Pentagram partners Jody Hudson-Powell and Luke Powell have created a dynamic equine identity for AI video company TwelveLabs. Based between San Francisco and Seoul, TwelveLabs describes itself as “the world’s most powerful video intelligence platform.” Unlike generative video tools which help users create videos from scratch, TwelveLabs uses AI analysis to help people understand their existing videos at a very granular level, which makes them more searchable. Co-founder and CEO Jae Lee explains that communicating this difference – between video generation and video understanding – was at the heart of their work with Pentagram. “In the middle of last year our models were improving pretty rapidly, and we thought we needed to up our game in terms of our storytelling, why we matter, and to match the design, the tone, and the messaging to our ambition,” he says. Lee described the previous branding as “straight out of Silicon Valley” and they chose Hudson–Powell and his team due to their tech-savvy design practice. In creating a new identity, it was important not to be “lumped in” with other generative AI video companies, Lee says, but also to differentiate themselves from other video analysis tools. “Our competitors essentially do frame-by-frame analysis, but we look at it temporally,” lead product designer Sean Barclay explains. “That’s what differentiates us, and we wanted to convey that secret sauce.” “On the first call, they had me at temporal reasoning,” Hudson-Powell laughs. His team had to avoid the visual cliches AI tools tend to embrace – “it’s a very noisy category with lots of sparkles.”  But they also had to capture and communicate TwelveLabs’ offering in a way that was accessible and exciting, but not dumbed down. “We had a distinct stream of work that wasn’t strategic or creative – it was just understanding the technology,” Hudson-Powell says. “We kept asking them, could we imagine your technology to look something like this? Or this? “We were trying to put some kind of conceptual apparatus around the technology, to see if we could find a visual communication language that we could start to build on.” “Jody was very good at pulling out those threads about what video looks like in our brains,” Lee says. Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs The Pentagram team homed in on the core idea of “video as volume” rather than a timeline, and they built a series of thread-based diagrams to help explain how it works. This visual motif could be scaled across the touchpoints, from product pages to sales and branding. “You get this graphic stretch, so you’re speaking to different audiences with the same concept,” Hudson-Powell explains. The horse logo was grounded in what Hudson-Powell calls TwelveLabs’ existing “lore” – Lee says they were inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s famous 1887 animation of a horse, and he likes the metaphor of a user as a jockey steering their technology. The logo – which has 12 layers in a nod to the company’s name – is often used in motion, galloping across a screen. “We worked a lot of animation into the identity,” Hudson-Powell says. “Animation can be quite frivolous, but we did it really intentionally. The logo gives you this feeling of perpetual motion, this rhythm at the heart of the brand, which is really important.” https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/01_TL_Logo_Gradient_16x9_60fps_10s_LOW.mp4 The team chose Milling for the typeface for its combination of “technicality and soft edges” and the visual identity uses the LCH colour system, which, compared to RGB, represents colour in a more similar way to how our eyes perceive colour. “You can match any two colours and they’ll be harmonious, which you don’t get with RGB,” Hudson-Powell says. “We can find infinite combinations.” There were also three colour subsets for TwelveLabs’ three key features – pink-purple for search, orange-yellow for generate and green-blue for embed. Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new colour palette for TwelveLabs Lee says the new identity has resonated with investors, employees and most importantly, customers. “It’s given them this confidence that they’re working with not only a super-technical team, but also a team that cares deeply about video,” he says. “So we can communicate with our science community, but also with the people who are building the content we love consuming. There’s a duality which feels really connected.” Barclay agrees, and adds that it helps people grasp what TwelveLabs does – and what it might do for them – more quickly. “It’s definitely improved our website tremendously in terms of telling a better story,” he says. “Before it took a lot of time to comprehend what TwelveLabs is, and what we’re offering. We have definitely shortened that.” Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new logo for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new icons for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs