Welcome to the Renku 2.0 Identity and Brand Design Document.
This guide defines the renewed visual and verbal identity of Renku, reflecting the platform's evolution and its ambitions for the future. As Renku continues to empower collaborative, reproducible research through technology, a clear, modern, and cohesive brand expression has become essential.
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Renku brings it all together in one seamless platform, powering collaboration across your project, your team, and your community.
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The Renku 2.0 brand is built on principles of joyfulness, collaboration, and a user-friendly interface. Every element — from the logo and typography to color palettes and the tone of voice — has been thoughtfully developed to strengthen our presence, resonate with diverse audiences, and support a growing ecosystem of users, partners, and contributors.
This document provides comprehensive guidelines to ensure consistency across all touch points, while allowing enough flexibility for creativity and growth. It is a toolkit for anyone who communicates on behalf of Renku: designers, developers, writers, researchers, and collaborators alike.
Through this refreshed identity, Renku 2.0 signals a confident step into the next phase of its journey — building a more connected, transparent, and impactful research future.
Renku began in 2017, originally as Renga and then renamed to Renku (Renga had already been registered for use in an adjacent domain). Both terms refer to styles of Japanese poetry, where the poem is created collaboratively, with the input of many people. That seemed like an evocative metaphor for data science projects, which also require the collaboration of many people with different expertise (domain knowledge, machine-learning expertise, software engineering, etc.) to realize the best results. Though some of details for how we want to achieve this have been in flux, the high-level goal has always been for Renku to be a platform for enabling collaborative data science.
2017 - 2023
2023 - 2025
Here you can access Renku legacy visuals and templates.
Renku’s brand identity defines the visual and conceptual essence of our platform, ensuring a cohesive and recognisable presence across all touch points. It reflects our core values, vision, and personality, shaping how we communicate with our users.
Our brand identity includes:
Wordmark (Name)
Renku (連句 “linked verses”), is a Japanese form of popular collaborative linked verse poetry, written by more than one author working together.
Logo and Wordmark
The logo is the primary visual representation of Renku, ensuring consistency in branding.
The logo is made up of dots that together form a moving frog. In Renku legacy, the frog is part of an ecosystem also built on the basis of dots that make up a natural landscape where it coexists with other species of the animal world.
In Renku 2.0 we continue working with dots and interconnected lines. A new concept have been created that better reflects what the new Renku means. See more details about the new concept bellow ↓.
Frogs are found all over the world and are primarily associated with transformation.
The logo (Renku name + Frog) can not be modified. Nevertheless, the logo (frog) can be modified to create dynamic animations using the grid system construction. For example for animation purposes that represents actions, like jumping, sleeping, eating, etc.