IYO

Every device is fighting for our eyes. The phones in our pockets, the screens on our desks, the watches on our wrists. They’re all asking us to look away from the rooms we’re in and the people we’re with. For sixty years, the computer has been something we stare at but IYO is building something different — a computer you talk to. One that lives in your ear and asks nothing of your attention.

When IYO came to us, the technology was already remarkable. Six years of research into spatial audio, psychoacoustics, and agentic AI compressed into a device barely larger than an old-timey coin. The challenge was building a brand ready to launch to an audience of 25M within the first 3 months.

Everyone has an inner world. A place where thoughts and feelings live, where identity forms, where the self goes quiet or loud depending on the noise outside. Most technology attacks that inner world, demanding and interrupting and pulling focus outward. IYO does the opposite. It starts from the inside to make the outside better by removing the visual interface altogether. No screen, no keyboard, no friction between thought and action. This anchored our brand foundation — the idea that IYO allows you to “hear the world according to you.”

The primary palette is almost aggressively desaturated with whites, grays, and, blacks, because a container shouldn't compete with what it holds. Secondary colors — acid green, warm orange, soft lavender — inject energy reserved for the generative soundmaps that pulse across the brand like an EQ responding to something just beyond hearing.

A single typeface, ABC Diatype Bold, used across everything at every scale. The discipline is intentional. When the message is this clear, four fonts would only introduce doubt. Expressiveness comes instead through scale, offset, and rhythm — stacking and splitting lines until a headline feels less like words and more like concrete poetry.

The soundmap tool is the most distinctive brand asset. A generative, browser-based system that translates audio input into visual patterns: grids, gradients, pixelated fields of motion. We built it because IYO's technology is fundamentally about making the invisible audible. The soundmap does the same thing in reverse. It makes the audible visible, and gives every piece of collateral a quality of being alive to sound.

The product renders expose the craftsmanship inside a device most people will only ever talk to — exploded components, macro surfaces, the interior geometry of a device sculpted for each ear. Lifestyle photography works in counterpoint, framing subjects as utterly present, in their bodies, in the room, unbothered by any screen.

When OpenAI announced its $6.5 billion acquisition of Jony Ive's hardware company, named "io" and pronounced identically to IYO, the courts ruled in IYO's favor. OpenAI abandoned the name. A brand is only as strong as what it can defend — IYO's held up.