Every project is a blank canvas.
Just in case you haven’t heard about our obsession with Gradient, Tulsa’s Innovation Hub, we’d like the record to show that we’re huge fans (and tenants). So when the Gradient team brought us a new project, we were pretty psyched.
The plan was to host an annual innovation event, with the (shorter) inaugural event being a taste of what’s to come. Unlike most traditional “tech week” events, the goal is to connect legacy industry leaders with the next generation of founders. Easy peasy, right? We just have to create a name and identity that could resonate with both the CIO managing enterprise systems and the founder building in a garage.
After a short sprint, we landed on the name Chroma, a word that refers to the purity (or intensity) of color. And in the context of this event, the word became a perfect metaphor. Just like Gradient (whose name represents the progression from one state to another), Chroma captures what happens when legacy and innovation collide: things get more vibrant, more intense, more alive.
The Chroma wordmark is a nod to the past, inspired by Paul Rand’s IBM logo, built from horizontal lines that grow bolder as they move forward. The letterforms take cues from the NASA worm logo and are filled with a white-to-blue gradient, part tribute to its namesake, part tribute to Tron. (Yes, we went there.)
Visually, the brand walks a line between cold corporate and creative future. From posters to badges to merch, the identity draws from a blend of VHS-era aesthetics and the sterile beauty of Severance’s Lumon Industries (I love you, Adam Scott). We kind of asked ourselves, “What would someone in the '80s think the future looked like?” And BOOM. We found our Chroma identity.
As Chroma launches this year and continues to grow, we expect it to drive long-term impact for everyone involved. Tulsa is a city where legacy industries and emerging startups literally share the same building. This brand sets the tone for what happens when those worlds collide.
