Work / Logo Design, Brand Identity, Graphic Design
Pisa Botanical Garden
Concept for the new brand and print materials of Pisa University Botanical Garden and Museum
Context
The Botanical Garden and Museum of the University of Pisa is one of the most ancient gardens in Europe, protecting thousands of species across several greenhouses, flowerbeds and ponds.
The garden needed a new logo and coordinated print system — flyers, brochures, posters, booklets — but a well-designed mark alone wasn’t the real goal. It needed to become something people actually said out loud.
Concept
“Hey, let’s meet at the MOB!” — a mark synthetic and memorable enough to double as an acronym that becomes part of everyday slang, not just a logo people recognize.
Proposal
The logo is based on Garamond 3, playing with the “O” of “Orto” (garden): I filled the circular shape with Light Green 500 (from Google’s Material Palette), then carved a negative-space oak leaf into it — the oak being a near-universal symbol of wisdom, tying the mark back to the University of Pisa and its role as a teaching laboratory for undergraduate and master’s programs. Brandon Grotesque — playful, modern, clean — pairs with the serif across every brand collateral: flyers, posters, booklets, brochures, business cards.
Alongside the standard black-and-green logo, I developed a black-only version and an outline version, the latter meant to sit over imagery, as in the orchid poster above.
