branding Archives | Fabio Besti

Board of Innovation: 1 year, leading a complex rebranding project

Throughout 2022, I had the pleasure of working full-time with Board of Innovation, a fantastic business design firm that, after rapid growth, needed to reposition itself as a global innovation consultancy.

With the creative project led by the incredible DesignStudio, I was brought in as Senior Graphic Designer to supervise the final stages of brand development and guide its implementation. Leading the redesign of all key touchpoints and visual materials was as challenging as it was rewarding. Working with the amazing people at BOI, I oversaw the new brand adoption across continents, strengthening the company’s position as a global innovation firm.

While BOI’s brand identity already took another step recently, to follow the company’s strategic shift on AI innovation, this remains a great project that marked my career, and something I will always hold dear.

Finally, time was on my side to create a detailed case study, check it out here!

Innovative Brand Licensing Strategies for MIND Milano: the workshop with POLI.design

Last March I led the first workshop of the 22° edition of the Specialising Master in Strategic Design by POLI.design, the post-graduate school of design at Politecnico di Milano (who I worked with also on the Lombardies exhibition for Expo2015).

Together with the students, we tried to design innovative brand licensing strategies for MIND – Milano Innovation Design District. Three intensive weeks to envision the evolution and the exploitation of a new territorial brand, defining the new district born in the area of the Universal Exposition in 2015, that now aspires to become a hub for excellence in the fields of Life Sciences / Healthcare, Biotech / Pharma, Agri – food / Nutrition e Data Science / Big data.

Awards by MIND Milano and Call 4 Ideas

The resulting projects will participate in the Call 4 Ideas launched by Mind Education, an initiative that involves students and universities in designing the city of the future, promoted by Arexpo and Lendlease, together with Human Technopole, IRCSS Galeazzi and Fondazione Triulza.

A great experience, with a special group of students, who put their enthusiasm and professionalism into the development of very interesting projects.

Fabio Besti Interdisciplinary Design has a brand new logo

A brand new tool for the studio, essential for pushing forward my activities, which over the last years have become more diversified and focused on larger, more international potential clients. The brand new logo design is not only a stylistic operation but a strategic one, aimed at reinforcing the studio and maximize the awareness of the brand between our newly expanded target audience.

The objectives of the logo design

The objective of the redesign is to convey a new-found spirit of harmony, a sense of rhythm: something that we called an effect of “powerful simplicity”. This is achieved by staying clear of graphical trends and leaning heavily on the strength of typography and the use of a minimal and simplified version of the diamond symbol.

But the final solution answers additional challenges. Firstly, the need to be easily integrated into the current visual identity, characterized by the dynamic use of Futura, paired with an extended use of gradients of blue. Normally a common rule would be to avoid the use of the same font in the logo and body-copy; here Futura LT is present in both, but in the logotype, it is also subtly tweaked and customized, and this seems to be more than enough to ensure both coherence and originality to the typographic part.

Design decisions and technical aspects

Another challenging aspect that we had to confront was the compactness and scale of the typographic elements; these couldn’t take too much real estate and this is especially true for a logo containing four words. To tackle this, ‘fabiobesti’ was contracted into a single word, following also what seems to be a common way of pronouncing my name (which is quite short and can be spelled out loud with one single breath).

The elements, therefore, become three and are vertically stacked by using a variable leading (that ensures both legibility and balance at different scales) and achieve the right visual compactness thanks to an unorthodox horizontal alignment (on the vertical letters “i”, “l”, and “i” of the three words) and thanks to a meticulous customization of the kerning.

To know more about the design and development process read the full case study on Behance.

Discover the project on Behance →