BACKGROUND
In the financial services sector in 2007, most brands looked and sounded alike. The language was safe, the visuals were conservative, and the names tended toward gravitas over meaning.
Quant was a new entrant with a sharp point of view.
chlorophyll was approached to create the brand from scratch, and what emerged was one of the more unusual exercises in brand definition and ideantity™ thinking we had undertaken.
Project Duration
One year
IPs
anthrop™ | ideantity™
The Brief
The client needed a new brand built for a cluttered marketplace. Financial advisory firms were competing loudly on trust, legacy, and credentials, all saying roughly the same thing in roughly the same way. Quant needed to cut through without simply shouting louder.
Strategy
The Brand Core that chlorophyll identified was precise: measurable advice is the only reliable advice. Everything the brand did had to flow from that single idea. The name, the visual, the brand line, and even the typeface would need to carry it.
Process
Most brand exercises separate naming from visual identity, treating them as sequential tasks. For Quant, chlorophyll collapsed that distinction entirely. The name and the visual became one idea, designed to work together as a complete ideantity™.
Elements of the ideantity™
Name: chlorophyll created several names and finally proposed the name Quant, a word drawn from quantitative analysis. It was short, unambiguous, and had a natural credibility in the world of financial measurement. More importantly, it set up a visual possibility that the team was quick to pursue.
Inventing a new alphabet: Rather than apply a standard typeface to the name, chlorophyll designed an entirely new alphabet: 26 letters, each constructed from mathematical symbols. The result was a custom typographic system where every character carried the logic of measurement within its form. The brand wasn’t claiming to be analytical. It was visually, demonstrably so.
The brand line: ‘Analysis adds up’ completed the triangle. Name, visual, and brand line together communicated the Brand Core without a word of explanation needed.
Applications
The custom alphabet extended beyond the ideantity ™ into the broader brand environment, applied to office spaces and brand touchpoints in a way that made the typographic system a recurring, recognisable asset. The letters appeared on glass surfaces, walls, and collateral, turning every application into a reinforcement of what Quant stood for.
The Outcome
an ideantity™ where form and idea are inseparable
The Quant ideantity™ is unusual in that its distinctiveness is not decorative. The custom alphabet is the idea made visible. Every time someone reads the name, they are engaging with the brand’s core belief
about measurement and precision.
By inventing a proprietary typographic system rather than borrowing from existing typefaces, chlorophyll gave Quant something no competitor could replicate. The 26-letter alphabet based on mathematical symbols became a genuine, ownable brand asset.
In a sector where most brands rely on convention to signal reliability, Quant took the opposite approach. The ideantity™ made an intellectual argument for the brand’s point of view, and it made it memorably.
When a brand’s name, visual, and brand line all express the same idea, the identity stops being decoration and starts doing the work of the brand