Case study — Identity for a Portland startup · 2025
AR·GO
Cryptic identity for a startup launching augmented-reality city adventures in Portland, Oregon.
Client
AR·GO, Portland, Oregon
Scope
Logo, motion, print
Two Layers
The name was the founder’s.
The dot was mine.
Johann Bayer. Navis, The Argonauts. 1603
The founder brought the name Argo, after the ship the Argonauts sailed to Colchis.
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I suggested keeping it but adding a dot, so the same word also reads as AR, for augmented reality, and GO, a nod to Pokémon GO and simply a call to go.
One name, two mythologies: the ancient one and the one on everyone’s phone. Catch both and you’ve scored the combo.
Three readings
One mark, three readings
None of these layers is an accident. I designed what a passerby takes in at a glance, the letters hidden under extra strokes, and the way the lines draw and erase themselves.
The clip shows all three at once; the sections below take them one by one.
Drawn live in code from the mark’s own geometry. No video.
The disguise
How a letter hides
A script you can’t read still tells you one thing: there’s a message in it. I disguised each letter just enough for AR·GO to look like one, and kept every letter close enough to the Latin alphabet to crack on a second look.
Linear B tablet from the palace at Pylos, 13th century BC. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Photo: Gary Lee Todd, CC0. Edited.
The script went unread for half a century, until Michael Ventris, an architect, showed in 1952 that it was Greek: a familiar language under signs nobody recognized. AR·GO does the same on purpose, and nobody has to wait fifty years.
No version takes much of the letter away. The disguise is in what’s added: a base that closes the A into a triangle, a stroke across the R, a hand inside the O. The familiar letter is still there, under the decoys.
The geometry
Shapes that already mean something
The letters aren’t random shapes. Their geometry borrows from signs, where a triangle warns and a circle sets a rule.
In motion
Lines never move. They’re drawn or erased.
That is the one rule of the motion, and it’s the rule of any path: a trail in the woods or a city street can only be walked. A line grows from the point where it meets another and rewinds the way it was drawn.
Watch a letter redraw itself and you see someone working a riddle: trying one way, then another, until it clicks.
The only exception is the O, which turns as a whole letter.
In one turn the circle tears open, as if by momentum. In the next, the needle swings back and forth, looking for north, then half of it fades and leaves a single timer hand.
Torn by momentum
Looking for north
Down to a timer
The system
Shaken, not stirred
Every letter keeps all of its versions on its own drum, and any version fits with any other: 3,584 combinations, one name. Choose a version per letter to suit the task, or let the drums choose.
The letters get shaken. The name never gets stirred.
Promotion
Taking the riddle to the street
The startup began with rack cards at tourist spots. I pitched a quieter channel next to the adventures themselves: QR small plaques with a cryptic state of the logo and a one-line promise, made for passersby curious enough to scan.
Reflection
The first riddle is the logo
Most logos ask to be recognized. This one asks to be solved: it pulls you into a small game and rewards you the moment the name clicks. In a product built on riddles, that’s where the experience begins.
Next Case:
Eugene Kazakov
Brand Designer, Austin, TX
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