One system for a family of Web3 agency brands

Coinbound is a Web3 marketing agency. It's also one brand in a larger family under a parent company, Nowbound, alongside Mintfunnel, Clickstrike, Content Ghost, Bitcolumnist, and others. A house of brands, each doing its own job, all under one roof.

Coinbound hired me to redesign their agency brand first, as a trial. Do it well, win the longer contract. Challenge accepted.

The real problem was bigger than one logo. When I met the CEO, Ty Smith, over breakfast near Central Park, he was still working out how he wanted the whole thing to live on. The identity had to run top to bottom, parent to sub-brand and back up again. Each brand needed to feel part of the family without leaning on it to stand up on its own. Scale it up, scale it down, and keep the connection legible either way.

I landed on a single idea: linking blockchain nodes. That's what the whole family actually does. They help Web3 companies build new connections, nodes, with their customers and partners, on the back of an SEO and PR engine that gets clients covered across the internet. The concept came from the work, not from decoration.

I built it out of textured squares linked at their corners, vertical and horizontal runs between them. Those squares doubled as windows that could hold imagery and play against larger photography. For the wordmark I used a typeface that felt ownable, and got lucky with the name: Satoshi, after the pseudonym behind Bitcoin.

The system had to generate logos for the entire library of brands, so I built a 5×5 grid at the base. On top of it, shapes connect on the fly to make any icon the family needs. It reads pixelated, which suits the gamified culture of Web3, and it points straight back to the linked-nodes idea that sparked the whole thing.

Then each brand got its own mark inside that system. Clickstrike, their SaaS agency, became a space-invader cross-target trailing smoke. Contentghost became an abstract ghost-faced character. Bitcolumnist doubled as an uppercase B and the number 3, for Web3. One grid, a whole family, each mark standing on its own.

I won the contract. The relationship has run two and a half years (and counting), and I designed brand identities for 20+ of their client accounts. Coinbound kept growing, taking on new Web3 startups and launching AI-driven products like Mintfunnel. The scope grew with it, and I picked up the web design for one of their sub-brands along the way too.