A concrete plan to carbon negative

Paebbl

Paebbl are the material technology company transforming built environments into carbon sinks. Inspired by how nature turns CO₂ from the atmosphere into rock, Paebbl combine captured carbon with mineral feedstocks, accelerating CO₂ mineralisation by a factor of 10 million. The product of this is quality, plentiful, carbon negative construction materials. These permanently store CO₂, lowering embodied carbon in the builds they create. With their demo plant soon to launch, Paebbl approached us to create a brand that would be crucial in ensuring construction is a solution to rather than a primary cause of CO₂ emissions.

Discipline
Brand Strategy
Brand Imagery
Brand Identity

A solutions focused company

Being a solutions focused company, the brand needed to have a utilitarian feel. And yet, it also had to be joyful. Everyone’s done enough doomscrolling to know the danger of climate change. What we don’t hear about enough are fantastic innovations such as Paebbl’s. We wanted to create a brand to spread the joy of the future Paebbl are building: one where industrial progress has a positive rather than a negative environmental impact. This joy softens the wordmark, which has a friendly, organic feel, reflecting Paebbl’s mission to reduce the harsh impact of construction on nature. The smooth curves of the ink traps in the letter forms seem as though the mark has been pushed into setting concrete, fitting for a company out to revolutionise the way we build.

The tension between curved corners and straight lines is carried through from the wordmark to the icon. The lines in the icon allude to the layering process that forms rock in nature, while their measured precision references Paebbl’s advanced technology; the forward tilting angle the dynamism of the method.

Animated, the icon begins soft and organic, with fluid lines that pulse and sway—representing the chaotic abundance of CO₂ and the untamed energy of the natural world. As the frames progress, these lines begin to align, compress, and tighten into form, symbolising the act of engineering and stabilising carbon. The resolved state, no longer in flux, is solid, composed, intentional. In motion, the identity speaks of process. In stillness, it speaks of purpose.

Palette, Textures and Typography

The brand’s typography gives a sense of futuristic techno-optimism paired with a robust industrial trustworthiness. Rounded inner corners create a humanistic feel that brings in the optimism, while the typeface’s flattened overshoots give it a technological edge.

Colours take their influence from the minerals Paebbl work with, with secondary and tertiary palettes inspired by the natural world — rust and terracotta shades found in sedimentary rock, blues that call to mind the clear skies the CO₂ has been removed from.

A suite of textures increase the range of brand expression. Illustrations mimic layers of rock, fragments and minerals, while abstract formations come together in natural, graphic representations of the movements of these strata.

Imagery

Bold architectural forms give our brand a cutting-edge feel, aligning us with innovation in construction. While future images will feature structures containing Paebbl’s materials, we're not limited to that. Unexpected angles can conceal a building’s identity and spark imagination around how our materials can be used.

Where Paebbl’s physical structures remain in progress, AI-generated imagery steps in, not as artifice, but as speculation. Paebbl’s value is that it hides CO₂ in plain sight, removing it from the air to become valuable construction materials.

Brand imagery leans into this ‘hidden in plain sight’ theme, with manmade structures obscured by nature, positioning Paebbl as a creator of construction materials aligned with the natural world. The result is a brand that balances rigour with optimism, engineering with imagination. It is a language for a new kind of legacy in which carbon is not a liability, but a building block. The future will be built for the natural world.