How Recent™ turned a circle, square and triangle into Olla’s identity — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design
Circle, square, triangle. Recent™ used those familiar primitive forms as the backbone of the identity for Olla – a liquid staking protocol built for the Aztec network, a privacy-focused blockchain. In plain terms, Olla lets anyone stake Aztec cryptocurrency, earn rewards and stay liquid, without having to understand the complicated infrastructure underneath. The Abu Dhabi and Amsterdam-based studio’s task was to build an identity that could convey that message to a first-time user.
“We asked ourselves: what if we just didn’t do that?” remarks Valentino Angela, Design Director at Recent™, of the custom marks, gradient symbols and abstract iconography that usually aim to signal ‘expertise’ in the DeFi world. “Circles, squares and triangles are the only shapes that are genuinely universal. You know them before you can read. There’s no barrier of interpretation.” The team’s working thesis was that ‘less technical’ is still a reduction. Start from the same reference point and subtract, and you end up inside the category’s gravitational pull. Olla needed to begin somewhere else.
The circle represents liquidity, its continuous form carrying an inherent sense of flow. The square is stable, representing the security layer underneath. The triangle, with its directionality and open peak, signals accessibility. It’s an entry point, a way in. “The moment it really clicked was when the shapes stopped feeling like metaphors and started behaving like a system,” Angela explains. “When we could see how each one would move, scale and interact with the others across the identity, that’s when we knew it was working.”
Season Sans and Mix carry the typography, with the former setting the tone for a brand asking users to trust it with their assets. Mix steps in at smaller scales and in UI states, where the information needs to breathe. “A lot of warm typefaces go too far and lose their credibility,” Angela notes. “Season Sans has open forms that feel approachable, but the construction is clean and precise enough that it holds up when the brand needs to communicate trust.”
Haischel Dabian, Founder of Olla, came into the project with a clear instinct about the palette. His references leaned into energy and youth, pointing the brand toward something that felt alive rather than traditionally institutional. The resulting colour scheme is built on a warm off-white base, with pink added for accessibility, cyan for liquidity and orange for security. Each colour was selected to carry weight in the identity. The pink feels warm and disarming. Cyan has circulation built into it, an obvious fit for liquidity. While orange holds enough density to make security feel trustworthy. The cumulative effect points away from the dark backgrounds and neon accents that tell newer users a product was built for insiders.
The verbal identity landed on ‘staking made easy,’ stitched beneath the wordmark on totes and set at full-bleed scale across campaign imagery. Angela is precise about why that phrasing won out over nearby alternatives. “Not ‘staking simplified’ or ‘staking for everyone,’ both of which still centre on the difficulty of the thing, but ‘made easy,’ which positions Olla as having already done the hard work on your behalf.”
On the platform itself, the shapes step back. Transaction screens sit on the same warm off-white, with the geometric vocabulary reduced to faint outlines behind the financial figures users came for, such as their stake amount, received balance and estimated return. The pink and cyan colours are used to carry the active elements like the ‘Stake More’ button, the connect-wallet pill, and the cards displaying portfolio and rewards. The palette stays load-bearing inside the product, not just around it.
Privacy stays out of the visuals, despite being the foundational reason Olla is built for Aztec in the first place. Recent™ held it back deliberately. Private staking sits on the roadmap once the underlying infrastructure matures, and Olla runs on the Ethereum mainnet for now. “The brand is designed to feel like this was built for you,” Angela explains. “To drive curiosity rather than intimidation. The category default is to front-load credentials and technical signals, to establish legitimacy through complexity. We inverted that. The first thing the brand communicates is warmth, energy and clarity. It earns trust before it earns authority.”
Most users will meet the brand before they meet the product, and understanding the product takes effort. “Like seeing something in the storefront and then walking inside the store,” Angela puts it. Dabian’s summary is quieter. “The result is a design that feels inviting and honest, which is exactly what we needed. In a category where trust is everything, that’s not a small thing.”