Nanosurf Brand Guidelines: The Basel Garage Start-Up Whose Microscope Went to Mars

Three physicists and a school microscope.

Nanosurf was founded in 1997 and is based in Liestal, near Basel. The company’s 25th-anniversary brochure, signed by co-founder Lukas Howald in October 2022, says it started in a garage with three founders, Robert, Lukas and Dominik, who had come together around the research group of Professor H. J. Güntherodt at the University of Basel’s Institute of Physics. Howald writes that he was a solid-state physicist who had built an ultra-high-vacuum AFM for friction measurements during his doctorate; the other two, who knew each other from their youth in Liestal, ran a small sideline making lighting controllers.

The spark, the brochure says, came from a physics teacher at a nearby high school who asked the professor for a discarded scanning tunnelling microscope, so that pupils could see the world of atoms for themselves. A retired research instrument would have been far too complicated, so the trio wrote a specification for a simple and robust STM instead, and built its electronics and software themselves after a student project to do so ran out of time. The result was the easyScan STM, the company’s first product. “Nanosurf” began as the name of the project and was meant for the device, the brochure says, before the founders decided it suited the company better; an easyScan AFM followed.

Accounts of the origin differ in emphasis. The Swiss start-up news service startupticker.ch wrote in January 2023 that Nanosurf was the first spin-off of the University of Basel and the first company to receive the CTI label, now the Innosuisse certificate. The founders’ brochure says theirs was “not a typical spin-off” of graduates commercialising a university development. The company sums up its early idea as shrinking a scanning probe microscope to fit a coffee table.

From classrooms to Mars.

Nanosurf’s first product was made for schools, and the anniversary brochure’s timeline records several innovation awards for its easyScan STM, AFM and PLL products, an STM for a US educational programme and, later, the delivery of its 1,000th STM to a school in Germany. Industrial versions of its AFM followed, and the range grew through names such as FlexAFM, NaioAFM, CoreAFM and DriveAFM, run by controllers including the C3000 and CX.

One project took the company to Mars. In July 2007 swissinfo reported that the atomic force microscope on NASA’s Phoenix lander had been built by Nanosurf together with Hans-Rudolf Hidber of the Basel Institute of Physics and Urs Staufer of the Neuchâtel Institute of Microtechnology. It was part of the lander’s Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, meant to map the fine structure of soil and ice grains. Swissinfo said NASA had first asked the Swiss team in 1999 whether it could build such an instrument, that six units were delivered by October 2000, and that a planned 2001 flight was cancelled after NASA lost contact with its Mars Polar Lander in December 1999; NASA called again in 2003. Nanosurf’s own timeline marks 2008 as the year it reached Mars with Phoenix.

The same timeline notes a first custom stage built for NASA, a move to larger premises, a cooperation on fluid AFM, and, later, a dedicated division for industrial solutions. In 2017 the company marked its 20th anniversary with a scientific symposium at the Natural History Museum in Basel. The company says its DriveAFM was chosen by the readers of Wiley’s Analytical Science as winner of the 2023 Wiley Analytical Science Award in the spectroscopy and microscopy category.

Design and documentation.

Microscopy makers sell instruments that most people never see, so their visual language is built from the lab itself. The typical product photograph shows a tall grey or white electron column rising from a chamber, set on a desk beside one or two monitors, often in a clean, evenly lit room with no clutter. The instrument is rarely shown working; instead, the screen beside it carries the result, and that result does much of the branding work.

Those results are the field’s most distinctive images. A scanning electron microscope produces greyscale pictures, and makers and their customers often add false colour afterwards to separate grains, cells or layers. Atomic-force and other scanning-probe instruments render a surface as a height map, frequently shown as a coloured relief or a three-dimensional landscape of nanoscale bumps and pits. Cathodoluminescence and Raman maps add another layer, turning light emitted or scattered by a sample into colour-coded images. Many makers credit these images to the university or institute that made them, which lets the customer’s science stand in for the company’s claims.

People appear mostly as scientists at workstations: a researcher seated at a monitor, a hand loading a sample holder, a small team gathered around a screen. Product names tend to be short and are often set in capitals, while technical sans-serif type and restrained blues, greys and blacks dominate websites and brochures.

Much of the presentation happens in person. Trade-show booths at meetings such as Microscopy & Microanalysis, the European Microscopy Congress (EMC) and the International Microscopy Congress are where new instruments are launched, demonstrated and photographed, and where application notes, webinars and customer publications carry the story the rest of the year.

A Swiss company inside a German group.

In January 2023 Lab14 GmbH, a German high-tech group, acquired a majority stake in Nanosurf AG, according to a note from the law firm CMS, which advised the buyer. CMS described Lab14 as a portfolio company of RSBG SE, the investment company of the RAG-Foundation, and said Nanosurf would use sales and technology synergies with the group in fields from biotechnology to semiconductor manufacturing. startupticker.ch reported the same month that Nanosurf had joined the group. Nanosurf’s website now says it is part of the Lab14 Group, which it describes as high-tech companies providing solutions for nano- and microfabrication and surface analysis.

Its headquarters remain in Liestal, with subsidiaries in Langen, Germany, and in Shanghai, and a network of distribution partners elsewhere, the company says. Its leadership page names Dominik Ziegler as chief executive, and the chief executive of Lab14 chairs its board. In the anniversary brochure the company describes itself as designing, building and supporting both bespoke and standard AFM systems for industrial and academic customers, and its stated mission is to make AFM as accessible and intuitive as optical microscopy.

The brand’s voice follows that mission. Its website opens its company story under the line “Zoom into the Future” and lists three values, solidity, respect and trust, while its timeline is divided into chapters on education and performance.

For a design guide, Nanosurf shows how a company can build an identity on ease of use, from a school microscope to an instrument sent to Mars. Compare Park Systems, a Korean AFM maker founded the same year, and JPK Instruments. For this guide we use a deep teal, a bright aqua and a warm white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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