New York design agency Sagmeister & Walsh has created an animated visual identity for cloud software management brand Fugue that responds to touch and sound (+ movie).

Sagmeister & Walsh designed a suite of interactive graphic elements for Fugue, aiming to create a brand identity that is different from its competitors.

Fugue's brief was for the logo to represent the ephemeral nature of its automatically regenerating cloud software products.

"When learning about the software, what stood out to us was the importance of ephemerality," said studio co-founder Jessica Walsh. "Fugue wanted us to design a brand that visualised this ephemerality and embodied their core attributes of lineage and elegance."

In response, the studio created a logo from a constantly moving series of inky lines and dots in the form of contemporary serif typeface GT Sectra, which "pays homage to the calligraphy of a broad-nib pen".

It alters the pace of its movement in response to the beat of music, and reacts to interaction with a touch screen.

Sagmeister & Walsh is a New York-based design studio that creates brand identities, adverts, websites, apps, films, books and objects. Its Fugue system helps to automatically manage operations and maintenance of cloud infrastructure running on Amazon Web Services.

"Our logo works like the software does: it constantly regenerates itself while data moves from one point to another," said Walsh.

The design studio also produced an app that allows users to import a line drawing, which is automatically regenerated in the same style as the logo.

The app includes a drawing function that enables users to create abstract visuals in the Fugue logo style on a tablet device.

The designers also developed software that loads music from a user's digital library, and changes the speed of the movement of the logo to reflect the beat of the music playing.

"The name Fugue, references music composition made famous by composers like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven," said the designers.

"The creators of the software are former musicians, and functionalities in the software reference terminology from music. We wanted to pay homage to this in the branding," they added.

The logo can be played with sound at trade shows, where it is designed to stand out against the more masculine branding of Fugue's competitors.