and tetrahedral visually correlating to distinct features of the letters of A, N, T and E. 

We then began to add some complexity – the building of our logo. Triangles and squares are instantly recognisable, shapes we are all introduced to as infants, but simple as they are, they do not make it distinguishable from anything else in the market. As with words, we began combining the shapes together to give the eyes something to play with, something to “read”. It is here that our next layer of complexity starts. Now a 2-dimensional entity on a plane we wanted the logo to engage with a passer by. Something simple, yet sparking intrigue. 

With most of the western word using a Latin-based alphabet, we read left to right, following each line from top to bottom. Most of us in this world are hardwired to this practice and so it felt like something we should lean into. Symmetry and repetition was used to reasonable effect but the resulting monograms and “flywheels” felt distant to our identity – any identity, even. As we mentioned above, the logo should be recognisable. Better still, instantly so. 

We didn’t want to abandon the principles used so far in our logo creation. The monograms are a fun visualisation and a good asset to have. The “flywheels” made for fun and interactive “reading”. So now the question for identity and how we present ourselves comes full circle. What can we do to make it glaringly obvious who we are without the heritage of a 100 year old brand? The answer was unsurprisingly simple, let’s just put our name in the logo. Reverse our workings from this point and try to substitute these shapes for its seed, the original letter. 

The resulting images actually resonated with us in ways we didn’t expect. Themes of unity and continuity, combined with the cyclical nature of the wheel expressing ideas of motion and flow. The need for legibility and recognisability is addressed. Finally, we have arrived.