How (visual) Design Shapes Arduino
Hello there 👋 this is Fabrizio (but call me Fab✨), Lead of the visual design team in Arduino; team also known as Dear Designers. You’re probably assuming that visual designers make pretty pictures, and sure you are right about it, but there is also a little more to it that you may not think at first. This is the first of a series of articles we will publish in the future, to tell you a bit more about how the Arduino brand identity is evolving and perhaps show you some backstage sneak peek. In each article one of our designers will unveil our processes, tools, fun facts, and projects we tackled as a team. Behind our super cool products, there is a team of dedicated people, and I can’t wait for you to meet them.
Okay, let’s kick off with the basics: What the heck is a visual designer, anyway? Well, it’s not rocket science — just like the name suggests. In today’s crazy competitive market, a product needs more than just working well. I know it might seem a bit shallow, but looking good is a big deal. It’s what grabs people’s attention, gets them interested, and makes them remember stuff. Most of the time, it’s the thing that sets one brand apart from all the others. And that’s where we as visual designers come in: we’re like the wizards who make sure everything looks consistent and cool for a brand. But we’re not just about the looks — we’re also great at simply explaining complicated stuff using visuals.
Paula Scher, the legendary graphic designer partner at Pentagram, said it super well in one of her recent interviews: she pointed out that we, as a society “moved from a verbal culture to a visual culture”, and that’s true, as most of the giant corporations are introducing more and more complexity to their smart-products, online services and all. Such complexity has to be explained quickly, no frills, straight to the point; that’s when visual designers come into play.
“We moved from a verbal culture to a visual culture. People began to notice differences in design that they didn’t see before because they would have to pick a typeface for their computer.”
Paula Scher — interview for Hurs Official
For electronics companies, such as Arduino, having a team of skilled visual designers it’s pretty important to create products that not only excel in their technical capabilities but also stand out in terms of aesthetics and user experience. Arduino has been, since its foundation, very close to the world of design; its first boards were prototyping tools intended for designers who wanted to tinker with their interactive mockups. Nowadays that legacy is still very much present in our minds, embedding the design discipline into the company’s production and marketing processes.
Talking about looks: a well-designed product with an appealing visual language can leave a lasting impression on users. Our brand, in particular, has always been at the forefront of graphic and visual design applied to electronics; think about the iconic silkscreen print designs, the distinctive color of our boards, as well as our packaging, not to mention our special logo. It all goes back to 2012 when Giorgio Olivero, the original creator, and designer of Arduino brand identity, together with Vanessa Poli and the TODO Design Studio, envisioned our iconic logo in its actual shape, as well as the main elements of the original visual identity that still stands out today. The extremely recognizable teal color (nope that’s not green nor blue), the loop with plus and minus, and the electronics components smiling and dancing, we call “puppets”; these are visual elements that shaped our history as a company, and will carry on as the most loyal users immediately link them to the Arduino brand.
By carefully crafting these visual elements, and populating product packaging, user interfaces, and overall product designs, we can establish a distinctive brand identity that sets the company apart from its competitors. Simple colors, friendly shapes, and recognizable fonts are vital in building brand loyalty and attracting new customers.
We also believe that visual design significantly enhances user experience: Electronic products are no longer limited to their technical specifications; they are becoming increasingly integrated into our daily lives. Whether it’s a smart home device, wearable technology, or an IoT-enabled gadget, consumers expect products that are intuitive, user-friendly, and visually appealing. The Arduino Visual Design Team collaborates daily with the team of UX/UI designers, as well as engineers, hardware designers, and marketers, to create visual outcomes that are not only functional but also good-looking and memorable. In the end, memory is the greatest objective of a visual designer; if we are successful in leading people to remember us, then we will have achieved our goal.
We make a huge deal of creating memorable images that outshine our competitors. Our team has previously developed amazing 3D renders for product launch campaigns in collaboration with the marketing department. Each time, we design unique visuals that communicate specific messages. As an example, we previously designed a visual toolkit for the Arduino Braccio, and on another occasion, we portrayed a circuit board as a Rolex watch to highlight its premium quality and top-notch technical capabilities. We always translate every idea into an image that tells a compelling story.
Storytelling is crucial; in a crowded marketplace, engaging stories are essential to grab the attention and convey key messages. Your Dear Designers create compelling graphics, illustrations, and animations that effectively showcase the features and benefits of the product, supporting the storytelling defined by the Marketing Team.
Marketing and visual design go hand in hand, but actually, we do collaborate with almost any team in the company. Still, one of the most recent collaborations with the Hardware Team brought quite fascinating results. It’s no mystery that different disciplines combined could conceive unexpected results. They can challenge conventional hardware norms and push the boundaries of what is aesthetically possible, and that’s what happened for the Arduino Make Your UNO Kit and the brand-new Arduino UNO R4s.
Arduino Make Your UNO Kit
This kit has been a fresh experience, to begin with; we joined forces with the Hardware and Marketing teams and together we started dwelling on the possible scenarios and use cases in which Arduino users could have enjoyed themselves building and soldering their first Arduino board, then raising the bar a bit higher by leading users to build their very first music synth.
It could have been a simple kit, consisting of a PCB with some components to solder, but after a couple of workshops and some testing with new users, we noticed that the biggest fear was: making mistakes while soldering. That’s when we realized that a dedicated soldering area, would probably have been the most comfortable playground where new users could test their skills, before committing to the core part of the project.
The packaging design has also been a one-of-a-kind experience, as we wanted to reduce waste and push our users to repurpose the box; that’s what we did, providing a blank canvas for people to customize and play with, a cardboard enclosure that users could make their own.
Arduino UNO R4 WiFi
Quite recently, we launched the evolved version of the most iconic product we ever produced, the Arduino UNO. For its fourth revision, we had to play bold, making sure that the most known board in our catalog, would maintain a distinguished look, yet be recognizable in an ocean of clones and Arduino look-alike boards. The design is still open-source, so anybody will still be able to improve it, but the production quality and trustability are all Arduino certified; that’s why we partnered with the Hardware and Trademark Teams to place a series of easter eggs, our customers and partners will be able to check to make sure a certain product is indeed an official Arduino® board. We will not spoil the surprise, we will leave the easter eggs unrevealed for you to discover, but let’s just say that what we achieved couldn’t have been possible without the expertise of our hardware designers. Contaminations like this one will bring us to uncharted lands, and we can’t wait to dwell on them.
To wrap this up, visual designers in Arduino are having a ball 💃 From nurturing and evolving our strong brand identity and enhancing user experience to driving effective marketing communication and fostering innovation, we play what seems to be a secondary yet pivotal role: we help elevate products beyond mere functionality, ensuring they make a lasting impression on consumers, standing out for good and so much more.
Fabricio Troya — Fabrizio Garda — Tugrulhan Ektuna
Giulia Loi — Fabio Ferrero — Ilaria Bocca
Would you like to see a bit more about what we worked on? Make sure to pay a visit to our Behance project page, and we will see you in the next article!
