The Story Behind our Brand Illustration

Sometimes the best way to explain something is to show it. So when we were building out Graze’s brand, we knew we wanted a single piece of art at the center of it all. Something layered that worked as a composition but also told a story about where we are and where we're trying to go.

What we got back from Jeffrey Kam blew us away. Let me walk you through it!

The Foundation

At the very bottom, there's a crew of builders — the developers, curators, and community leaders building on ATProto. They're down in the caves tending to the roots, laying groundwork with their tools out, building the support structure for what comes next.

The Bridge (and the Cat)

In the middle section, the little carrot guys are crossing a treacherous, precarious bridge, which is a visual metaphor for trying to post on legacy social media.

You make something you put your heart into and you want to share it with the people who actually care. And then you're just stuck on a rickety bridge, hoping your stuff makes it across and the algorithm doesn't decide your work isn't worth showing to people who explicitly asked to see it.

The cat represents the gatekeepers. It just sits there, controlling the bridge, mining everyone's attention while curators do all this precarious work building beautiful spaces and trying to reach their communities. They're so big they don't even have to try block the little carrot guys. Sitting there is enough to be in the way.

The composition puts them right in the middle for a reason: they're the obstacle. The thing between you and the people you're trying to reach.

The Local Minima

Here's something I love about this piece: the middle layer isn't just treacherous — it's also a trap! It's a local minima. If you're not familiar with the term, a local minima is when you're stuck in a valley that feels like the only place to be because you can’t see past the hills around you. There's a better place to be, but from where you’re standing, climbing up looks impossible...or that it would make things worse. So you stay put, convinced you’ve found the optimal spot.

That's legacy social media right now, and it's not the best we can do. It's just where we got stuck and from inside the valley, it’s hard to imagine anything better. The platforms optimized for engagement and ad revenue, and now we're all stuck in this weird middle ground where everyone just shrugs and says “that’s just how social media works.” Platforms serve themselves, not you. Creators are exhausted and communities are fragmented but it’s familiar and leaving feels risky, so everyone stays.

The illustration gets this perfectly. That middle layer is literally a valley where no one is looking above. To get to the flourishing world at the top, you have to be willing to climb out of what feels comfortable, even if you can’t quite see where you’re going yet.

The Vision at the Top

Here's where it gets super dreamy! The top layer is a lush, vibrant world that's glittery with possibility and life. Communities thriving, creators connecting, people actually shaping their own spaces.

That's what we think the open social web can be, and that's what we're building toward with ATProto and Graze. A place where you have agency over your feed, where algorithms work for you because you built them, where the infrastructure supports people instead of extracting from them.

The whole piece reads bottom to top, foundation to flourishing. It's hopeful in a way that feels earned, not naive.

Why This Became the Brand’s Cornerstone

Visual storytelling does something words can’t. It shows you the whole mess at once without simplifying it.

This illustration makes a case for what we’re building. It doesn’t pretend that everything is fine or promise magic solutions. It’s kind of like a map of the terrain we find ourselves in: here’s where we’re stuck, here’s what above, and here’s how we climb out.

The foundation is yours to build and the climb is yours to make. We're building the tools to help you get there.

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Illustration by Jeffrey Kam. You can see more of their work at https://www.jeffreykam.net/.