Moonhub

When Dami, Hannah and Vinh came to Outfly, The Moon Hub was a young London startup with a product that already worked. VRiTT, its Virtual Reality interactive Training Tool, dropped staff into realistic role-play scenarios and scored them with a patent-pending spot-and-jot system on reaction time, spatial awareness, knowledge, accuracy and initiative. Early demos with retail teams had gone well, and Plexal had taken the team in and named them ones to watch.

What the company didn’t have was a brand to match its ambition. The founders wanted to sell to some of the biggest employers in the world and to grow into a hub for VR and AR innovation, with new products and sector teams under one roof. That meant a brand as clean and sleek as the experience inside the headset, with room to stretch across products that didn’t exist yet.

We started with a Brandscape™ workshop to understand who Moonhub needed to win over and what those people needed to hear, then translated it into tonal properties: a texture map for the company. The direction that came out of it was sleek but cheeky, modern and timeless, with Apple, Tesla and BrewDog as reference points, and future-proof enough to anchor sub-brands as the business moved into new sectors.

The first decision was the name. We dropped “The” and gave the company a wordmark it could own: MOONHUB, set in Circular, with a single raised ‘o’ that rises like the moon. The icon distils the same idea into one mark, bringing together the moonrise, an orbit, a crescent and an eye. Black, white and platinum carry the core brand, and a retro family palette of seven colours, from Space Cadet to Flavescent, is held in reserve for the products to come.

From there we built the identity into a full system and a set of brand guidelines. Each sector got its own colour and a name taken from the moons of neighbouring planets, while projects took their names from the missions that got there, so a new product could launch with its own identity and still read as Moonhub. Two of those names have since gone to market: Titan, for security training, and Elara, for health and social care.

Imagery follows strict treatment rules, either black and white or high saturation and contrast, with sharp geometric lines where the virtual world cuts into the real one. We carried the system across Moonhub’s first website, business cards, email signatures, letterheads and social profiles, and designed a branded hard case. We also created a look and feel for the VR experience, so what trainees see inside the headset matches the brand outside it.

In 2021 we turned Moonhub’s product into a story on screen. We wrote and shot a brand film in a darkened hangar: a founder steps into a spotlight, puts on a headset and runs a training scenario, while a holographic interface scores each attempt and feeds the results to a live dashboard. Interviews with the three founders explain why VR training works and how the platform fits alongside the learning systems organisations already use.

The same year we designed a holding page that greeted visitors arriving from Dami’s appearance on the BBC with a simple “Well, hello there”, and mapped the user experience for a Moonhub shop, where clients log in to buy training credits and headsets.

In 2022 we came back to help relaunch the website. Working from Moonhub’s own designs, we refined the desktop pages and user experience, designed mobile versions of every page, animated the home page and built the core site, with the new products front and centre: Elara for health and social care, Titan for security and IO, the corporate training suite. That spring we also filmed and photographed Moonhub’s dementia care panel event, where guests tried Elara’s training in headsets, and cut the footage into panel videos and social reels.

Along the way Moonhub has been featured by the BBC, TechCrunch and the Evening Standard, and Elara and Titan have taken the brand into new sectors. Next stop: the moon.