Sora Union

Employer:  All Turtles
Role: Sr. Design Director
Year: 2022-2024

Context

The Situation

Sora Union didn't exist when I started working on it. It was incubated at All Turtles, and my team was there from day one, not as an external agency brought in to polish something, but as the creative engine that helped build it from nothing.

That meant doing things in an unusual order. We were developing the brand, naming conventions, and visual identity simultaneously, while the founders were still defining the business model. I helped hire Sora's first design employees, and one of my direct reports temporarily became their Design Director. We also embedded Sora designers into other All Turtles partner projects, building their craft and culture in parallel with the brand itself.

It's the kind of 0→1 engagement that's hard to categorize. Part brand studio, part talent incubator, part embedded creative leadership.

The Challenge

Sora Union had a positioning problem baked into its business model: it needed to speak to two completely different audiences with one brand.

For companies, Sora needed to feel credible, reliable, and premium, a serious talent partner, not a freelance marketplace.

For talent, Sora needed to feel hopeful, inclusive, and human, a place that saw remote workers as people with ambition, not resources to be allocated.

Most dual-audience brands resolve this tension by picking one audience and hoping the other follows. I pushed to hold both. Not because it was the easy call,  it wasn't, and there was real debate about whether one brand could carry that weight, but because the tension between those two audiences was actually Sora's core value proposition. If we flattened it, we'd lose what made them interesting.

The brand had to be aspirational enough to attract talent and credible enough to convert clients. Those aren't opposites. We just had to find the visual and verbal language that lived in both worlds.

The Team

Dala Botha - Design Lead
Allie Packard - Design
Namika Hamasaki - Design
Ivan - Engineering Lead
Peter Kemme - Motion Design
Carlos Rocafort - Illustration
Clio Atencio - Sr. Design Director

Services Provided

• Brand Identity
• Design System
  
• Motion
• Digital Design
• Technical Consulting
• Team management
  

My Role

As Sr. Design Director, I led the full creative scope: brand strategy, visual identity, design system, website, and motion. I also managed the team structure, hired Sora's first designers, embedded All Turtles designers in their projects, and helped establish their internal design culture alongside the external brand.

This was simultaneously a creative engagement and an organizational one.

Impact

• Directed Sora Union's brand from zero,  naming rationale, visual identity, design system, website, and motion, through to Anthem Award recognition (Silver, Branding)
• Hired and onboarded Sora's first design employees; one direct report served as their interim Design Director
• Established the brand foundation that supported Sora's growth to 50+ employees and $3M+ in annual revenue
• Delivered a scalable identity system used across digital, motion, and marketing surfaces

What is Sora Union?

Sora Union is a globally distributed extension of Teams, helping companies access top talent on-demand without full-time commitments. By building dynamic, cost-effective teams, Sora Union accelerates execution while reshaping remote work for at-risk knowledge workers—connecting talent with stable opportunities regardless of location.

The Identity Work

The Name: Sora

The word Sora means "sky" in Japanese. It sounds like soaring, to fly, to rise. It feels regal, aspirational, and effortless to say in almost any language.

There was also something more resonant beneath it. The impact of economic displacement, war, and climate change forces people from their homelands — but the sky, the sunsets, the stars always remain. For a brand built around globally distributed talent from at-risk communities, that felt true in a way that a more functional name never could.

Visual Identity

The primary mark, three birds in flight, came directly from the name and its meaning. Birds move together, cross borders, and navigate by instinct. They symbolize community, freedom, and collective momentum. For a brand about building dynamic global teams, it was the right icon.

The visual language needed to bridge both audiences: premium enough for enterprise clients, human enough for the talent joining the platform. We landed on a system that feels elevated but warm,  confident without being cold.

Color System

The most discussed creative decision in the entire project was the color system, and the most distinctive one.

The sky is the brand's anchor metaphor, so the question became: what color is the sky right now? The answer is different depending on where you are and what time it is.

We built a dynamic color system where the website background gradient shifts based on the visitor's local time zone, sunrise blues in the morning, amber and orange at golden hour, and deep navy at night. It's subtle enough that a first-time visitor might not consciously notice it. But repeat visitors experience a brand that feels alive, that changes with them, that acknowledges where they are in the world.

For a company whose entire mission is about connecting global talent regardless of location, it's not a gimmick. It's the brand idea made literal.

Primary Color Palette

Sora's primary palette is drawn from the sky at its most legible moments, the clear blue of midday, the deep indigo of late evening, and the warm neutrals of early morning. These anchor the brand across static applications where the dynamic system isn't available, ensuring consistency without sacrificing the warmth of the overall identity.

Design Tokens: Reference Color

Typography

The typeface search was longer than expected. We tested hundreds of weights and alignments looking for something that could hold the weight of the wordmark while feeling distinctly Sora, not generic, not try-hard.

The discovery that stopped us: a Google font named, of all things, Sora. We used it for "Union" in the wordmark, then custom-crafted each letterform of "SORA" to create a bespoke pairing. The result is a wordmark that feels designed, not assembled.

Visual Brand System

The illustration system and visual brand language were built to travel across the website, motion, marketing, and eventually into the product. We worked with illustrators to develop a style that felt globally inclusive without defaulting to the generic "diverse hands" visual language that has become a cliché in the talent industry.

The shapes, textures, and motion language all trace back to the same sky metaphor: gradient, movement, light, and openness.

The Website Work

The website was the primary canvas for the brand's most ambitious idea, the time-zone-responsive color system. It was also the project that won the Anthem Award.

The brief for the site was simple in principle and complex in execution: make a visitor feel, within seconds, that Sora Union is a different kind of company. Not a staffing agency. Not a freelance platform. Something that genuinely sees its talent as people and its clients as partners.

The dynamic background does a lot of that work silently. The rest comes from content hierarchy, motion, and the warmth of the illustration system.

What I'd Do Differently

The dual-audience positioning was the right call, but I'd push even harder on the talent-facing voice in the website copy. In the final product, the enterprise's credibility comes through clearly. The emotional resonance for talent, the sense that Sora sees them, is present but quieter than I'd want it. With more time, I'll develop a more distinct content lane for talent: stories, testimonials, and content that speaks directly to the person on the other side of the keyboard, not just the company trying to hire them.

heraclio@designstgy.com