Herellex
Revealing the invisible. In the lab, and on the page.
Client
Industry
Reach
Services
Duration
Project Year
Client context
HerelleX is a biotech company born as a university spin-off, built on two decades of research into bacteriophages and tuberculosis, operating from Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Its core technology, FluoTB, engineers bacteriophages to make living TB bacilli fluoresce in clinical samples — turning an invisible infection into a readable signal. Tuberculosis remains the deadliest infectious disease in the world, held back not by science but by access to diagnosis.
Challenge
The problem was not the science — twenty years of research stood behind it. The challenge was translation. A spin-off moving from laboratory to market has to be legible to health institutions, laboratories, regulators and investors, and that legibility is carried by the brand. HerelleX had a mark but no system: eight thin lines that filled in and vanished at small sizes, no reduced version, no defined minimums, and colour values living in loose files with labels inherited from a template.
What we built
A complete identity system documented across 66 pages and eight sections: Brand Core, Logo, Colour, Typography, Verbal Identity, Photography and Applications. At its centre is a logo set of 12 variants — four types across three colourways — built on editable master geometry, so a single change propagates to every instance in the document. Colour runs on 18 defined tokens with HEX, RGB and CMYK calculated for each brand value; typography on 15 text styles. Verbal identity, photographic criteria and the applications system had no prior definitions and were written from scratch.
Process
The logo was rebuilt before anything else. The signal dropped from eight lines to five — thicker, better distributed — and we added a three-line simplified version for embroidery, screen printing and small formats. Minimum sizes were defined for digital and print, with a clear step-down rule between the three versions. All 103 component instances across the document were relinked to local sources, leaving the file with no external dependencies.
Handoff
The final handoff included the 66-page brandbook, a presentation deck, and a working assets file containing the master geometry, the full variable collection and the complete logo set — all editable in place. The client can update the system at its source and watch it propagate, without needing us to do it.
Key decision
The brand isn't a metaphor for the science. It's the science.
FluoTB works by making living bacteria glow against a dark field under a microscope. So we built the identity literally rather than figuratively: the symbol is a fluorescent signal, the palette runs cyan and electric blue against near-black, and the entire 66-page brandbook is set on a dark ground rather than the usual white. Reading the brandbook is the same visual act as reading a slide. Most biotech identities illustrate their science — this one reproduces it.
