I’ve been trying to pin down the visual identity of The Moribund Institute, and the shape is finally starting to appear through the fog.

The project is meant to be an LMS-style learning aggregator: a place for organizing strange, & or maybe complicated nerd whatnot, breaking them down Feynman-style, & making them digestible while adding a flair of weirdness. So the branding cannot feel like standard corporate education software. No sterile tech blue. No smiling vector people pointing at dashboards. No frictionless productivity utopia.

The working formula is simpler:

Learn something before you kick the bucket, preferably while the chalkboard is on fire.

1. The Macro View: The Mad Scientist’s Workshop

The larger visual world should feel like a retro-futuristic research lab: CRT monitors, open-source robotic arms, strange educational machines, cluttered workbenches, diagrams, chalkboards, and a battle against the supposedly impossible.

2. The Faculty Mascot: Scholar, Duelist, Somber

The mascot is not a cute ed-tech helper. She is a faculty apparition: composed, severe, beautiful, and faintly alarming.

Her intended outfit is precise: a women’s long-sleeve mandarin-collar button-down blouse, fitted through the bodice with a shirttail hem, worn beneath a medieval cloak. That combination matters. The blouse keeps her sharp, academic, and disciplined; the cloak pushes her into gothic faculty, secret-order, memento-mori territory.

The glasses make her scholarly. The calm expression makes her unnerving. The flower brings mortality, delicacy, and beauty. The vintage revolver adds theatrical pressure. It is not ordinary violence, but symbolic confrontation: curiosity versus ignorance, clarity versus confusion, learning versus intellectual rot.

She should feel calm, almost tired, as if she has explained this concept for three centuries and will explain it once more, provided everyone behaves.

She is the Moribund Institute’s duelist professor: elegant, morbid, academic, faintly absurd, and just threatening enough to make you finish the lesson.

3. The Faculty Uniform: Black Blouse, White Cloak, Lotus Clasp

The outfit uses a fitted black mandarin-collar button-down blouse as the base layer. Over the blouse is a white medieval-style cloak. At the throat is a lotus flower cloak clasp.

4. The Moribund Institute Formula

So the current MorBranding direction is:

Visual world: retro-futuristic mad science lab
Philosophical core: memento mori, finitude fighting, 

Mascot energy: gothic anime faculty member
Fashion language: Women’s long-sleeve mandarin collar button-down blouse with a fitted bodice and shirttail hem with a medieval cloak overtop
Humor layer: irreverent anime panic
Educational mission: complex concepts made digestible without becoming boring

The goal is not to make The Moribund Institute look professional in the normal sense.

The goal is to make it look like a place where curiosity has been given a cloak, a chalkboard, a skull, and a deeply questionable sleep schedule.

That feels much closer.

Earlier Branding Attempts:

Here’s an earlier Moribund Institute branding attempt that blends the irreverent queen-drinking concept with the original duelist professor direction. It keeps the royal memento mori imagery, especially the crown, veil, skull, and casual drinking, but translates it into a more anime-styled faculty mascot. One variation also experimented with fresnel-lit whatnot, giving the figure a sharper glowing edge and a more dramatic, poster-like presence.