In the ever-evolving world of artificial intelligence, where systems like ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Meta’s LLaMA dominate headlines, there exists a growing need to make advanced technology feel less alien and more human. While natural language processing (NLP) tools have become increasingly powerful and essential across industries, they still often suffer from an emotional and aesthetic disconnect. These tools are typically branded in ways that emphasize their technical prowess but fail to make them relatable to users or reflective of their real-world applications.
That is where Cohere enters the picture—a transformative AI startup on a mission to reframe how we interact with NLP. Founded by Ivan Zhang, Nick Frosst, and Aidan Gomez, Cohere provides a robust platform that democratizes access to AI tools. From content generation to hate speech detection and data classification, their technology has practical uses that empower developers, regardless of the size or stage of their business. But what sets them apart is not only the sophistication of their platform but the clarity of their vision: to make AI accessible, meaningful, and emotionally resonant.
Reimagining AI Branding with Emotion and Utility
As artificial intelligence continues to permeate every corner of daily life—from customer service bots to recommendation engines and voice assistants—its presence has become more utilitarian than speculative. Yet, in stark contrast to its growing influence, AI branding remains visually and emotionally disconnected. Many AI platforms continue to rely on design languages filled with neon gradients, abstract grids, and mechanical symmetry. These aesthetics, while futuristic, evoke a sense of clinical sterility—alienating the human audience they intend to serve.
Cohere recognized this disconnect early. As a natural language processing company building tools for developers across all scales, they understood the urgent need for a brand that felt both intelligent and empathetic. That led to their collaboration with Pentagram, a global design studio known for its ability to craft brand identities that harmonize meaning and visual expression. Their shared vision: to reimagine the face of AI and make it more emotionally intelligent and contextually aware.
Their creative strategy was anchored in a deceptively simple but profound idea—“NLP Now.” It positioned natural language processing not as a distant or futuristic concept, but as something fully integrated into modern workflows and interactions. For Pentagram, language was not static, linear, or binary. It was alive, evolving, and constantly morphing—an organism of sorts. Just as speech changes with dialect, medium, and culture, AI too must reflect this dynamism if it hopes to be understood, trusted, and adopted broadly.
Language as Living Design: Evolving Communication through Visuals
Language is humanity’s oldest and most sophisticated tool. It is simultaneously a mechanism for survival, culture, connection, and innovation. Pentagram’s foundational design decision was to treat language as a biological entity—a mutable force that evolves, fragments, and reassembles depending on its environment. This philosophy helped them avoid design clichés that usually accompany advanced tech: metallic gloss, rigid grids, or holographic overlays.
Instead, they delved into nature, using biomimicry as a guiding principle. Drawing inspiration from natural systems—cell division, neural networks, and organic growth patterns—they developed a visual language that mimics the behavior of speech and thought. These weren’t arbitrary visuals. The use of Voronoi diagrams, which model how cells expand in a shared space, created a brand texture that feels alive and intelligent. It’s an abstract yet intuitive way to represent the interconnected, overlapping nature of human and machine dialogue.
In practical terms, this meant layouts and compositions that flowed rather than snapped to a rigid framework. Instead of cold uniformity, there was expressive asymmetry. The goal was not to look programmed but to appear thoughtful, fluid, and meaningful—mirroring the very systems Cohere builds.
Designing for Developers, Not Just Decision-Makers
Unlike many AI companies that focus solely on enterprise clients or showcase their offerings through academic language, Cohere is developer-centric. Their tools are designed for real-world application—helping teams embed AI-powered content generation, classification, summarization, or moderation directly into their products. Thus, their brand identity needed to serve a dual purpose: inspire confidence in business stakeholders while remaining accessible and empowering for developers who interact with their platform daily.
This required more than aesthetic elegance. It demanded usability. The visual system needed to perform across user interfaces, data dashboards, documentation libraries, and code environments without becoming intrusive or overly stylized. Icons, colors, and typography had to remain consistent yet adaptable, facilitating both quick navigation and brand recognition.
