FRAME — Geometric logo prototype
The brief: a brand for an NFT fund called FRAME. Simple letterforms using the fewest possible points, fully geometric, resizable to any aspect ratio. White stroke on black.
Built an interactive prototype — click to cycle through 8 aspect ratios (16:9, 4:3, 1:1, 9:16, etc.). Each letter defined as polylines in a normalized unit cell. The whole word stretches and reflows between horizontal and vertical layouts.
Total: 28 points · Diagonal angles required
What if every line segment was horizontal or vertical?
A question emerged: which words can be depicted using only 90-degree angles? No diagonals, no curves — pure grid geometry.
15 of 26 letters. The rest need diagonals.
This became a generative constraint — what meaningful words exist within this 15-letter alphabet?
Art and culture words within the grid
The fund is in the NFT space, so the name needed to feel like art and culture, not finance. Hundreds of words were filtered through the 90° constraint.
FOLIO — 20 points, zero diagonals
FOLIO emerged as the strongest candidate. It means portfolio (finance), a collection of prints (art), and a leaf of a manuscript (provenance). The repeated O creates rhythm, the narrow I gives vertical structure, the F anchors it.
Total: 20 points · Proportional letter widths · Grid overlay
It's for Raoul Pal
The fund is Raoul Pal's — founder of Real Vision, macro investor turned crypto-native, one of the most visible NFT collectors and advocates. The name needed to match his energy: bold, thesis-driven, intellectually grounded, credible to both LPs and the crypto-native crowd.
Left-field intellectual references
Names that encode a thesis but sound like they could be on a building. Insider references that reward the people who get them.
OVERTON (the shifting window of cultural acceptance) was strong but too many funds already use it. SUBSTRATE was perfect conceptually — the layer everything grows on — but conflicts with Polkadot's blockchain framework.
Internet-native and technical
Words from the tech/internet world with double meanings in art and finance.
CACHE was the favourite — hidden value, stored, ready to be retrieved — but it's already taken. LATENT was the runner-up: latent space (where generative art lives), latent value (finance), latent meaning (culture).
Two-word names
Inspired by hivemind — compound names with conceptual weight.
Permanent Collection — loved but flawed
The museum term for holdings that never get sold. It was the perfect positioning for a long-hold cultural fund. But it had a fatal constraint:
The name would turn ironic at the first exit. Variations were explored — Private Collection, Living Collection, The Permanent — but the magic was in the original pairing, and the original pairing was a trap.
The Bowie thread
David Bowie invented Bowie Bonds in 1997 — the first tokenization of creative output. A perfect origin story for the fund's thesis. Bowie-adjacent names were explored.
LOW was the power move — Bowie's most experimental album, and the word every fund wants to whisper. But the Bowie reference was stronger as part of the thesis narrative than as the name itself.
Chaos theory — Strange Attractor
A strange attractor is the hidden pattern that emerges from a chaotic system. The market looks random, but there's an underlying shape pulling value toward it. Raoul's literal job is finding the attractor in chaotic markets.
The Lorenz attractor — drawn from three simple equations, never repeating — would have been a stunning visual identity. But "strange" was too much to explain in a first meeting. The concept was right; the word was a barrier.
Types of frames
A return to the original FRAME concept — what if the name was a specific type of frame? Art frames, architectural frames, digital frames.
Rich territory but none cleared the bar of being immediately understood while encoding a thesis.
EPOCH ONE
Two words that had surfaced separately — epoch from the 90° grid exploration and one from the thesis framing — converged.
It does the most work with the least friction:
"We're in epoch one" is already how Raoul talks. It's a timestamp and a thesis. In machine learning, epoch one is the first pass through the training data — patterns forming, weights adjusting. In culture, it's the moment before consensus, when conviction is cheap and the permanent collection is still being assembled.
No selling constraint. No explaining. No conflicts. Three syllables. E1 as shorthand.
The thesis, written
With the name locked, the thesis wrote itself in nine sections — from the one-line position ("We are in epoch one of cultural assets moving on-chain") through the macro frame (Bowie Bonds as proof of concept) to the closing line.
Key lines that emerged from the process:
Whitepaper site
The thesis was built as a long-scroll essay site — EB Garamond body text, Inter for section labels, dark background, gold-accent pullquotes, scroll-triggered fade-ins. Designed to read like a published essay, not a pitch deck.