IGLO

Brief

A mark that said nothing

The mark I.G.LO. was using was the only piece of branding that existed. No palette, no typography, no alternate versions, no rules for anything. A serif logotype with a road running through the 'I', drawn in a way that had aged badly and that said almost nothing about the company behind it.

That last part was the real problem. I.G.LO. manages real estate portfolios, condominiums, office buildings, multi-storey car parks and shopping centres, and it positions itself on process innovation: an automated system that routes emergency maintenance calls straight to the available contractor, a mobile office for on-site assemblies, a client portal, a certified independent energy advisor auditing utility contracts. None of that was legible in the mark. The distance between what the company actually does and what its logo communicated is what the rebrand had to close.

Constraint

Keep the road

The brief was loose in every respect but one: keep the road. The road comes from the company's own payoff, la strada migliore, the better road, and it lived inside the 'I' of the old logotype, using the letter's straight vertical as a natural place for a receding lane. It was the one element the client would not give up, and that instinct was correct. It is the only thing tying the mark to what the company says about itself.

Process

Two rounds that did not work

The first proposal modernized everything around the road while leaving the road where it was. A new sans-serif logotype set in Area Normal, a palette built out from the turquoise already present in the old mark, positive and negative versions, a standalone pictogram made from the 'I' and its negative space, and a set of applications.

The client's feedback was that the road looked like a ladder. I could see it. Inside a narrow vertical letter, the dashes of a centre line stack up and stop reading as perspective, and the eye resolves them as rungs. I widened the spacing, corrected the perspective and made the adjustments the problem seemed to call for. The second round came back with the same reading.

At that point the issue was clearly not execution. The idea itself was structurally weak. The 'I' is too narrow to carry perspective, and no amount of refinement was going to change that.

Decision

Keeping the constraint, moving it

The two obvious paths from there were to keep refining or to drop the road. I took a third one: keep the constraint and change where it lives.

A new round of research and sketching moved the road into the 'O'. The letter opens at the bottom and the road runs through it in perspective, turning the counter into a tunnel. The move solved the formal problem, and it gained something the first version never had. In the 'I' the road was a texture inside a letter. In the 'O' it becomes a passage, an entrance, the way through to the company behind the mark. The payoff stopped being illustrated and started being said.

I presented it next to the earlier proposal rather than on its own. Side by side the difference was immediate, and the client, hesitant at first, moved from trusting me to seeing it for himself. That comparison is the part of this project I value most. It was the first time with a client of my own that I did not sell a solution but made the reasoning legible: why a sign can mean something rather than decorate something, and what that difference is worth.

Palette

Cold blues, one green with a reason

The palette keeps the cold blues already associated with the company, so the rebrand reads as continuity rather than rupture, and names them as a system: Navy Blue and Lagoon carry the identity, with Jet Black, Glacier and a sage green as accents, each specified in HEX, RGB and CMYK so the identity survives leaving the screen. The sage is the one addition that is not inherited, and it is there for a documented reason: the company reports having cut paper use and energy consumption by more than half through the way it runs its buildings, and it audits utility contracts through an independent energy advisor. The green marks a real commitment rather than a decorative gesture toward sustainability.

Pictogram

One shape, every scale

The tunnel detaches cleanly from the logotype and works as a standalone pictogram, which is what makes the system usable. It holds as a signage element on a building corner, as a fingertip-sized sticker, on the back of a business card, and in every compact context where the full logotype would be illegible. The guidelines document the approved colour pairings and, just as explicitly, the ones to avoid, since several combinations within the palette do not reach adequate contrast to stay readable.

Outcome

Where it stands

The identity was approved and the client confirmed the intention to register the new mark. It has not been rolled out yet, and the company's public touchpoints still carry the old logotype, so what exists today is a complete and applicable system rather than a deployed one.

The outcome I can claim with confidence is the one that happened in the room. A client who arrived wanting a refresh of an idea he already had left having understood why a different one was better, and he got there by seeing the comparison rather than by being talked into it.