The complexity of defining a concept and building an identity based upon it
The construction of our identity navigates the same processes that we mention in our methodological model. First we find ourselves in a stage of discovery, where we only have notions of our identity. We ask ourselves the question: how to find a consistency between who we are (individually and as a whole) and how we show ourselves.
The most concrete things we had were our name “bloom” and our notions of identity, which were more focused on what we did not want to project as a design office.
With these two points in mind, we decided to look for references: on the one hand, we inquired about how other consulting firms showed their work, methodology and team, looking at the design, the use of graphic resources and the narratives. It was always relevant to be able to communicate our ethos from all these –or more– points of view.
On the other hand, we investigated identity creation projects, where we focused on how that translation occured, from a concept to something concrete. The idea was to find patterns that would give us hints of “from where” a concept is approached and thus define what would be our starting point.
We decided to approach our concept from its meaning (to bloom) and by exploring the process that determines it (flowering).
Flowering is a development process that occurs successively through multiple stages or events, beginning with the production of the reproductive structures and culminating with the formation of the flower: the main factor in plant reproduction. The flowering process creates a structural change in the plant, as it changes from a vegetative to a reproductive state.
This concept provided our story with meaning and allowed us to move on in a more certain way to that search for commitment, from where we started to build our foundations.
Every time we start a new project we try to place ourselves in a zero state, a “blank” state that allows us to adapt to the requirements in a more organic way. As a metaphor for this, we defined black and white as our base palette, and from flowering we added colors which we delegated to icons and interaction elements.
We wanted to distance ourselves from any elaborate way of communicating and transmitting what we are and do, which we accomplished through the use of messages and brief definitions.
Based on this idea, we also defined our fonts, a decision that gave us the constructive basis of the iconography, used to complement the written information in the headers, services and values.
From the need to redesign the Bloom website, we realized that the process should question how we wanted to show ourselves comprehensively, starting from our subheading (office, consultancy, agency) to design objects that go beyond digital. This is why qualities such as “moldable” and “scalable” were taken into account when creating our system.
