LID & OGTIC · Government of the D.R. · Brand, 2 months

Two brands, one family

The state's digital innovation lab did not have a name people could picture. I created it. Later, when OPTIC became OGTIC, I co-created the institutional mark — and built it on the lab's pattern on purpose, so the office would read as the parent of the lab citizens already knew.

Role: Brand creator · visual system · product vision
For: Laboratorio de Innovación Digital, and OGTIC
Timeline: 2 months for the lab's brand
Status: Both marks in service

The LID mark and the OGTIC mark side by side: same facets, same arrow, same family — Two living marks, one pattern. LID was born first; the OGTIC mother mark follows it deliberately.

See the OGTIC mark in service →

A lab nobody could picture

The first thing the government's innovation lab needed was not a service. It was itself. A public institution asking citizens to bring it ideas has a credibility problem before it opens the door: it looks like a ministry, it sounds like a ministry, and nobody brings a ministry an idea.

So the brief was a promise, not a logo: an identity that read as young people improving the state from inside it. We wrote down what it had to mean before anyone drew anything — curious, human, without limits, in perpetual movement, diverse, collaborative.

Creating the identity of the lab. Before the mark: references, meanings, and a lot of arguing on paper.

LID: a mark that pushes forward

The mark is a faceted form leaning forward, in colours that refuse to look institutional. Facets because the lab is many disciplines at once; forward because the whole point of the place is movement. It had to survive four treatments — flat, on colour, in a single ink, and shrunk to a favicon — because a state brand lives everywhere and gets no special handling.

The mark, and the four treatments it had to survive.

OGTIC: the mother mark, on purpose

Then OPTIC was renamed OGTIC, and the office needed an institutional mark. I co-created it, and we built it on the lab's pattern deliberately: the same facets, the same colour logic, the same arrow. Not because we ran out of ideas — because a family resemblance does work that a press release cannot. A citizen who already trusted the lab could see the office and read progress, advance, future without being told.

To be exact about it, because it gets told wrong: LID did not become OGTIC. They are two living brands. The lab was born first and the institutional mark follows its pattern — parent and child, in that order.

What a brand did that a memo could not

After the relaunch, the number of citizens showing up to the lab's events tripled, and the number of government institutions bringing it work doubled. Proposals started arriving better formulated, with a clearer purpose. The lab was formally established as a group that could deliver.

And the OGTIC mark is still the one the office uses. That is the only proof of a brand that counts: it is still standing when you are not in the room.

The institutions that brought their problems to the lab: police, city halls, film, public works, migration, education — Who started showing up once the lab looked like somewhere you could show up.

A brand is what people expect from you before they read a single word. For a public institution, that expectation is the whole product.