Breaking the rules with a venture firm.
When Jake Bergmann approached Matchstic to develop an identity for his new firm Iconoclast, one thing was immediately clear: this wouldn’t be your daddy’s venture management brand.
The founder and former CEO of one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing cannabis companies, Bergmann saw Iconoclast as a way to incorporate his extensive background in both the investment world and the realm of regulatory entrepreneurship. He had a strong vision, but needed help with strategy, messaging, and design.
Following through on the promise of Iconoclast’s name (an iconoclast attacks cherished beliefs or establishments), we suggested a brash market position: “contrary wisdom.”
To differentiate itself from the staid, dispassionate, and buttoned-up world of venture management, Iconoclast would instead be righteous and roguish, embracing wild ideas and rejecting conventional thinking.
To bring Iconoclast’s aggressive identity to life, we seized on design ideas that broke rules, bucked convention, and demonstrated the idea of creative destruction.
We explored the visual constructs of an invisible brand, and of an anti-brand. We embraced missing content, compressed visual data, and obscurity. Instead of boutique typefaces, we opted for system default fonts.
The brand’s central “I” symbol is stark and simple: an upturned exclamation mark that calls to mind an error message. Paired with confident and swaggering messaging, the effect is confident, intriguing, and tongue-in-cheek.
Iconoclast’s brand is the product of dozens of provocations meant to arrest, upend, and baffle—perfectly suited for the ventures it will support.