Early in the project, Chris and Oliwia Mendel, Madalena’s designer, bounced ideas back and forth to find a strong visual foundation rooted in creating beverages; they went from bubbles to liquid textures, before settling on bacteria. “Everything digital just felt a bit flawed and inauthentic,” Chris says, so the team steered clear of typical visual approaches to reflecting science, like lines of code.

But with bold visions comes complex production, especially since Chris and Oliwia decided to grow the bacteria themselves. “We had no idea if this would actually work, what the result would even look like, if Crucible would even do it, but on a quiet Friday afternoon I laser-cut the C logo out of cork, ordered some petri dishes, and we got started,” says Chris. They covered each cork logo with a range of substances; aged kombucha, liquid culture of lion’s mane, household food waste, cotton swabs of skin, and soil solutions, before placing them in the petri dishes and then placing them in “relatively lo-fi laboratory conditions”: a local makeshift incubator (the basement of Chris’ flat).

Because Chris planned to create moving assets, the team had to regularly photograph the growing bacteria. Every few hours, Chris would capture the changes in 10 to 15 samples for nearly two weeks, even overnight. “Luckily I live close to the studio, so I could go back and shoot during the day,” Chris says, “but it all felt a bit crazy sometimes.” After growing and photographing the samples, the only editing Chris and Oliwia did was tweaking some colors to match Crucible’s signature neon, day-glo palette. “It felt like just the right amount of human intervention, because there was no manipulation of any shape or form,” Chris says.

For Chris, the project was a joyous one on a personal level; his long-standing passion for natural shapes and textures was fully satisfied, and he appreciated taking the time to actually watch the samples grow. Furthermore, they have a large range of highly functional assets. Thanks to Chris and Oliwia’s meticulous attention to detail, they have built up a whole library of “varied, beautiful and unexpected visuals”, with each sample creating vastly different shapes, patterns and textures, some elaborate and some unrecognizable, keeping Crucible’s identity open to possibility.