CREDO: identity and website for a centre of excellence on cultural diplomacy

The identity starts from a preliminary strategic analysis, carried out through focus groups between the supplier and the project's internal group. That exchange produced a document bringing the fundamentals of the brand into focus: vision and mission, stakeholders, target persona profiles, the Centre's value proposition. It was the key values isolated there that guided the first drafts of the logo, within two guidelines set in advance. The logotype had to be easy to reuse across the whole coordinated image, and it had to represent the letter C, the initial of the name.

Cultural diplomacy has ancient roots, and in Italy it consolidates in the Renaissance. That is the period in which artists and intellectuals exercise a direct political and diplomatic role. Petrarch, Machiavelli and Guicciardini among the writers, Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo among the artists, exert lasting influence at international level. The archetype of the modern diplomat emerges there: a learned, curious, multilingual figure, the forerunner of today's cultural diplomat. The origins of European diplomacy can be traced in the relations between the Italian states of the fifteenth century, which become centres of diplomatic training.

The identity acknowledges that root, and keeps its distance from the myth of the Italian Renaissance. The monogram C is inscribed in a geometric form recalling the ornamental frieze of a Renaissance marble inlay. To its right, a solid circle: a small orbiting planet, a reference to modern scientific culture and the advance of knowledge. The style of the C, by contrast, does not quote the antique, and the choice is deliberate. CREDO's own dimension is the contemporary, and the symbol draws on a modernist canon, on the essential geometric forms of the Bauhaus. The result is a contemporary style with references to tradition, without nostalgia.