Pentagram’s solution was a suite of modular, responsive assets—icons based on cellular structures, minimalist layout templates, and intuitive motion elements that enhanced interaction without overwhelming the user. The entire design ecosystem was engineered to communicate clarity, intelligence, and naturalness, aligning with the needs of both technical users and decision-makers.
A Logo that Grows with Its Audience
Cohere’s new logo distills the brand philosophy into a compact yet evocative symbol. At first glance, it appears abstract. But as one examines its contours, a deeper story unfolds. Composed of three uneven, organically-shaped components, the form subtly constructs the letter “C.” Each of the three shapes represents a distinct stage of development—expansion, connection, and integration. This nod to growth not only reflects the company’s evolution but symbolizes the way language and technology intertwine over time.
Unlike traditional logos that prioritize symmetry and rigid perfection, this emblem embraces imperfection. Its uneven edges and dynamic form mirror the irregularity of human thought and the unpredictable beauty of spoken language. The design is as much a symbol of evolution as it is of unity. It shows that AI doesn't need to be alien or flawless; it can be raw, responsive, and relatable.
This logo does not shout innovation—it whispers it. It invites viewers to explore, engage, and interpret. It stands as a quiet yet powerful declaration: AI is not just for the future; it is already here, growing with us.
Natural Meets Synthetic: Crafting a Purposeful Color System
Color theory is an often underutilized yet critical aspect of brand storytelling. Pentagram employed a finely tuned palette that serves both aesthetic and psychological functions. Earth-rooted tones like volcanic black, moss green, and mineral grey provide a tactile, grounded feeling. These hues evoke calm, dependability, and familiarity—traits essential for trust in any digital product, especially AI.
Balancing these are high-energy digital colors such as synthetic coral and acrylic blue. These accents symbolize data flow, machine learning, and algorithmic energy. Used sparingly, they create moments of contrast—drawing attention to key features or interactions without overwhelming the eye.
The palette’s success lies in its restraint and intentionality. Gradients are used not for trend appeal but to suggest motion and progression. Backgrounds shift subtly, reflecting the idea that language, thought, and AI are in constant transformation. Overall, the color system harmonizes with the design philosophy: organic intelligence enhanced by synthetic potential.
Custom Typography as a Living Language
One of the most compelling aspects of Cohere’s identity is its type system—crafted from scratch to mirror the complexities of language. Unlike generic system fonts, this custom typeface breathes. Designed as a variable font, it features dynamic “cuts” or cellular gaps within the letterforms. These gaps evolve based on how the font is used—adapting to headline scale, body text density, or code formatting. It’s a typographic expression of modularity and adaptability.
More than decorative, these generative gaps allude to the fragmented but contextual nature of speech. Just as meaning is constructed from phrases, pauses, and emphasis, the typeface reflects linguistic unpredictability. It’s not only highly legible across digital and printed mediums—it also injects personality and rhythm into every word.
By embracing design that is responsive, flexible, and emotionally expressive, Cohere ensures its voice is not just read but felt.
Equipping the In-House Team: Design as a System, Not a Style
One of the most future-ready decisions in this rebrand was the creation of an internal design toolkit. Recognizing that branding is not static, Pentagram built a scalable system that allows Cohere’s creative teams to generate new content without breaking cohesion.
This includes a Figma plugin that creates bespoke Voronoi patterns, ensuring each new layout or asset remains aligned with the brand’s cellular language. A modular library of templates allows marketing, product, and engineering teams to produce visuals for campaigns, pitch decks, or documentation swiftly. Additionally, a custom Cinema 4D workflow enables the rendering of intricate 3D assets that mirror the organic design ethos—without requiring external design support.
These tools future-proof the brand, empowering Cohere to evolve creatively without diluting its identity. They’ve transformed branding from a one-time project into a continuous, collaborative ecosystem.
