Soft, Cozy, and Gentle
Soft, Cozy, and Gentle
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Tender Futurism
10.Nov.2025
I was tasked with rebranding cryopreservation. We wanted it to feel warm, legible, and humanistic. Show that in building this technology, we are motivated by love and care.
The status quo visuals of cryo were: cold, dark, blue, depersonalized.
And the headlines:
“Ticket to cheating death”
“Rich People Freeze Themselves”
“Decapitate Now, Immortality later”
“Reviving Frozen Bodies”
The imagery above doesn’t only feel aesthetically bad, it is also untrue.
Until was founded (by Laura) primarily from a desire to help patients, and secondly from a sense of indignation that there seems to be a clear path to helping patients, that was not being explored due to a silly cognitive bias. Until was founded (by Hunter) because he has lost someone he loved, someone who died just before a cure came online. He had accepted that there might never be a path to helping terminally-ill patients like his father-in-law. Until he met Laura (you can read their words here).
Our new imagery is a step closer to truth:
We tried to evoke warmth, care, and personalness (that is literally a photo of me and my bf on the homepage!¹ ² And the rest of the site is adorned with cute pics of our team members). We want to relate to cryosleep like The Meadow from Howl’s Moving Castle — a beautiful waiting room we built for the people we love — and our lab like The Castle itself, powered by Heart. Not a coffin in the dungeon that an undying vampire sleeps in.
We’re certainly not the first to present technology as warm and humanistic.
Apple’s iconic iPad Air commercial, with the Robin Williams voiceover from The Dead Poet’s Society first aired in 2014. It only once explicitly mentions the product — in the very last second of the video. While a rich montage of art, culture, enterprise, ambition, and exploration rolls on, the iPad itself is scattered around, always in the background, in human hands, a supporting character in human endeavors.
Humanistic branding is on the rise.
Anthropic is a quite on-the-nose example of this, its name means literally means “relating to human beings”. The company’s LLM has a human name, Claude, and is trained to have specific human affects³.
I adore Figma’s latest spread of billboards. Closeups of hands in the act of design, no sign of the software itself, other than the vibrant Figma-made vector images overlaid. It feels all exciting, familiar, accessible, imaginative, intimate, and very human. An impressive feat for software company banding.
Look at Neo from 1x Robotics:
Look at Neo laying in the fall leaves:
Look at Neo’s little knit sweater, look how tiny Neo is:
Look at Neo in a comfy home giving flowers to the older folks.
Neo is soft, cozy, and gentle.
The late, Humane Inc, which made an AI powered wearable suffered some kind of horse shoe problem in which they were a bit too overt in their intention, while ignoring some current human facts, like no one really wants a(n explicitly) constant surveillance device in all their interactions, and it is hard to use your own hand as a screen.
Neuralink is the deepest of deep tech. This was their homepage in 2017-2019 (according to the wayback machine)
Then at the end of 2020 they started blossoming, with a little more warmth:
And now Neuralink’s homepage, in full bloom, showcases the patients that their technology has helped.
This is definitely just a reasonable arc for many a startup:
minimalist hyperfocused website for recruiting crucial first hires,
informative website for legibility (probably good for clinical trial applications? Investors?), then
human-forward celebration of the tech helping people to get broad public acceptance of the technology.
Neuralink went from:
“Developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers”
to:
a montage of people spending time with their loved ones in a way they were previously unable to do ⁴.
Science and Technology are the most profound expressions of human curiosity and care.
This is what transhumanism is all about (or, I like to call it Stepwise Transhumanism). We’re seeing a lot more Transhumanist Companies pop up.
When I simply Google image search, “Transhumanism” here’s a sampling of what I find:
It is dark, cold, and abstract.
This is… just aesthetic preference, right? Who am I to “yuck” the transhumanist’s aesthetic “yum”? We don’t all have to converge on round corners, soft ambient lighting, earnest eyes, and Earthly tones.
Why do I feel so much “AAARGGGG!!!!”?
Because I actually align with the values and hopes of the Transhumanists, but I don’t feel like those values and hopes are aesthetically represented here. Aesthetics have purpose. I feel sad when my friends and family are icked out by the technology or ambition that I find to be a beautiful epitomic expression of love for humanity.
We’ve romanticized going to war to protect that which we love, and I’d like to see more romanticization of scientists and engineers laboring away in lab for endless hours because they care. My coworkers do this, it is a Truth that has not inspired very much art (why?!).
I want people to see and feel that technology is made out of earnest love.
Maybe reality is soft, cozy, and gentle.
Maybe we build things that are incredibly difficult to build because we are motivated by love.
Maybe all this branding is misguidedly creating a red herring and we need technology to embody the evil that it is.
Or maybe we need to love our creations, lest they become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
¹ In the process of building the website, there was an earlier version of the homepage that featured an AI-generated person. Upon asking “who is that?”, Until’s CSO and Co-Founder, Hunter — who is also the greatest scientific mind I have ever met — said something along the lines of “It is BAD JUJU to have an AI-generated human on the homepage of a company that is betting on humanity existing in the future!" and his outrage only continued when he learned it was an AI-generated girlfriend for MY rl boyfriend. It was a real sweet moment.
² I’m using the royal ‘we’ here, but these views are my own. I’m not speaking on behalf of anyone but myself
³ OpenAI’s ChatGPT is an interesting foil to this. Perhaps keeping the robot’s character slightly non-human, keeping a sense of “otherness” is actually more humane?
⁴ And of course, once Neuralink gets broad public acceptance for their technology in the explicitly medical benefit context, they will proceed to step 4, which is a user product, not for medical benefit, but for human entertainment and/or enhancement.
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