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Casimir: a new dawn in power

· 3 min read · Kapil Gowru
Other workdesignbrandwebsite
The Casimir homepage hero: a prismatic column of light with three dark cells suspended inside it, next to the headline 'A new dawn in power.'

Over six weeks I designed Casimir from scratch — the logo, the brand, and the website — working directly with founder Dr. Harold "Sonny" White, a former NASA propulsion physicist. I designed everything in Figma; Sweven Design built the site in Webflow.

Casimir is a hard company to brand because the pitch sounds impossible: chips that harvest energy from the quantum vacuum, so devices never need a battery, a cord, or a charge. The design had to make that feel credible, not sci-fi.

Making quantum physics approachable

The company is named after the Casimir effect. In 1948, Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir predicted that two uncharged metal plates, placed close enough together in a vacuum, get pushed toward each other by the vacuum itself — more virtual photons press from the outside than fit between the plates, and the pressure difference squeezes them together. Casimir, Inc. builds microscopic cavities that put that force to work.

Almost nobody has heard of any of that, and the people who have are skeptical by default. So the storytelling rule I set was: lead with the feeling, then earn the physics. The site opens with a question anyone can answer — what if you never had to replace or charge a battery again? — and only then walks you down into plates, cavities, and negative pressure.

The physics itself got the same treatment: quiet, labeled, diagrammatic. No lightning bolts.

A dark isometric diagram of two metal plates with arrows pressing in from both sides, labeled 'negative pressure' and 'unperturbed vacuum effect,' over a background of faint wave lines.
The Casimir effect, explained with plates and pressure — not particles and lightning.
A diagram of two dark plates with converging arrows labeled 'Casimir Force: the difference of the virtual photon pressure on the outside and inside.'
Every diagram sits on the same quantum-field wave texture.

The mark: first light

The logo is an eclipse. A crescent of light breaks around a dark disc, with a four-point glint at the moment of contact — the first light of a new dawn in power. It doubles as a C, and the glint became a system element of its own: it marks section corners across the site the way stars mark a night sky.

Logo variations on a dark board: a crescent C with a four-point star glint, orbit-ring versions with a horizontal line crossing the circle, and the glint on its own.
Variations of the mark: the crescent, the orbit ring with its horizon line, and the glint alone.

The wordmark leans forward in an expanded italic, with the horizon line extending off the R — motion without a swoosh cliché.

The CASIMIR wordmark in an expanded italic typeface, with the crescent-and-glint mark on the C and a thin horizon line running beneath the letters.
The wordmark lockup.

The system

Two typefaces carry the brand: Surt Expanded, a wide grotesque that reads engineered and slightly aerospace, and Cousine, a mono for the numbers — nav indices, spec tables, terminology. The palette is honest about the subject: near-black canvases, a prismatic beam of spectrum light, and one electric blue for emphasis. Waves of the quantum field run under everything as a texture.

The middle of the process had an AI lane, too: a scrapyard of Midjourney studies — purple-dot stencils, light and lens experiments — that never shipped, but taught us what the light should feel like before I committed to the final hero artwork.

The website

The site is one narrative arc: dawn → question → physics → product → scale. The hero holds the promise, then each section earns a little more belief.

A light gray section of the Casimir site with an electric blue headline reading 'What if you never had to replace or charge a battery again?' above a plain-language explanation of Casimir cavities.
The question that opens the story — the only saturated color on the page.

The product is the Microsparc, Casimir's first chip:

5×5mm
chip footprint
1.5V
continuous output
25µA
of current, day or night

From there the story scales "from the humble to the audacious" — tire sensors, smoke detectors, and hearing aids today; phones and homes on the horizon — and lands on real photos of wafers and cleanrooms, because nothing says credible like manufacturing.

Dark cards showing glowing blue renders of a tire sensor, smoke detector, hearing aid, and remote IoT sensors under the heading 'Casimir scales from the humble to the audacious.'
Use cases scale from microwatts to the audacious.
The 'microsparc development progress' section: a photo of a silicon wafer with chip dies on a steel table, next to a researcher in cleanroom goggles.
Development progress: wafers, not renders.

I handed the Figma off to Darren at Sweven Design, who built the site in Webflow — then we worked closely to optimize the load times, tuning asset weight and load order until the glow-heavy pages felt instant.

The site is live at casimir.inc. Go ask yourself what you'd do with unlimited power.