Shaping the AI Narrative Through Design
In reimagining its brand, Cohere has not only differentiated itself in a crowded AI market—it has redefined what an AI company can look and feel like. Through this identity, the company tells a deeper story about how humans and machines can connect—through shared language, emotion, and purpose. Pentagram’s design doesn’t just make AI look approachable; it makes it meaningful. The visuals serve as entry points into a broader dialogue about ethics, functionality, creativity, and the future of communication.
More importantly, this rebrand positions Cohere as a technology provider with soul. Its design narrative doesn’t scream innovation through spectacle; it speaks it through symbolism, subtlety, and structure. This nuanced approach is not only rare—it’s resonant.
By combining biomimicry, generative typography, intelligent iconography, and a thoughtful user experience, Cohere’s brand reflects the future of technology—not as something foreign, but as something inherently human. It’s a bold and necessary redefinition of how AI should present itself in a world that increasingly depends on it.
In the end, this branding work proves a powerful idea: that emotion, utility, and innovation are not separate concepts. When unified, they don’t just change how things look—they change how they’re understood.
Biomimicry at the Core: Drawing from the Natural World
In the current age of artificial intelligence, where synthetic intelligence and natural language interfaces are revolutionizing communication, there remains a vital question: how do we bridge the emotional and conceptual gap between machine logic and human expression? When Cohere partnered with Pentagram to rethink its identity, the answer emerged not from circuits and code but from biology. Biomimicry—a design philosophy that emulates natural systems—offered a visual and structural language that seamlessly marries the organic with the computational.
At the heart of this approach lies the Voronoi diagram, a mathematical abstraction of natural division seen in everything from leaf veins to soap bubbles to cellular growth. Its fragmented, web-like structure conveys how intelligence—be it neural or linguistic—spreads, connects, and evolves. Pentagram didn't use biomimicry as mere decoration; they used it as the DNA of the entire visual system. It wasn't just about looking natural—it was about functioning in a way that feels intuitively human.
The Organic Blueprint of Intelligence
Nature offers the most intricate examples of efficiency, adaptability, and communication. From the branching of a river delta to the intricacies of mycelial networks, the natural world thrives on fluid, decentralized systems. These biological models don’t just inspire aesthetics—they reflect how language works: unpredictable yet ordered, dynamic yet cohesive. For an AI company whose core mission is to process, understand, and generate human language, these metaphors are more than appropriate—they are profound.
Cohere's new design language utilizes these ideas to form a brand identity that behaves like a living system. Rather than constructing visuals that are linear and rigid, the brand embraces undulating contours, overlapping structures, and visual interruptions that suggest evolution, fragmentation, and cohesion—all key features of both human cognition and machine learning. The system doesn’t strive for perfection; it embraces variability, capturing the essence of both conversation and computation.
Visual Language Rooted in Life
The challenge for Pentagram was to distill this intricate philosophy into a tangible design language that could scale across platforms—from digital interfaces to printed assets to immersive brand experiences. By turning to biomorphic structures, they created a dynamic foundation for the brand’s visual lexicon. These forms, based on cell division and organic layering, appear across the identity in multiple formats.
Instead of sterile UI elements or purely functional diagrams, users encounter environments that feel like they’re growing and adapting in real-time. Backgrounds resemble mineral-rich surfaces or underwater ecosystems. Graphical elements evoke both neurons firing and roots branching. Even when translated into simple iconography, the organic cohesion remains palpable. This attention to detail infuses every part of the user journey with a sense of subtle vitality—an acknowledgement that AI, like nature, is in constant motion.
From Micro to Macro: Consistency Through Complexity
In branding, consistency often comes at the cost of complexity. However, Pentagram challenged this norm by ensuring that Cohere’s identity could scale from micro-elements like app icons and data charts to macro-level implementations like exhibition spaces and animated explainers—all while preserving its biomimetic ethos. This required meticulous design architecture.
