DISCOVERING OLD LAND.

Our mobile unit: 215,000 mls and still going…

Just before Christmas our studio received a phone call from a guy who wanted to start up his own business. His idea was to present himself as a hired gun for clients in search of new ideas and strategic territory where “to make” business. He asked us for a name, a logo and stationery for his new firm (stationery: what a palatable, old fashioned word!) He invited us to meet him up in the mountains of Abruzzo, some 300 miles from any city deserving such name. So we packed our stuff into our rusty VW van and off we went to meet the guy who turned out to be a guru without devotees, living in a small hut surrounded by oak trees, with no electricity and running water, on the very fringes of civilization.

We talked about his activity and how he imagined it to be like. He told us he had no car and moved around mostly by bicycle and he couldn’t wait for the first snow to take out his pair of skis. In front of a few bottles of Montepulciano, we discussed with him about strategies, the wicked digitalization of space and the end of exploration and adventure as such. That’s when we came up with the name for his business: LANDSCAPE! A sort of old land where to re-discover a real strategic territory; a physical contact with the elements and the world of ideas. He liked the concept.

With his permission we are publishing a few steps and the final result of our work. Inspired by the simple lifestyle of our client, we decided to get rid of all technological devices and “make” a logo. We cut out the Compacta letters from a foam board, we placed them on a physical contour and took some pictures with an old Swiss camera.

The googly digital landscape is a surrogate, not a substitute of geography.

A reminder to all creative people: Explorer is not only a goddam’ browser.

The unbranded camera we used to shoot our logo. The problem was to find the proper film cartridges. Below: a physical, low-tech approach to graphic design is big fun. (Don’t tell Apple!)

Above: Shadow theory and Leonardo’s velature were applied to the logo to obtain more depth and a true sense of space. Below: the strange guy who lives up in the mountains, while smoking some homegrown tobacco. We nicknamed him the Zarathustra of Marketing and he shyly asked whether he could put that on his business card.

To add a last, personal touch, we picked a color whose separated values (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) corresponded to the age and birthdate of our client. He said the color reminded him of “the winter patches of sleeping grass under the snow”. The stationery, upon direct request from our client, was printed on thick, smelly goat-cheese paper. This is True Style!