EY Doberman’s identity for Agronod bridges the gap between tech and agriculture

Agronod, a Swedish AgTech startup, is dedicated to strengthening profitability, sustainability and innovation in Swedish farming through the sharing of data. Their national platform empowers farmers with data control while fostering innovative solutions for a stronger agricultural future. Building upon their collaboration with the startup for their climate calculation app Agrosfär, global design firm EY Doberman returned to help Agronod with the development of their visual language.

While the AgTech company was in an exciting stage of growth, they were eager to bridge the gap between the at times clinical world of data visualisation and the human, tangible realities of Swedish agriculture. To achieve this, the studio taps into ‘organic’ aesthetics, introducing a warm colour palette – the key colour, yellow, conjures images of sunshine and the natural hues of wheat fields – and a simplified approach to presenting the brand visuals. “Agronod enables large-scale data sharing without compromising privacy or security, and they make the process incredibly simple,” shares Lead Visual Designer Hanna Hein. “This simplicity inspired us to reflect it in the identity, leading us to choose the most basic form, the circle.”

From there, the team created the central building block of the identity, the node, which also takes inspiration from the company’s name itself – ‘Agronod’ – and calls to mind both the root nodes on a plant and the ‘nodes’ of data. As a versatile motif, the nodes are seamlessly applied across the identity, used within the logo mark and as a repetitive pattern within several assets.

Being a new player in the AgTech field, Agronod’s wordmark is intentionally laid-back and slightly informal, set in lowercase. “We chose Inter for the wordmark, which is also Agronod’s brand font,” notes Hein, describing the brand’s typographic direction. “Since Agronod is a digital platform, we wanted a font specifically designed for user interfaces, with a focus on high readability for small to medium-sized text on computer screens. To incorporate the visual direction into the logo, we added a node within the ‘o,’ which also evokes the image of a growing seed.”