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§ 00.A

BRAND COLLECTION

Seven marks over the past two years, most of them for software companies where customers meet the brand as an app icon before they see it anywhere else. Four belong to one client, a Brazilian govtech group operating across more than 200 municipalities.

TYPE

BRAND IDENTITY

YEARS

2025 — 2026

SECTORS

FINTECH · B2B SAAS · URBAN MOBILITY

SCOPE

MARKS · LOGOTYPES · BRAND SYSTEMS · GUIDELINES

STATUS

SHIPPED 2026 · ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT

Northflank by Erik Padamans

§ 01 / CONTEXT

Most of the brand work that reaches me now comes from software companies. A founder with a working product, early customers, and a mark someone made in an afternoon to get the thing shipped.

They ask for a logo. The harder part is that the same form has to hold up as a favicon, an app icon, a nav logo at 24 pixels, and occasionally a sign bolted to a wall.

§ 02 / PROBLEM

A mark presented at 400 pixels on a white slide tells you almost nothing. Everything passes that.

The real test is a phone home screen, twenty apps deep, at a size where most of the detail is gone. A mark that only works large gets found out months later when the app ships and the icon reads as a grey smudge. By then it is expensive to fix, because it is already on the store listing, the invoices and the signage.

So small is where I start rather than where I check.

§ 03 / DECISIONS

01

DealMover

DealMover is a workflow operating system for structuring and moving complex deals through a controlled process. It starts in credit and investment, and the platform is built to reach further than that.

The mark is two angled forms that read as an M and as forward motion at once. I built it on a construction grid so the same geometry could be cut into brushed steel for signage and stamped into a payment card without being redrawn. It holds at two metres and at twenty pixels.

01

DealMover

DealMover is a workflow operating system for structuring and moving complex deals through a controlled process. It starts in credit and investment, and the platform is built to reach further than that.

The mark is two angled forms that read as an M and as forward motion at once. I built it on a construction grid so the same geometry could be cut into brushed steel for signage and stamped into a payment card without being redrawn. It holds at two metres and at twenty pixels.

01

DealMover

DealMover is a workflow operating system for structuring and moving complex deals through a controlled process. It starts in credit and investment, and the platform is built to reach further than that.

The mark is two angled forms that read as an M and as forward motion at once. I built it on a construction grid so the same geometry could be cut into brushed steel for signage and stamped into a payment card without being redrawn. It holds at two metres and at twenty pixels.

02

NodeBOM

NodeBOM turns CAD assemblies into supply chain data. Hardware engineers, procurement teams, nobody looking for a playful brand.

The old landing page buried what the product actually did under several scrolls of feature copy. So the work started with the sentence that explains the product, and the mark came after it. Getting the message right first meant the mark had less to carry.

02

NodeBOM

NodeBOM turns CAD assemblies into supply chain data. Hardware engineers, procurement teams, nobody looking for a playful brand.

The old landing page buried what the product actually did under several scrolls of feature copy. So the work started with the sentence that explains the product, and the mark came after it. Getting the message right first meant the mark had less to carry.

02

NodeBOM

NodeBOM turns CAD assemblies into supply chain data. Hardware engineers, procurement teams, nobody looking for a playful brand.

The old landing page buried what the product actually did under several scrolls of feature copy. So the work started with the sentence that explains the product, and the mark came after it. Getting the message right first meant the mark had less to carry.

03

Digipare

Digipare handles digital parking across roughly 50 Brazilian cities. Drivers open it in a car park, in sunlight, usually in a hurry.

The old mark was a wordmark with a pin, which is what most parking apps use. The new one is a single closed form with no interior detail, because interior detail is the first thing to go at icon size. It was drawn as the app icon first and scaled up for everything else.

03

Digipare

Digipare handles digital parking across roughly 50 Brazilian cities. Drivers open it in a car park, in sunlight, usually in a hurry.

The old mark was a wordmark with a pin, which is what most parking apps use. The new one is a single closed form with no interior detail, because interior detail is the first thing to go at icon size. It was drawn as the app icon first and scaled up for everything else.

03

Digipare

Digipare handles digital parking across roughly 50 Brazilian cities. Drivers open it in a car park, in sunlight, usually in a hurry.

The old mark was a wordmark with a pin, which is what most parking apps use. The new one is a single closed form with no interior detail, because interior detail is the first thing to go at icon size. It was drawn as the app icon first and scaled up for everything else.

§ 04 / SYSTEM

Four of these marks belong to Areatec, a Brazilian company building traffic and parking technology since 1996. They operate the largest OCR fleet in the world across more than 200 municipalities.

The group has a parent company, a driver app, an operations platform for city control rooms, and the layers underneath. Three audiences that share almost nothing: municipal governments, everyday drivers, and operators watching live data come in.

They had to read as one company without looking like the same logo four times. So the marks share construction rather than shape. Same geometric language, same weight, same relationship between form and counterform, a different symbol in each.

§ 05 / SHIPPED

Each engagement delivers the primary lockup, horizontal and stacked variants, monochrome and negative versions, an app icon cut for small sizes, the palette in hex, RGB and CMYK, vector sources, and a guide covering spacing and usage.

The exploration sheets go out with it. Founders approve a direction faster when they can see the ones it beat.

§ 06 / NOW

DealMover and NodeBOM are live. The Areatec marks roll out across the group's platforms this year, starting with the driver app.

Areatec came back for a few more brands after the first three were delivered.

"Erik delivered outstanding work on our brand identity logos for Areatec, Digipare, OlhoVivo, and Qentral. His ability to translate complex tech concepts into clean, modern marks is remarkable. Every deliverable was polished, versatile across formats, and came with thorough brand guidelines."

Will Stewart

FÁBIO BATISTELLA / CEO, AREATEC

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