🤖 AI in Motion: The Rebrand That Runs on Threads
Design got structured. AI got stylish. And somewhere along the way, a horse trotted in. Sean Barclay, Lead Product Designer at Twelve Labs, walks us through the rebrand.
Welcome to On-brand by Brandfetch—the weekly scoop on the most intriguing rebrands, brand evolutions, and fresh identities shaping your favorite products.
📽️ From Cyber Cafés to a Video-First Future
Twelve Labs began in 2018 when three of its five co-founders met working in South Korea's Cyber Command. Driven by the need for better video understanding tech, they left the bagel-shop meetups behind and built their first model from scratch. Fast forward to today: offices in San Francisco and Seoul, and a growing remote crew. But one thing hasn’t changed—their mission to make video searchable, understandable, and useful.
They do this through foundational AI models called Marengo and Pegasus. Whether you're looking for a man in a helmet (Roman gladiator? Astronaut? Sure.) or trying to summarize a 2-hour video into chapters, these tools help users see—and search—video in new ways. Forget scrubbing timelines or tagging frames manually. With natural language prompts and smart APIs, you get insights, not headaches.
🧵 Building One Thread at a Time
AI isn’t magic. It’s learning, refinement, and transparency. That’s why Twelve Labs built the Playground: a visual space where users can see how their AI works, search for moments, and watch the system improve with every prompt. Their goal isn’t perfection on the first try—it's clarity, iteration, and trust.
The way they see video is also reflected in how they show it. Threads, volumes, temporal-spatial reasoning—these aren’t buzzwords, they’re the design DNA. Their new visuals express the continuous nature of video, not broken into frames but woven like fabric. It’s modular, flexible, and purposeful.
Even the color palette tells a story. Gone are generic tech blues; in are vibrant, LCH-calibrated shades like peach and green, each linked to product features. Every hue carries meaning. Every thread, a narrative.
🏇🏻 A Horse, a Jockey, and a Design Dream Team
The crown jewel? A horse in full gallop—inspired by Muybridge’s iconic motion studies. The horse symbolizes movement, the jockey human control, and the whole thing? A wink at the roots of video itself. It’s smart, a little nerdy, and totally on-brand.
“So our logo is a nod to that early moment in film history, symbolizing movement, progress, and technological curiosity.”
—Sean Barclay, Lead Product Designer at TwelveLabs
Pentagram brought it to life. Jody and team gave structure and style, but respected boundaries. Some things were non-negotiable: like keeping beloved model names Marengo and Pegasus. They even have an AI agent called Jockey, tying the whole metaphor together.
This wasn’t just a visual facelift. It was a moment of reflection and momentum. As Sean puts it: “The story’s not done. But now, at least, it looks the part.”
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See you next week!
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