Editor’s Note
Every series has a beginning. A conversation that set the tone for everything that followed. For Psychedelics Design, that conversation was with Bruno Maag with whom I had the honour working on a project whilst I was at the London studio of Method Inc.
Back in 2022, I sat down with Bruno — founder of the renowned Dalton Maag type foundry in London — to ask a question that had been quietly forming in my mind for months: what does colour and typography actually mean in the psychedelic context?
I’d just come back from a conference in Malta, and I’d been watching a wave of startups flood into the space — many of them pre-product but flush with funding — and nearly all of them arriving with one of three visual vocabularies. On one end: dark blues, conservative typefaces, and the studied restraint of a company that wants to be taken seriously by institutional money, whispering “pharmaceutical conglomerate.”
On the other: hyper-saturated, maximalist, a kind of psychedelic party aesthetic that leaned hard into the counterculture associations the serious players were working to distance themselves from. And somewhere in between: a well-meaning but underdeveloped naturalistic look — earthy tones, organic shapes — that gestured at depth without quite landing it from a brand POV.
None of these were wrong, exactly. But none of them felt fully right either. The tension was palpable. These are companies built around one of the most intimate, transformative experiences a human being can have — and their visual identities were struggling to hold that weight. Naturally, when starting anything, branding is mostly an after thought if at all.
To be clear: the industry has come a long way. The past six months alone have brought a noticeable shift in sophistication — brands thinking more carefully about who they’re speaking to, and why design is not decoration but an argument. But to understand where we’re going, it helps to understand where we started. And in 2022, we were very much at the beginning.
Bruno gave me the framework to understand why it was so hard — and what doing it well would actually require. Enjoy the write up!
The Interview That Started It All
Bruno Maag is not someone who deals in vague design intuitions. He’s spent decades at the intersection of neuroscience, typography, and brand strategy — researching how the human brain actually decodes letterforms, what happens when legibility breaks down, and why our emotional response to type is not arbitrary but deeply, evolutionarily conditioned.
His foundry, Dalton Maag, created BBC Reith — the bespoke typeface family now synonymous with the BBC’s global identity. He’s thought seriously about what it means to design for audiences in high-stakes, high-trust contexts. Healthcare is exactly that kind of context. And psychedelics sit squarely within it.
The conversation we had in 2022 covered three interconnected tensions that, in my view, define the visual challenge facing every company operating in this space right now.
Tension 1: Conservative Investors vs. Expansive Experiences
The first tension is structural. The psychedelic industry is caught between two audiences with almost opposite visual expectations.
On one side: institutional investors. Bruno was direct about their influence: “Investors tend to be highly conservative, and therefore you will not want to have anything that would ever want to rock the boat. Big institutional shareholders hold sway.” You speak with restraint, you signal stability, you choose a typeface that reads like a company you would trust with your money — and with your mental health.
On the other: a culturally curious, often countercultural consumer base for whom the sanitised pharma aesthetic feels alienating, even dishonest.
And then there’s the healthcare dimension, which cuts across both. As Bruno put it: “Companies in the medical sector, in general, have to tread quite carefully because you are talking about health, and health is very close to people. This means the branding has to show a degree of seriousness. You can have a degree of creativity, but that is still on a narrow path. You are not sending out a party invitation; you are talking about health and need to convey the feeling of trust.”
The result? A visual compromise that satisfies no one fully. Conservative type choices paired with adventurous icon design — as if the logo itself were trying to have two conversations at once. It’s not incoherence for its own sake; it’s the visual symptom of an industry that hasn’t yet settled its own identity.
Tension 2: Form Follows Function — Even in Branding
Bruno invoked Louis Sullivan’s foundational architectural axiom — form follows function — and applied it to brand design with a precision I found striking. In most branding conversations, aesthetic preference dominates. People like it or they don’t. It looks good or it doesn’t.
Bruno pushed back on that directly: “Mostly as designers, we hear ‘like it / don’t like it’ and ‘looks good / doesn’t look good.’ But if the functionality is poor, you disengage with it emotionally, and if you disengage with it emotionally, you don’t even try to see if you can make the functionality work.” Once emotional engagement is lost, you don’t give the functional content a second chance.
This matters enormously for type. The Grotesk genre — the dominant typographic mode of the space — carries a neutrality that is genuinely useful. It conveys stability. It doesn’t provoke. But Grotesk also has small apertures and closely shaped letterforms, which creates what Bruno calls ambiguity. And on ambiguity, he was unequivocal: “Ambiguity is the enemy of accessibility. The more clear and concise, the easier it is for the brain to decode the individual shapes and the easier it is to extract the meaning.”
The brain expends more effort. Fatigue sets in faster. In a space where you’re communicating with people who may be navigating significant vulnerability — mental health challenges, life transitions, trauma — the cost of that extra cognitive load is not abstract. It’s real.
