Branding agency Chapoo from Antwerp created the identity for the joint venture between Umicore and Volkswagen’s battery maker PowerCo. The corporate identity makes heavy use of the typeface Purple Haze by Font Spectrum, adding some custom icons and animations to the variable font.
The logotype of ionway is a mixture of a Purple Haze-like i with the rest of the word set in FF Mark Heavy by Hannes van Döhren and Christoph Koeberlin. FF Mark also does the heavy lifting in print materials. On the ionway website, however, the typeface has been replaced with Open Sans, while Purple Haze is used for titles. Readers can speculate themselves why this might be the case.
The typeface creates a futuristic look that fits the scientific and progressive targets of electrifying our private and public transport systems. The name “ionway” is a combination of the raw battery material and the company’s end goal: thanks to high-performance lithium-ion batteries, travelling with significantly lower CO2 emissions.