John Kao took an MD in psychiatry at Yale and an MBA at Harvard, built Harvard Business School's first innovation curriculum over fourteen years, and now teaches creativity at Yale. His argument is that single-mode thinking has run out. He needed an identity that carried it across a website, a Substack, Instagram and YouTube without collapsing into a logo and a colour.
The organising idea is Binary to Poly. I drew the mark from a binary graphic that breaks apart as it repeats, so you see the argument before you read a word. Five content pillars each carry a number, an icon and a title that behave as one unit. Five colour values, no gradients, Gill Sans Nova throughout.
Eleven pages are live: homepage, About, Start Here, four pillars, and four for the Poly Framework, Kao's own intellectual property: polycognition, polyvalency, polytrophism. I ran the strategy, designed the pages and built them. The brand kit of reel covers, quote cards and carousel frames went to the person producing his social output, so they post without a brief.
The Creative Architecture Map is the outlier. Fifty years of material will not fit in eleven pages, so I wrote the requirements and built the working prototype on this page, an interactive map that lets a reader move through his thinking rather than scroll a list of it. It stays a prototype until he decides otherwise.
- Year
- 2026–present
- Project No.
- 003
- Client
- John Kao
- Discipline
- Brand Strategy, Brand Identity, Website Design, Social Design, Interactive Prototype
- Role
- Brand Strategy, Development & Implementation
- Production
- Illustrator, InDesign, Squarespace, React prototype, Adobe Express brand kit