Avo Consulting by Bleed — BP&O
Text by Richard Baird.
Avo is a Nordic technology and management consultancy with offices in Norway and Sweden. Since its foundation in 2016, the company has grown rapidly and has expanded from 5 to 85 employees in three years. This has been achieved by strategically rethinking the way in which consulting services are provided. The keywords associated with the industry were removed, business problems were solved and the necessary changes were then simplified. The Avo Consultancy culture has a unique and playful philosophy. This and the ambiguity of the AVO name (often adopted as an acronym or initials with embedded meaning) formed the basis for a new visual identity design created by Bleed. This playful philosophy and ambiguity is mostly expressed as A, followed by two characters from “Avodings”, a custom font of unique dingbats. In addition to color and Neue Haas Unica, the Avo Consultancy website combines this with super graphics, tote bags, banners, employee-created posters, email signatures and other messages.
“For many, Avo (formerly AVO) seemed to be an acronym, an abbreviation with an embedded meaning. Although this wasn't the case, we decided to use this misinterpretation of the company name to build a universe of suggestions on what Avo could mean. "- bleeding.
Avo Consulting is a technical problem solver, and the graphic language is of an equation-like quality. The dingbats add up to something bigger. And that this goes back to the origins of digital technology, in which dingbats, due to the limited bandwidth, formed the visual language of the time rather than today's images, is a nice recall.
BP&O firmly believes in the power of ambiguity, which leaves the viewer room to project his or her own meaning onto something like a logo or a visual identity. In this way, the graphic language becomes more inviting than dogmatic and predetermined. The connection goes deeper when the interpretation and finding of meaning comes from a place that is deeply personal and comes from a lived life. Here, this is so fascinating as an approach, especially when many things have become oversimplified or literal until they are meaningless.
The execution of the "avoidances" is really well done. Although they are rooted as an idea in the past, they are thoroughly modern and bring a lot of character and life to an industry that often uses banal visual language or leans too far into the tech zeitgeist. There is also a visual scope of the approach that keeps it interesting. Some of the "avoidances" appear friendly and office-centered, others strange and left-wing, the rest playful and cheerful. Stylistically, they move effectively between fillings and contours and work with high contrast, subtly and immediately. This is also supported by different proportions in the application. These look great on the entire website or as small story highlights on Instagram.
Typography and the approach to layouts create a visual framework that is contemporary and useful. It holds everything together somewhere with something in the style of the Swiss International in terms of space use, a hierarchy that is determined more by arrangement than by font size (which gives the dingbats a high priority), but with a relaxed playful irregularity.
The A forms a useful constant, an anchor for play and visual ambiguity, there is room for imagination, both on the customer side without becoming too strange and on the employee side through participation. The system developed by Bleed gives Avo employees the opportunity to create their own versions of the Avo logo and to share what Avo means to them. These can be provided as mail signatures across keynotes and business cards. As Bleed rightly states, "while dynamic identities are rarely dynamic in the long run, the" Avodings "font allows Avo to be clearly dramatized in different contexts by different people." Further work from Bleed to BP & O.
Design: bleeding out. Opinion: Richard Baird. Fonts: New Haas Unica.
Support BP & O.
Thank you to everyone who has visited BP & O since the beginning of 2011. As many of you know, BP&O has always been a freely accessible design blog that wants to offer an expanded opinion on brand identity work. An attempt was made to be the opposite of the social media platform, which often untangles form, context and content. Writing articles can take 2 to 4 hours and is carefully researched.
I am passionate about design writing and believe that design discourse promotes spending time writing about work rather than just posting pictures. If you liked this article, you have been on the website from the beginning and want to contribute to the future, you should support the website with a small PayPal donation. This will affect hosting, CDN and Mailchimp costs, and will cover part of the time it takes to research, write, and format posts.