Interface glyphs and icons, for instance, maintain the cellular motif even at the smallest resolutions. Built to fit within 24-pixel squares, these elements aren’t just scalable—they’re meaningful. They align visually and conceptually with the larger identity system, reinforcing a holistic brand narrative. Each icon, though minimal, conveys interconnection and adaptation—qualities intrinsic to both natural ecosystems and intelligent algorithms.
In motion design, the organic forms pulse and expand as if breathing. Transitions flow like the blooming of a flower or the splitting of an atom. This kinetic consistency doesn’t just beautify the interface—it communicates that the product itself is alive with intelligence, constantly learning and evolving.
Designing Intelligence that Feels Alive
Cohere’s rebrand does more than visually depict intelligence—it animates it. And not in the usual, techno-centric way we see in most AI branding. There are no hyper-geometrical grids or sterile, monochrome wireframes. Instead, there are swelling 3D forms that look as though they’re inflating with data, textured backgrounds that suggest geological layers of meaning, and animations that mimic biological processes like photosynthesis or neural firing.
These are not just aesthetic experiments—they are visual metaphors for how natural language processing works. Language, after all, is not linear. It shifts with inflection, culture, environment, and context. By mirroring this with biomorphic design, Cohere invites users to feel the intelligence rather than merely see it. This sensory dimension is critical in making artificial intelligence less foreign and more familiar—something that feels like an extension of human cognition rather than a replacement for it.
Building Emotional Resonance in Digital Ecosystems
The incorporation of biomimicry does more than elevate aesthetics; it cultivates an emotional bond between user and interface. Most AI tools focus exclusively on functionality—speed, precision, output. While these are indispensable, they often come at the expense of relatability. Pentagram’s biomorphic system, on the other hand, softens the technological edge, inviting users to engage with AI as a partner rather than a product.
The tactile feel of the visuals—combined with a carefully chosen color palette of mossy greens, oxidized blacks, and iridescent blues—evokes natural phenomena like algae bloom, stone erosion, or underwater light refraction. These sensations awaken familiarity. They don’t just reinforce usability; they create delight, curiosity, and trust—emotions often missing from AI interactions.
This emotional resonance supports Cohere’s broader mission: to make NLP tools accessible, inclusive, and deeply usable. When the design reflects the values of care, connection, and adaptability, users are more likely to explore, adopt, and advocate for the platform.
A System That Evolves with the Brand
One of the most visionary aspects of the biomimetic approach is its capacity for evolution. Much like living organisms that adapt to shifting environments, Cohere’s brand system is built for continuous growth. The generative patterns derived from Voronoi structures can be recombined infinitely—allowing for new layouts, animations, and brand moments that still align with the core identity.
Custom tools created by Pentagram—such as a Figma plug-in for generating unique Voronoi patterns and a Cinema 4D system for animating cell structures—equip Cohere’s internal teams with the ability to expand their design language without needing to reinvent it. This infrastructure ensures longevity and adaptability—essential for a fast-growing company working at the edge of technological advancement.
It also means the brand doesn’t stagnate. It matures in parallel with the platform’s capabilities and community. Whether launching a new product feature, publishing a research paper, or entering a new market, Cohere’s design system can flex to meet the moment—always grounded in its core philosophy of organic intelligence.
Humanizing the Machine: A New Paradigm for AI Branding
Cohere’s visual identity is not just a milestone for the company—it’s a paradigm shift for the artificial intelligence industry. In choosing to design not around the expectations of what AI should look like, but around the realities of how people feel and think, the company has charted a new path. Biomimicry is not merely a theme; it is a framework for aligning technology with nature, computation with cognition, and efficiency with empathy.
