Work / Logo Design, Brand Identity, Web Design, Illustration, Graphic Design
Identistories: counselling, coaching & refocusing
Brand, website and illustrations for Identistories, the counseling firm led by Alessandra Cosso. Her work consists in reshaping business and professional identities through Narrative Humanities and Relationship Design.
Context
Identistories is the counseling firm led by Alessandra Cosso, who reshapes business and professional identities through Narrative Humanities and Relationship Design.
Alessandra focuses her practice on unravelling the skein of people’s personal and professional stories through narrative coaching and counselling techniques. She helps organisations, brands and individuals take back control of their own script, designing how they relate to bosses, peers and clients so that their “Identistory” reads clearly in every word and action.
Visualizing something as abstract as identity, personality and relationships is hard on its own, doubly so for a practice whose entire method is about not handing people ready-made answers. A conventional logotype and a conventional info-first homepage would have said the opposite of what Alessandra actually does.
Logotype
The idea behind the project came from Alessandra method: deconstructed letterforms that force the reader to complete their own meaning as a methaphor for the very same maieutic principle Alessandra uses with her clients.
Starting from the maieutic idea of self-discovery guided by a maestro — a counselor who doesn’t give answers, but asks the right questions — I developed a logotype built from missing strokes, hidden serifs and forgotten stems. Reading it means rebuilding it: recollecting how a glyph is made, then completing the maimed letterforms.
It leans on the principle of desirable difficulty, “a learning task that requires a considerable but desirable amount of effort, thereby improving long-term performance”, the same way the maieutic master’s question asks a disciple to find the answer already inside her.
Website: a narrative journey
The website mirrors the narrative approach of Alessandra’s work. Instead of opening on the classic services/about structure, the homepage prompts the visitor to start an unexpected narrative journey — following a red thread through jungles, mountains and seas, experiencing what it means to explore the inner self with a narrative approach, guided by a counselor.
Illustrations help the visitor immerse herself in the experience, enhancing the narrative and setting the mood for the whole stay on the site. As the narrative journey ends, the visitor arrives at the informative homepage, where Alessandra finally explains what she does, with whom, how and why.
