Meatable Logo

This page contains the basic tale of how the Meatable name and logo came to be.

The Name

When I sat down early 2018 with Krijn and Daan the company did not have a name. They had a working title ‘Simba Meat’ but they weren’t happy with it. It did not convey the width of application they had in mind for the company. If anything it caused more confusion, on wether the meat was coming from lions. Which is not the case of course. I sat down with them and together we formulated their motive, vision and their mission. And we gathered a bunch of (unrelated) company names we liked. From this I started the search for a name that better suited their product, company and personalities.

Motive

The current method of producing animal meat in combination with current global meat consumption is disastrous for the animal, humans and as well as the environment. This unsustainable situation will have to change radically in the coming years.

Vision

We believe we are able to tackle the meat production related problems without having to eliminate animal meat completely from our diet.

Mission

We want to develop clean meat by multiplying animal cells, without keeping livestock and all the adverse consequences. Our mission is to deliver a commercially viable product for this.

The name Meatable is a compound term, consisting of the word ‘Meat’, ‘Eatable’. And by adding ‘able’ to the word ‘Meat’ we are basically saying we are enabling Meat, by which we mean; initiating the cultured meat industry to meet our world’s needs for many years to come.

The Logo

Metaballs

Metaballs are, in computer graphics, organic-looking n-dimensional objects. The technique for rendering metaballs was invented by Jim Blinn in the early 1980s. Metaballs largely made their introduction in the 1990’s through the demoscene: groups of enthusiastic programmers and artists that aimed to create graphical/musical effects that pushed the known limits of older hardware, such as the Commodore 64 and Amiga. The goal of demosceners was to create audio-visual effects in real-time that would impress viewers and confound other demoscene programmers with how the effect was implemented.

One such effect that gained popularity was metaballs: squishy circular objects that had an organic look and feel to them. The shapes are generated by an equasion. The shape of Metaballs depend on the size off and distance between objects and a determined threshold. The shapes this technique creates remind me of simplified visualizations of a cell splitting up into two separate cells.

Also Meatable and Metaballs kind of sound alike ;)

Petri dish

A Petri dish (or Petri plate or cell-culture dish) is named after the German bacteriologist Julius Richard Petri. It’s a shallow cylindrical glass or plastic lidded dish that biologists use to culture cells. I wanted to add a visual representation of the dish in the logo somehow. Could be as simple as a plain circle.

The color of meat

Typically a piece of meat we bake and eat has a gradient in it. Moving from brown-grey to a lighter pink on the outside to a darker and deeper red in the core.
I wanted to use a gradient like this in the logo, make it a little more subtle, and turn it into a linear gradient (see image).

I used a dark blue color instead of traditional black text, as it creates a contrast that seems more friendly.

The Shape

We look down into a petri dish and see how a couple of cells are dividing. The shape pof these cells remotely resembles the letter ‘M’. The white shapes capsulated inside the red shape could aslo be interpreted as a ratio of fat and muscle cells.

All proportions and spacing between the cells consist of the same circle shapes and metaball calculations.

As a bonus the result could also be regarded as a slice of baloney.

Typography

Early on we decided on a clean and stylish font like the Helvetica Vignelli used for the New York Subway in the 1970s. Especially the way it was displayed in the famous NYCTA Graphics Standards Manual. A simple and when done right timeless style. I decided to use Europa Grotesk SH Medium because I think it sits on the sweet spot between vintage and modern Grotesk typography.

The Result

by Jarien Geels