This approach doesn’t reject technology—it reinterprets it. It asks deeper questions about what intelligence means and how it should be expressed. Is it linear or fractal? Cold or warm? Predictable or adaptive? By embracing the uncertainty, fluidity, and interconnectedness of nature, Cohere’s brand reimagines the digital experience as something far more intimate, intricate, and inspiring.
In a digital era defined by acceleration and abstraction, Cohere offers a more grounded, harmonious alternative—one where technology doesn’t dominate the user, but collaborates with them. Through biomimicry, the company not only advances the aesthetics of AI but also its emotional, ethical, and experiential dimensions. And in doing so, it shows us what AI can truly become—not just a tool of the future, but a partner in the present.
A Logo that Embodies Evolution and Connection
Cohere’s new logo is a masterclass in symbolic design. At first glance, it’s an abstract mark. But upon closer inspection, it reveals three softly contoured cell-like shapes coalescing to form the letter “C.” Each of these cells represents a different stage of development, visually narrating the story of AI as a constantly maturing force. The logo manages to strike a delicate balance—celebrating both biological imperfection and technological precision. It feels less like a product logo and more like a living emblem for the AI era.
This design direction helps reposition artificial intelligence not as a distant or futuristic marvel but as something deeply human and inherently present. It becomes a symbol not of machine dominance, but of machine understanding.
Color as a Bridge Between the Natural and the Digital
Color plays a fundamental role in reinforcing the emotional tone of Cohere’s new brand. Instead of defaulting to cold metallic tones or hyper-saturated digital palettes, Pentagram embraced an earthy yet modern spectrum. Hues like conifer green, volcanic black, and mushroom grey provide a grounded visual base, suggesting stability, warmth, and nature. These are offset by vivid accent colors like acrylic blue and simulated coral, injecting bursts of energy that represent the digital, computational side of the platform.
Gradient overlays and subtle transitions ensure that the brand feels textured, layered, and multidimensional. Rather than overwhelming the viewer with sharp contrast or excessive color complexity, the system uses restraint—inviting interaction while avoiding visual fatigue. It’s a palette that feels equally at home in a scientific journal or a developer’s dashboard.
Intelligent Iconography Rooted in Purpose
Supporting the interface and product ecosystem is a bespoke suite of icons designed with the same biological logic. These line-based illustrations borrow heavily from the Voronoi-inspired brand language, ensuring consistency across all touchpoints. Each icon fits within a compact 24-pixel square, making them efficient yet expressive.
More than just decorative elements, these icons serve a practical purpose—streamlining navigation and enhancing the user experience. Specialized pictograms known as “endpoints” represent conversational flows and exchanges, helping users intuitively understand model inputs and outputs. These design choices ensure that even micro-interactions reinforce the brand’s core narrative of natural intelligence.
A Typeface that Reflects Language’s Living Nature
Typography is often where branding either soars or falters. In Cohere’s case, it becomes a powerful tool for expression. Pentagram developed a fully custom type system tailored to the nuanced needs of AI communication. With multiple weights and styles for headings, body copy, outlines, and code, the typeface supports both legibility and stylistic flair.
What makes it truly remarkable, however, is its generative capability. The headline font features cellular “cuts”—organic gaps and splits that evolve as you type, thanks to an advanced variable font engine. This creates a living typographic system that mirrors the unpredictable, adaptable nature of language. It’s not just a font; it’s a metaphor rendered in type.
Scalable Creative Tools for In-House Innovation
Understanding that the brand must live and evolve within Cohere’s internal ecosystem, Pentagram designed a set of scalable, flexible creative tools. These assets allow Cohere’s in-house design team to build marketing collateral, product visuals, and documentation with ease—without sacrificing brand fidelity.
The toolkit includes a custom Figma plug-in capable of generating unique Voronoi patterns on the fly, enabling designers to create consistent textures and backgrounds effortlessly. A modular layout system supports both web and print formats, while a tailored Cinema 4D setup helps generate 3D visualizations that align perfectly with the cellular motif. These tools act as a creative multiplier, giving Cohere’s team the autonomy to build and iterate rapidly.
