Psychonaut brand identity

Client: Psychonaut
Services: Branding

Psychonaut is a new press founded with the imperative to publish singular books of fiction and nonfiction that inspire, speculate, and illuminate fantastic outcomes for humankind. Their mission is to imagine—and help to bring into being—what’s next.

In one of our early conversations, co-founder Janaka Stucky described Psychonaut as “the intersection of inner space and outer space,” a phrase that perfectly summarized the central goal of this project: to develop a no-frills identity system that instantly conveys the feeling of being transported both physically and spiritually.

The heavy lifter in the identity is the P logo, which creates a portal that is equal parts psychedelia and science fiction. The Psychonaut wordmark, set in a typeface that evokes the romanticism of 1960s counter culture, incorporates a customized double S to suggest subtle, sophisticated trippiness. When needed, the wordmark compresses into a neat PS monogram that, like the postscript at the end of a letter, suggests that there is always something more to say.