“The identity needed to speak to children without feeling childish, and to adults without feeling like a space designed exclusively for parents of young children. Finding a visual language and tone of voice where both could meet, without either having to compromise, became the guiding principle of the project,” shares Monica. A central question that framed the design of the logo was how to create a visual language that could communicate something more than legibility, for “children who may not yet be able to read,” lead designer Maia Loucif says.
The team approached the construction of the logo mark quite like they were in a playroom themselves. Treating it as a game, Maia set about stress-testing a build of the brand’s name from a very limited set of forms in multiple variations – “I found myself returning to Fanette Mellier’s activity books introducing children to graphic design,” Maia shares. From this constructivist inspiration, the designer drew up reduced alphabets from simple geometric shapes, finding the “essence of each letter within them”, she says. The wordmark was all about capturing the meaning that can derive from our childhood experiments with building and moving physical forms.
Worlds apart from the constructivist wordmark, however, sits a whole cast of characters created by Francesca Albergo, the team’s in-house illustrator. For these fluid and inky creations, drawn out by hand, the illustrator used the geometric shapes in the identity as her starting point but brought a whole new expressive dimension to form animals that feel “expressive, vibrant and full of personality”, Monica shares. The characters are placed across cafe menus, products, signage and other applications and aim to act as friendly faces kids could encounter throughout their experience of Canica, she says.
It’s precisely the contrast between a geometric logo and this tactile and joyous overspill of ink in the retracing of its shapes that makes Canica’s identity work so well. A balance of freedom with restraint, Francesca’s addition to its visual world “became a way of testing the identity itself”, Monica ends. “A good visual system should be robust enough to be interpreted, played with and extended by others.” From a pared-down starting point to the arrival of its whimsical creatures, Francesca’s hand-painted work feels like a more unexpected trajectory that only enriches the cafe’s visual world.