Case Study: Alivio Brandmark
This year, I created a company, Alivio, and a brand for it. To give some background on Alivio, it is a company with a goal to relieve back and leg pain while promoting a healthy lifestyle. It specializes in shoes that are as versatile as they are comfortable. The target audience for such a brand is middle-aged adults that live with pain that limits their ability or motivation to be active. This company is also geared toward servers, cahiers, and laborers since they spend many hours a day on their feet with little break.
The first task for making the brand identity was to come up with a brandmark that conveyed the message I wanted to send to the target audience. To achieve this, I looked at what I decided to make Alivio stand for. Some essence words that sum up the goals for the product are functionality, durability, support, and comfort. This is what Alivio is trying to give to people through their shoes. I developed a few logo concepts that conveyed some or all of these essence words. The figure running up the clouds conveyed the lightness and energy that I wanted the wearer of the shoe to feel. The winged shoe is similar in what it conveys to the audience in that it relates to speed, lightness, and comfort. The third brandmark is a wordmark. It turned out to be the strongest of the three, to my surprise.
However, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me since I typically design wordmarks for branding purposes. They are sort of my bread and butter. The wordmark uses the font, Base 9 Sans. I thought it font was perfect for one reason initially; The ‘A’ in this font stuck out to me, told me it could be altered in a creative way. Not to mention, the word Alivio itself in that font just looked right to me. Since support is one of my chosen essence words, I saw the ‘A’ in this font as an arch, one of the strongest, self-supporting structures you can find in architecture. I pushed this concept further by taking the crossbar out of the ‘A’ and within the empty space, placed another arch, the top of which located where the bottom of the crossbar was. This inner arch was created from the other letters such as the ‘i’. I then rounded off the top corners, so it took a similar shape as the negative space.
