Decoding Bio

The Decoding Bio Snapshot is a community-led report mapping the startups building at the intersection of biology, AI, robotics, and software - the emerging field its authors call "techbio." Produced by the Decoding Bio collective with investors and operators from Hummingbird Ventures, Cantos Ventures, Compound VC, KdT Ventures, Immunai, Century of Bio, and Not Boring, the first edition profiles a wide range of companies across nine technology themes shaping the future of human health. Wunderdogs served as Design Partner, creating the report's visual language, editorial system, and company-profile templates.

Designing for a field that doesn't have a name yet

The Snapshot set out to capture a movement still defining itself — "some call it techbio, others computational bio, some just see it as biotech." That ambiguity was the design challenge. The report needed a visual identity distinctive enough to stake out new territory, science-credible enough for a discerning audience of founders and investors, and flexible enough to hold nine very different technology domains and dozens of company profiles in one coherent volume. 

A visual language for techbio

We built the Snapshot around a bold, deliberately un-clinical identity: a deep navy base charged with a coral-and-blue duotone, set in confident geometric display type. A custom iconographic system — an asterisk-compass mark, interlocking hexagons, and orbiting ellipses — runs through the report as connective tissue, suggesting structure, synthesis, and discovery without resorting to literal science clichés. Photography was treated in two-tone halftone, giving the imagery a tactile, printed-matter quality that reads as editorial rather than corporate. Each of the report's nine themes received its own full-bleed color world.

An editorial system built to scale

We created a flexible company-profile template that pairs each startup's platform narrative with embedded data charts, a structured "commercial" panel of custom-iconed markets-and-model summaries, and a leadership grid — a layout that had to flex across companies with wildly different stories, stages, and supporting figures.