Benjamin Lee
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Contact
I’m a designer currently based in Singapore, with experience in crafting design solutions for clients across the mediums of digital, print, and art direction. My passion lies in developing unique solutions that delight and inform the end user through design.
QCP Capital
Leading the change in cryptocurrency
Scope
Brand Strategy, Brand Identity, Print, Digital, Motion
Year
2021—2022
Completed at
Practice Theory
QCP Capital stands as one of the largest cryptocurrency trading firms globally, with a trading book of over USD 2 billion. From its humble beginnings as a four-person trading firm, QCP has catapulted to a 70-strong team, becoming a leading voice in the global crypto space. As the firm moves toward institutionalisation, the next step was to define the brand’s core values to effectively communicate its stature. Collaborating with the brand to craft its positioning and visual identity, we helped QCP seek a more strategic, purposeful brand direction to match the strength of its performance and reputation worldwide.
An identity that speaks to the future
With its future plans and priorities in mind, we positioned the firm at “the centre of change”, drawing inspiration from the idea of a global thought leader—calm, composed and consistently credible in the eye of the storm. In this territory, QCP Capital’s steadfast presence in a hyper-volatile space established the firm at the core of the crypto ecosystem, serving as a changemaker and contact point between institutions, crypto companies and high-net-worth clients.
Growing the centreExpanded in our brand story and language, the possibilities of this ecosystem were distilled into the idea of a circle that was both inclusive and exclusive; inclusive to elevating the key operational components within, while exclusive to external parties and investors looking to enter.
Being at the centre of this circle intuitively became the focal point of our visual identity framework. The logomark is a letter ‘Q’, generated from the shape’s base form. The key brand elements were also derived from the circle to flexibly morph into other letters, permutations and icons to represent various aspects of the firm.
We further introduced nebulas and 3D textures as a visual interpretation of the dynamic climate of the markets. These flexible elements offered a gestural quality of the ever-changing winds and landscape, doubling up as symbols that embodied new frontiers and uncharted growth. Presented together, the identity system served to accentuate QCP Capital’s new position of being a key player and global leader in this growing industry.
Constructing new ways of seeingThe theme “Accelerated Design” is an urgent call for critical reflection of and creative action by architecture through a time of perma-crisis. It provokes crucial discussion: Can and should we use technology to accelerate design? If so, to what extent and to what end? Perhaps, design must decelerate instead? Our creative direction attempts to find beauty in this chaos, inviting debate on design’s role amidst accelerated change.
The 2024 edition launched with a distorted version of the CAADRIA logo, visualising the theme of excessive acceleration and pushing clarity to the edge of recognisability. Leading up to the conference, the identity itself becomes a dynamic response, continuously evolving and building upon itself.
The subsequent Call for Entries campaign further developed the branding. As participants submitted abstracts on the website, they were also invited to create unique gradients as a form of human verification. This crowdsourced initiative acknowledged the human input that is typically omitted by CAPTCHAs, at the same time capturing contributions to the AI training dataset. Over four months, we collected over 600 gradients, which were fed into Dreambooth.