Wolff Olins and zigbee launch the “first open-source brand for the Internet of Things”

Wolff Olins has developed an identity for the zigbee alliance’s dotdot: an open source, wireless language that allows everyday devices to communicate with each other, regardless of brand. Launched at CES, the mark “is inspired by the universal language of Morse code and its visual grammar of circles and rectangles.” The zigbee alliance is a global membership of tech firms that are working together to set standards and certify products that are headed to market. The new mark is an illustration “that serves to represent the hardware layer, the software layer and the smart objects brought to life,” says Wolff Olins.

At the launch, the agency showed mock ups of how the mark might be applied to signage, marketing materials such as pin badges and new technology as well as unveiling a CSS version of the logo that is available to download.

Forest Young, head of design at Wolff Olins San Francisco says: “We’ve brought our tradition of pushing design boundaries into the IoT space. The dotdot mark was crafted in and can be rendered with code, and lives in a GitHub repository, not just a PDF. The :|| mark can be typed in SMS using a single colon with two vertical bars on your keyboard, freeing the design from the limitations of traditional brand expression and democratising its use. As such, the mark exists as an Emoji-like emphasis to the right of the word mark. The brand typefaces – Montserrat for headings and Hind for body copy, are open source courtesy of the Google Fonts initiative. The accessibility and usability of the mark makes this new IoT design language true to dotdot’s ambition to be open and accessible to everyone.”