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.
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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.
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Following through on the promise of Iconoclast’s name (an iconoclast attacks cherished beliefs or establishments), we suggested a brash market position: “contrary wisdom.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.