Marvin

Marvin keeps track of what happens between drone flights: aircraft, batteries, pilots and service. We designed its brand, its workspace and its landing page as one piece, and built them as working code. Marvin is a self-initiated concept with synthetic data.

Scope of work
Brand identity, product UI, landing page
Industry
Drone operations
Project
Self-initiated concept
Year
2026

Named after a robot who does the dull work

Most of a drone programme's work happens on the ground: service, batteries, records of who flew what. Douglas Adams's depressed robot suits that work. The brand keeps his dry humour for the landing page and keeps the product plain.

A head in one colour

A disc split by a brow line, with two triangular eyes notched below it. The gaps are empty, so the mark works in one colour on any ground, from the lockup down to a 16 px browser tab.

The Marvin lockup in white on black: the head and the wordmark
The wordmark is Cal Sans as outlines, opened up so no letters touch at 20 px.
Construction drawing of the lockup: the circles and arcs that cut the brow, beside the wordmark's cap height
Built on circles and thirds: the halves mirror and the eye corners sit on the thirds of the width.
The mark at four sizes, from large to browser-tab size
One mark at every size.
The mark in black on an orange badge
On orange only as the fault badge.

Black, white and one orange

Black is every ground and white carries the words. Answer Orange is the only accent. Five steps of light, teal to yellow, shade the pictures and mean nothing. A state is always a colour, a shape and a word, so no state depends on colour alone.

The palette: a bar showing roughly how much of a brand plate each colour takes, four swatches (Void black, Towel white, Answer Orange and Reading grey), the five steps of light from Sea to Babel, and the four states: OK as a white square, Service required as a yellow triangle, Unavailable as an orange diamond, Selected as white brackets
About how much of a brand plate each colour takes: black 70, light 13, orange 12, white 5.

Four typefaces, each with a job

Geist carries the product. Geist Mono sets anything you could look up: an aircraft, a battery, a flight. Cal Sans is kept for the logotype and section titles, and Jost Black for DON'T PANIC.

Type specimens, each labelled with its face and job: DON'T PANIC in orange Jost Black, a title in Cal Sans, a reading line in Geist and aircraft, battery and flight numbers in Geist Mono

Pictures drawn the way a drone sees

Every picture is square points lit from the top left. Size and shade follow the same light. Orange stays out of the shading, so it keeps meaning attention.

The head as a lidar scan. It always looks down and away.

The product keeps the brand quiet

Marvin's workspace is for fleet managers: which aircraft can fly, who flew them and what needs service next. It uses the same black, white text and Geist, two state colours with shapes, white brackets for selection and no pictures.

Marvin's fleet overview: a plan of Warehouse 1 with aircraft markers, two with yellow service triangles, one in flight on a dashed route, and a Needs attention list on the right
Overview. Yellow triangles mark service due; DR-01 is out on a roof check.
Marvin's overview with DR-08 selected: white brackets around it on the Warehouse 2 plan, an orange Unavailable diamond, and a drawing of the aircraft with its battery in orange
DR-08 selected. White brackets on the plan, an orange diamond for Unavailable, the damaged battery in orange on the drawing.
Marvin's fleet list: eight aircraft with availability, base, battery and flight time, beside the open events
Fleet. Every aircraft with its availability, base and battery.
Marvin's flight records: each flight with its aircraft, pilot, duration, outcome and summary status
Flights. Each flight tied to its aircraft and pilot.

The landing page is where the brand speaks

DON'T PANIC is the only large orange on it. The pictures move there: the head follows the fleet, a battery is checked step by step, a drone scans a site into colour. Every section points back to the working product.

Open the live product

A section of the landing page: See what's due, plan what's next, with a maintenance form over the fleet dashboard
A section of the landing page: Built for the work between flights, with three isometric drawings answering which aircraft can fly, who flew it and what changes when you save
The end of the landing page: DON'T PANIC in orange, the line Drone fleet management. Because someone has to., an Open Marvin button and the head drawn in white points

Credits and limits

Marvin is a self-initiated concept. Every aircraft, pilot and record is synthetic, and the choices came from design reviews, not user research.

The name, DON'T PANIC and the colour names come from Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as homage; the head nods to Marvin in the 2005 film. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the rights holders.

Cal Sans, Geist, Geist Mono and Jost are used under the SIL Open Font License.

This is the work we do for clients: a brand and the product it shapes, delivered as working code.

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