Elevating the Developer Experience Through Design
Beyond aesthetics, the redesign also focused heavily on the user experience. Pentagram collaborated closely with Cohere to overhaul the digital journey from discovery to deep integration. The new website functions as both an informative hub and an interactive platform. With a sleek, responsive layout, it invites developers to explore without friction.
Key features include a customizable user dashboard, an interactive model playground for testing queries and saving code snippets, and an extensive knowledge library filled with tutorials, documentation, and community use cases. Every design decision emphasizes usability and clarity, helping reduce the learning curve for new users and making AI feel less like an experiment and more like a dependable tool.
From Research Lab to Daily Utility
One of the most powerful outcomes of this rebranding is how it transforms perception. Where AI tools were once seen as the domain of data scientists and researchers, Cohere’s new identity makes them feel relevant to everyday development workflows. It bridges the chasm between theoretical innovation and practical application, ensuring that AI can become a day-to-day ally rather than an intimidating black box.
This strategic shift is crucial for widespread adoption. When tools look friendly, feel intuitive, and reflect the human experience, they are more likely to be embraced. Cohere is not selling a distant dream—it’s delivering AI that works today.
Making NLP Tangible, Empowering, and Visually Alive
Cohere’s revitalized identity is more than a rebrand; it’s a philosophical repositioning. It brings together design, storytelling, and technology to answer a pressing question: How do we make artificial intelligence feel natural, accessible, and emotionally engaging?
Pentagram’s work accomplishes this with remarkable clarity. Through biomorphic visuals, an expressive type system, intuitive digital interfaces, and emotionally resonant color schemes, they’ve created a language for AI that people can relate to—one rooted in humanity, nature, and the evolving landscape of communication.
Ultimately, this identity tells a bigger story—about how we interface with machines, how we shape tools that shape us back, and how the most advanced technologies are only truly successful when they speak our language.
As the design team put it so aptly: “NLP isn’t some future fantasy—it’s ready for business right now.”
Final Thoughts:
Cohere’s brand transformation, masterfully executed by Pentagram, is a powerful example of how thoughtful design can transcend aesthetics and enter the realm of meaning. In an industry often dominated by cold, technical visuals and abstract promises, this new identity brings artificial intelligence back down to earth. It speaks not only to engineers and AI researchers but also to everyday developers, product teams, and end users. It proves that AI doesn’t have to feel distant, cryptic, or futuristic—it can be immediate, intuitive, and emotionally resonant.
At its core, this rebrand represents a shift in how we think about technology itself. By grounding AI in biological metaphors and organic forms, Cohere offers a vision of innovation that is neither intimidating nor impersonal. The use of Voronoi patterns, cellular geometry, and evolving typography is not just visually compelling—it’s a metaphorical articulation of what AI really is: a growing, learning, responsive system that mimics the dynamic nature of language, thought, and conversation.
This approach also underscores an essential truth about communication: it is not linear or static, but complex, adaptive, and fundamentally human. In this light, the redesigned type system with its generative "cuts" becomes more than a typographic flourish. It reflects the very mechanics of speech—fragmented, contextual, and alive with meaning. Similarly, the custom iconography and color palette are more than design decisions; they are the visual vocabulary of a brand that understands nuance.
The success of this brand evolution lies in its cohesion—no element exists in isolation. From the customizable toolkit that empowers in-house creatives to the responsive website experience tailored for real-world developers, every piece is connected by a unified philosophy: AI should be useful, beautiful, and human-centered.
Cohere’s new identity is not just a facelift for a tech company—it’s a cultural recalibration. It invites us to reimagine how we relate to machines and how machines, in turn, relate to us. It bridges nature and computation, intellect and empathy. And most importantly, it doesn’t sell a distant future—it brings AI into the present, where it can be embraced, understood, and put to work for everyone.
