Farvatn asked Nonspace to build the brand and digital presence it opens with.

Framdrift's ambition is international: to become the address by which Norwegian innovation is measured, and to hold founders and investors from Bergen to Stockholm to San Francisco. The easy framing is smaller, a regional innovation house, a register that would undersell a partnership backed by generational Norwegian capital in a city that has launched pioneers for nine hundred years. The brand has to carry the full ambition and read with international confidence.

The work began in a room with the people who would build Framdrift. Nonspace facilitated the founding workshop with founders, investors and partners, visited the two houses as they were being restored, and presented the project to politicians and civil servants, because Framdrift carries weight for the whole region, for Vestland's profile, capital, innovation and growth. The brand strategy grew from there, and it started where Framdrift started: with the values Kristin and Johan Odvar Odfjell brought home from two years in San Francisco, where people cheer each other on and build together. Pay it forward, collaboration, courage became a charter, the behaviours every founder, investor, member and partner signs up to. From that charter Nonspace built outward, into a positioning, an ambition and a worldview: that ideas and capital belong in the same room, that the hardest problems are the greatest opportunities, and that a country long quiet about being good is ready to host the next century of progress. It set Framdrift not as a regional house but as the address by which Norwegian innovation is measured internationally, anchored in Bergen's nine hundred years of trade, science and exploration.

The identity begins in motion. The symbol of three interlocking orbits is captured from movement before it settles into a single form, the power of three Framdrift runs on, people, knowledge and capital, researchers, entrepreneurs and investors, pulled together by a magnetic force. The mark is strong and still, yet it holds that movement, giving the identity depth of field rather than a flat surface. A custom wordmark leans forward so the name itself reads as moving. Built from the existing Farvatn identity rather than starting over, it carries that lineage into a palette running from light tones for energy and space to deep, anchoring colour, with quiet typography that lets the symbol and wordmark lead.

More than a mark, the identity is a frame. It is made to carry and profile the people inside it, members and partners alike, because Framdrift is not a workspace. It is space to show, learn and change. Members join a community, and the brand is theirs to use, standing behind what they build rather than speaking over it. The same system holds the two historic houses, the café and the wider coalition of partners and funders together without losing coherence. The launch lives on a deliberately spare website built on Sanity CMS, enough to set the ambition and open the door, built to grow into the full platform as the house fills.

Framdrift opens in 2026, and the brand built to attract is already drawing people in. Ahead of opening, it has gathered a partnership of Farvatn, VIS, the University of Bergen and Fana Sparebank, the last committing NOK 25 million over five years to fund the first key hires. 115 people applied for the two founding leadership roles. Early membership interest, political backing and national press coverage have followed. The numbers that will define it arrive as the house fills, but the pull is already real: people are moving toward Framdrift before its doors are open.