Vertpaint - A vertex in conversation

Vertpaint is the team AAA studios call when the hard parts of a game need building: senior artists and engineers who slot into someone else’s pipeline and deliver, across 43 titles so far. Jonathan Berube of Hello Giant called them “the SEAL Team of game development”, and the brand had to live up to that. Today it runs across the studio’s site, stands and merch, and down the side of a McLaren in British GT.

Co-development is quiet work. The best of it disappears into someone else’s game, under someone else’s logo. So the identity had one job: whenever Vertpaint does get a moment to show itself, in a pitch, on a stand or on a shirt, it has to land at once.

That is why the mark is so reduced. A single V with a speech bubble lifted off its tip, the craft and the conversation in one shape. It reads at app-icon size and at ten metres wide.

Around it there is almost nothing. Black and white, a lot of space, and small technical type set like a spec sheet. It looks like production paperwork, the language the studio’s clients already speak, and it leaves the mark and the work to do the talking.

That restraint is what lets it travel. The same few pieces hold up on a T-shirt, a bus stop, a wall sign and the side of a GT3 car, without being redrawn.