Grow by Ginkgo

Giving a voice to synthetic biology

Overview

The concept of synthetic biology is core to longtime collaborator Ginkgo Bioworks. However, while its the foundation of everything they do, it’s not something that most people understand or maybe have even heard of. In an effort to foster a broader understanding in synbio and to give their team a means to flex their creativity, they created an annual magazine entitled Grow. ICS was at the ground floor of this initiative and was brought in to design the logo, brand identity, collaborate on print layout, and to create a dynamic content-rich website.

One unique aspect of Grow would be that each issue would focus on a single theme that would unite all of the articles, interviews, stories, and art contained within it. This led us to developing a mark designed to be dynamic but still stand on its own and represent their brand. This flexibility carried over into the styling of the website. While it was fundamentally a blank slate for the writers and artists, we made the decision to build a dynamic variable to allow the issue’s theme colors to be set for the digital edition and to carry on through the site.

Since the primary content would be long-form journalism, we designed a post template built for comfortable reading with a strong typographic hierarchy and a number of modular content blocks to layout stories with the same fluid feel as in print, but in a way that would still work on the web. Additionally, we provided some blocks that could introduce multimedia elements, allowing the content on the site to be enhanced with video, audio, or other supplemental content. Over the years, we also worked closely with the Grow team to enable custom translations as well as a shop where users could purchase print copies as well as other Grow and Ginkgo swag.