From now on, we are Ciao
Case study: We rebrand our studio to capture the new path we walk with our digital products.
Cavallo was born in 2015. Since then we have created digital products with more than 30 entrepreneurs, improving their ideas and making them profitable.
Cavallo is a name that has been with us all these years and, as it usually happens, to which we feel attached. Literally, it means horse in italian, but when it first came into our mind we felt it mixed key concepts for us in English and in Italian such as commitment, power, connection, beauty, involvement, and teamwork.
But the truth is that we were the only ones that understood it that way. In practice, it’s a name that has never worked: people miswrite it and never get it the first time.
Taking advantage of these changes to create change.
The past few years we have grown progressively with our partners. We have projects in our portfolio that have helped our client partners successfully raise financing and have attracted customers like Dell or Unilever. Now that we are one of the world’s top product design agencies, we can say a new stage begins where it makes sense to create a new brand with which we look to the future.
The concept.
It seems obvious, but it is vital not to forget the story behind the brand as a source of inspiration. If you design only from a visual point of view, you run the risk that the result will be empty, soulless, and therefore, it won’t work.
We pick up this idea because we have always approached projects differently, working in a friendly way with entrepreneurs who only have an idea or who are in very early stages of their business. With each one, we travel the road that goes from a first draft to a marketable and scalable prototype.
The creative process.
To design the logo that accompanies the new brand we started creating a mood board that would serve to set all the concepts we had in mind. This work helped us reflect on how we got here and what we really wanted to convey: the journey we make from the first idea to a prototype.
We gathered many images of real prototypes, both physical and digital products, and analyzed the patterns that were repeated. We chose the ones that were most interesting to us: repetition of lines, points, the grid, etc. This was what we used for the final logo.
In our new logo, you can clearly see the brand name (Ciao), the way of taking a product from one point to another is communicated by its continuity, and it also contains that unfinished character of the first iteration by its composition thanks to the lines playing with negative spaces.
New website and other resources.
Our new brand is not just a logo, but a whole new imagination around our philosophy and way of understanding the projects. For that reason, to build the new website we wanted to have lots of organic and curved forms that would contrast with the strict geometry of the logo. Not only that, but sinuous forms would also contrast with the geomanist typography we inherited from Cavallo (which is our particular homage to our beginnings).
In line with this, we added pastel colors, textures, volumes and characters to get the handmade and human touch that is involved with the creation of any product. Each illustration has a function and represents something: people are in action either thinking an idea, drawing a prototype or delivering an object; figures symbolize the different parts of a prototype and plots different materials.
Graphic principles and values.
With our new identity, we have connected visual resources with features of our personality as a company. We have removed unnecessary elements, achieving the necessary balance so that our logo works in harmony by itself or integrated into different contexts.
- NEUTRALITY / TIDY: We provide solutions based on needs, not requirements.
- GEOMETRY / STRENGTH: Stability, hard work, reliability.
- CIAO / CONTINUITY: Long lasting — friendly relationship. Going from inception to launch.
Designing for oneself is way more difficult than designing for others.
Transforming Cavallo into Ciao has not been a quick or easy task. We are used to working for others, but when you are your own client something changes: you become extremely critical.
However, we are totally happy with the result. We have built a brand with which we fully identify. Ciao reflects our values, demonstrates our attitude, and captures our achievements. From today we will continue partnering with both the entrepreneurs and forward-thinking enterprises, helping them to bring their ideas to life. Now we will do it with the energy and renewed strength that transmits our new image.