Bruno also brought in a historical dimension that reframed the whole conversation for me. Typography has always carried cultural meaning — “The advent of advertising in the 1800s started seeing a much wider variety of type styles. We were used to a functional purpose and express different ways to express different things.” Even the Roman Empire understood this, using different letterforms for formal imperial communications versus informal ones. The psychedelic industry didn’t invent the problem of visual signalling. It just inherited it in an unusually charged context.
Tension 3: Accessibility Is Not One Thing
Perhaps the most useful framework Bruno offered was his three-pillar model of accessibility: emotional, functional, and technical — and the insistence that all three must be addressed simultaneously.
He defined emotional accessibility with precision: “Emotional accessibility is the first impression a person experiences when presented with a service or product. Does that person react positively or negatively? Do they feel invited or rejected? Without it, functional and technical accessibility is largely redundant.” In other words, if the design doesn’t emotionally invite someone in, the rest is moot.
Functional accessibility is about legibility and cognitive load — the effort required to decode information without fatigue. Technical accessibility covers the engineering layer: how a typeface renders across different screens and environments. These aren’t separate checkboxes. As Bruno described it, think of a Venn diagram — “in the middle of it, you have the sweet spot.”
On icon design specifically, he was sharp. Looking at how complex logos have become compared to the work of Paul Rand and Saul Bass in the 1950s and 60s, he noted: “Everything was much more stylised back then. Simple without being simplistic. It could work in different environments without losing any of the brand messaging. The moment it goes small, the design collapses.”
That last line landed hard when I first heard it. And looking at the psychedelic landscape, it still holds. Most brands are optimising for one pillar at the expense of the others — emotionally ambitious designs sometimes sacrifice functional clarity, functional stalwarts sacrifice warmth, and very few are asking the technical questions at all.
What This Means for the Industry
I published this interview in 2022 because I believed the psychedelic industry was at a visual crossroads. It was still early enough that identity could be shaped deliberately — that the sector could choose to build a visual language worthy of the experiences and the people it was claiming to serve.
Three years later, some things have shifted. We’ve seen more sophisticated brand refreshes, a movement away from pure pharma pastiche, and a growing recognition that design is not decoration — it’s a functional investment in trust.
But the core challenge Bruno articulated hasn’t gone away. These are companies working in the territory of mental health. Their audience may be vulnerable. Their investors may be conservative. Their products are, in many cases, still fighting for cultural legitimacy (not to mention legality). Every typographic decision they make is making an argument — about safety, about credibility, about who belongs in the conversation.
Bruno’s parting thought from that 2022 conversation has stayed with me: “There’s an evolutionary reason for our immediate emotional response to specific visual shapes and forms. Everyday decisions will always be taken on an emotional basis first.”
Design is not a nice-to-have. It is the first argument a brand makes. And in psychedelics, that argument had better be worth listening to.
Read the Full Interview
The full conversation — including first looks at specific psychedelic brands, Bruno’s breakdown of colour accessibility, and his take on why the industry’s icon design tends to collapse at small scale — is available in the original piece:
👉 Bruno Maag on fonts, form, and psychedelic identity
NEWS FROM PSYCHEDELICS DESIGN
It’s an honour to share that Zoe Wilder joined us as a strategic advisor!
Named “Cannabis Empressaria” by Forbes, “35 Most Influential Women in Cannabis” by Entrepreneur Magazine and recipient of the 2024 Green Market Report Award for Public Relations, Zoe Wilder is a public relations professional specializing in lifestyle, culture and wellness.
For over 20 years, Zoe has worked with hundreds of clients across a variety of industries to develop and execute inventive promotional content and campaigns that capture the attention of tastemakers and influencers from around the globe. Zoe holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the College of William & Mary and a Master of Social Work from Fordham University.
Her team comprises over 50 years of forward thinking and purpose driven public relations expertise working with A-list celebrities, New York Times bestsellers, award winning film, television, radio, music, and consumer products, critically acclaimed podcasts, top brands and business leaders, and publishing oversight for several of the world’s leading peer-reviewed medical journals.
A founding member of DoubleBlind Magazine, a media company covering the expansion of psychedelics around the globe, she also launched Liquid Culture, a revolutionary record label and artist collective redefining the intersection of music, visual art, and cultural innovation. Beyond that, she’s an ambassador for the Last Prisoner Project and Success Centers, advocating for justice and community empowerment; a strategic advisor at Psychedelics Design; and a member of the Association For Electronic Music.
We are in the midst of co-curating the upcoming online awards and event – and much more. Stay tuned!
Find Zoe on:
LinkedIn • Instagram • Zoe Wilder Public Relations • Liquid Culture Records
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When a psychedelic executive order gets signed with Joe Rogan in the White House, you know we’ve crossed a cultural threshold. The immediate question is whether the design of these systems — the infrastructure, the access, the care — will be built with the same urgency as the headline.
On President Trump signing an executive order to accelerate psychedelic research and access — read the full breakdown on Psychedelic Alpha.