Pleiades
Your ecosystem for the AI era
VISIT WEBSITEPleiades is Greece’s intelligent innovation ecosystem, bringing together start-ups, SMEs, corporates, cities, research institutions and investors to move ideas from vision to real-world impact. From its base in Athens it connects members through projects, labs, initiatives and living-lab testbeds across the country, with tiered membership designed to help every kind of organisation collaborate, access funding and scale intelligent solutions.
The Project
Pleiades is Greece’s intelligent innovation ecosystem, connecting start-ups, SMEs, corporates, cities, research institutions and investors. They came to Ruler for a full rebrand and a website with the depth to run the ecosystem itself — members, projects, labs, initiatives and news, all interconnected — wrapped in a bold, distinctly branded experience.
What we did
- Full rebrand — identity, art direction and a cohesive design system
- Custom WordPress theme, designed and built end to end
- Interconnected custom post types: Members, Projects, Labs, Initiatives and News
- Membership tiers modelled as taxonomies (Startup, SME, Enterprise, Institutional)
- Multi-step “Become a Member” application form
- Custom home-animation — “we exist to remove barriers”
- AI chatbot integration
- Multilingual (EN / GR)
- A powerful, client-friendly back-end to manage the whole ecosystem
Web Design & Development
Pleiades is building Greece’s intelligent innovation ecosystem — a network where start-ups, SMEs, corporates, cities, research institutions and investors meet, collaborate and scale. Ruler led the project end to end: a full rebrand and a custom-built website designed to carry that ambition. The design language is bold and highly branded, with a considered system of type, colour and motion applied consistently across every template.
Under the surface it is a genuinely powerful platform. We modelled the ecosystem as interconnected custom post types — Members, Projects, Labs, Initiatives and News — that reference one another, so a member links to their projects, a lab to its initiatives, and news threads through it all. Membership is structured through tiers held as taxonomies (Startup, SME, Enterprise, Institutional), driving both the join flow and how content is filtered and surfaced. A multi-step “Become a Member” form guides applicants to the right tier, and the whole experience is multilingual across English and Greek.
The home page opens with a custom animation built around the line “we exist to remove barriers,” setting the tone before visitors explore. An integrated AI chatbot helps people navigate the ecosystem, and everything is backed by a carefully designed WordPress admin that lets the Pleiades team manage members, content and relationships without touching code. The result is a fast, motion-rich, fully branded site that doubles as the operating system for a growing innovation community.
Branding
Pleiades came to Ruler for more than a website — they needed an identity to match their ambition of becoming Greece’s intelligent innovation ecosystem. We led a full rebrand alongside the build.
The old mark — an orange molecular cluster — gave way to a sharp, constellation-inspired star: a nod to the Pleiades star cluster and to a network of members orbiting a shared centre. The system pairs an electric blue with a deep navy and a signal-orange accent, a bold geometric wordmark, and a flexible pattern language built from the mark. The positioning — ‘move innovation forward’ — runs through every touchpoint, and a short motion identity animates the new logo and palette into life.
We extended the identity across a complete system — stationery, large-format signage and transit media, posters, event and exhibition graphics, digital screens, lanyards and social — and codified it in a full brand-guidelines document, so the ecosystem looks as connected as it works.
