Brand identity · Self-directed · 2025

TITAN

Rebuilding a legacy name as performance eyewear.

Goggles catching the ember

The context

The brief was open.

I got here because of a Travis Scott show, weirdly enough.

I spent way too long beforehand trying to find a pair of glasses I actually wanted to wear, and never landed on anything. That search stayed with me longer than the concert did. Titan already makes the kind of glasses you’d wear every day, and somewhere in all that looking I kept wondering what the brand would look like if it went after something rougher than that.

The brief was open, so I gave that problem to Titan. It’s a name that already carries weight, and performance is a segment it has simply never touched. The project is what that move would look like if the brand actually made it: three months, start to finish, on my own.

Sport is where my head goes by default, so that’s the version of Titan I built.

A wrap-around silver sunglass worn low on the face, lenses catching the room behind
A single-lens shield visor close up, climbers mirrored across the whole lens
Thin metal optical frames worn against a window, daylight through the lenses

The problem

Performance eyewear mostly shouts.

  • Aggressive angles
  • Loud colour
  • Logos sized for a stadium

It reads as sport because it looks like sport, not because anything about it performs.

I wanted a brand that stayed calm and still held up in conditions that don’t care how it looks.

Precision. Performance. Protection.

The starting point

I was stuck on the logo for weeks.

It needed to mean something and stay minimal. Those two things kept pulling against each other. Anything meaningful got busy, and anything minimal was just a shape.

The real problem was that I had no reference. I was trying to design performance without having looked at what performance actually is.

Direction 01
Direction 02
Direction 03
Direction 04
Direction 05
Direction 06

The turn

I watched an eagle hunt on YouTube.

Not research, just a video. But the dive was clean, the correction mid-air was instant, and nothing about it was wasted. That was peak performance, and no one had designed it.

That pulled me into a longer read about how much of what we design has already been solved by something in nature first. Nature doesn’t separate form from function, because it was never given the option.

That became the thesis.

An eagle seen head-on, wings raised into a sharp triangular arch as it drops toward the water at speed

Nature is the perfect design.

Everything after this followed from it.

The obvious eagle is a silhouette in flight. That would have made the mark about soaring, which isn’t what an eyewear brand should be claiming.

So I worked from the front of the head.

  • The brow ridge and outer eyes make two upward curves
  • The beak drops through the centre
  • Together they resolve into a T

The animal has the sharpest vision alive, and the mark comes from the part of it that does the seeing.

Reference

Golden eagle photographed head-on, with the mark's x and y axes, its sight lines and the words 'designed with intention' drawn over it

Construction

The correspondence, part for part: the brow ridge and outer eyes become the two upward curves, the terminals land where the eyes sit, and the beak drops through the centre as the stem. Read together they resolve into a T — the mark is the part of the animal that does the seeing, not the part that soars.

The typeface

This is the part that took longest and produced nothing for a long time.

Nothing off the shelf worked under the mark. Sharp corners read cold and brittle against its curves. Rounded corners went soft and lost the engineering. I kept trying new faces expecting the next one to solve it.

None of them did, so I stopped looking and cut one instead.

I took Morgant and redrew it, matching the corner radius to the mark. Once the radius was shared, the wordmark stopped fighting the logo.

Morgant's capital T at large size, with dashed circles marking the square outer corner and the arm-to-stem junction
TITAN set in unmodified Morgant
The redrawn capital T, the same circles now marking a rounded outer corner and a chamfered junction
TITAN set in the custom cut

Morgant, top. The cut, bottom. The circles mark the two joins that moved.

The system

The colours came from material in the first place.

They were photographed on stone and charred wood rather than laid out as flat swatches.

  • Obsidian Depth
  • Arctic Light
  • Steel Veil

Two gradients carry the two temperatures the brand works across. Blue to white for clarity. Black to orange for heat.

From there I built the system out across letterheads, cards, packaging and the site, because anything left theoretical would also have been left untested. The manual got printed rather than exported, which meant a few trips to the one shop I found with the paper and finish I wanted, two hours away.

The three brand colours — Obsidian Depth, Arctic Light and Steel Veil — as chips laid over a photograph of charred wood
The clarity gradient, ramping from near-black through blue to near-white, with the TITAN mark centred on it
The heat gradient, ramping from pale cream through orange to black, with the TITAN mark centred on it
The printed TITAN brand manual held in one hand over a dark wood table

In use

Frames, packaging, business cards, an ID, a letterhead.

This is the part I wanted to see finished rather than described.

The frames worn close up, lenses caked in dust, the mark picked out in white on the brow
The black-to-amber goggle box standing on grey rock, a line drawing of the goggles on its face
Three business cards fanned on linen — one amber, one blue, one showing the contact side
A staff ID card hanging from an orange lanyard, the mark in an amber block at its foot
The letterhead photographed at an angle, the mark in an amber block at its head

The campaign

Four faces. Mud, snow, heat, endurance.

Each frame is shot on a person rather than a product, with the mark closing the bottom of the image after the scene has already done the work.

NOTHING GETS THROUGH.

A claim about dust and glare.

It’s also what an apex predator’s design already guarantees.

The NOTHING GETS THROUGH poster lit in a bus shelter on a dark street, a sunburnt face filling the frame
The same campaign as a fabric banner hung from a stone building, a mud-covered rider's eyes above the line

What stayed with me

A thesis is worth more than a reference.

I spent weeks collecting shapes I liked and got nowhere. One idea about how nature solves problems unlocked the mark, the palette, the tagline and the campaign in about a week.

If I revisited it, I’d put that idea at the front of the manual instead of leaving it implicit on the logo page. Someone reading the book cold would see an eagle-derived mark and assume I picked an eagle because eagles look sharp.

What I’m glad about is that the system held. Every part of it can be traced back to one thought, which is what made the last two months of building it out straightforward.

Year
2025
Type
Self-directed
Role
Brand strategy, identity, custom typeface, colour system, collateral, campaign, brand manual
Duration
3 months

Scope of work

  • Brand identity
  • Logo design
  • Custom type
  • Colour system
  • Brand manual
  • Collateral system
  • Campaign
  • Packaging
  • Website

NEXT STOPS

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A 55-second spec brand film for Headspace, introducing ebb — a calm-focused AI companion.

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