Defining Reach Robotics: Behind the Brand

Every business has a backstory to its brand. This story is frequently told through instantly recognisable business names and logo designs: Google is named after the mathematical expression for one followed by 100 zeros, while Apple’s famous logo is a tribute to Alan Turing, the founder of modern computers. Our brand story and corporate culture inspire all that our name has come to represent — ambition, vision, and innovation — and Reach Robotics is no exception.

Silas Adekunle, the CEO and co-founder of Reach, was teaching robotics to children and teenagers two years ago. They enjoyed making and playing with their robots at first but soon lost interest. Silas, a die-hard gamer, began incorporating gameplay mechanics into his courses and noticed that gamifying robotics kept his students significantly more engaged and interested.

The concept for Reach Robotics was conceived.

Silas intended to revolutionise robotics, gaming, and entertainment as a 21-year-old university student. It’s a near-impossible ambition even for a seasoned veteran, let alone a university student. The unidentified company’s driving force was to inspire, strive for something higher, and produce the things we had always fantasised about as children. “Reach for the moon,” Norman Vincent Peale once advised. You’ll land among the stars even if you miss.” It was a foregone conclusion. Reach Robotics was formed extremely rapidly.

Every great business name necessitates a memorable logo. We knew exactly what we wanted the logo to represent, so we paired up with YZ Designs and started working together.

We explained our background to YZ Designs and laid up the following requirements:

• The necessity to expand one’s horizons and potential must be properly communicated.
• The letter ‘R’ should be prominent
• The logo should be basic and easy to remember.

They presented us with the following five designs with only that little information.

The features we supplied were embodied in each logo. From there, we decided on one logo to use with YZ Designs. The large purple R was our favourite of the five. It was clean, recognisable, simple, and bold, similar to Apple, Nike, and Google, while also conveying our own brand story and ethos.

We then provided some further feedback to the designers.

• The hands don’t stand out sufficiently.
• Experiment with different colour combinations for the R.
• A logo that might be used in the tech environment in Silicon Valley.

They accepted the suggestions and ran with them. They came up with the following:

We were getting pretty close to achieving our goal. The robotic hand, on the other hand, was not yet well-defined. As a result, we went back to work on the design once again.

We finally had a logo we could be proud of, one that is immediately identifiable and distinctive. We experimented with various colour schemes before settling on this shade of blue, which is both recognisable and comforting.

We are reaching for the human hand, the robotic hand. We’re attempting to build a brand-new play experience that has never been experienced before. Reach Robotics was a name we could do business around for a long time. As our logo proved, whether we arrive on the moon or among the stars, we’ll always be striving for the next shot.

NASA launches their R2 Robotnaut to the International Space Station on the final flight of Space Shuttle Discovery after two decades of successful humanoid robot research. NASA will rely on its R2 machines to fulfil duties unsuitable for human astronauts as we travel further into space, thanks to their near-human range of mobility, which is unique in humanoid research thus far.