Maxion was coming out of the lab and into the world for the first time. Its KnotBody technology grafts naturally occurring miniproteins into antibody binding loops to reach ion channels and GPCRs, targets that had resisted antibody drugs until then. Real science, hard to say out loud. The company needed a brand and a site that could raise money and explain the technology at the same time, to investors who move fast and to scientists who do not forgive shortcuts.

This was also the first project of Codon65, a studio my friend Andrea and I set up specifically for biotech. A scientist and a designer, which turned out to be the right pairing to make science look like something worth looking at: the illustration and the visual language were built from the biology rather than laid on top of it. It was the project that made the studio start existing.