About: The Team | How the AI Works | Rules of Curation | Brand Identity | Illustrations | Acknowledgements and Disclaimers | Press and Coverage
The ImprovBot.ai brand identity is a fairly subdued affair that mostly stems from the conceit of treating the project’s algorithmic business end, its neural networks, as a ‘robot’. This treatment is seen in the project name, in the byline under which the generated show listings are posted on this site, and in the logo mark and Twitter avatar, which depicts a highly stylised robot face, recognisable as a robot face only through its one facial feature of the antennae-shaped ears.
We rejected the obvious choice of combining the robot motif with one of the ‘futuristic‘ typefaces that, over the last thirty years or more, have often been used to invoke the science-fiction imagination and its presumed embodiment in digital technology. Instead, we opted to counterpoint the robot motif with a self-consciously retro typeface that would, hopefully, convey a whiff of olden-time comedic jollity. This led us to use a slightly modified version of Ilham Herry’s Caniste.
For the collaboration between ImprovBot and the Improverts, the University of Edinburgh’s in-house improv troupe, our respective brand identities have been remixed into a few combo-pieces.
The brand identity’s robot motif is more fully explored in the illustrations that accompany the published show listings.
improvbot.ai 