Italy, Hong Kong and other places around the world
For the Business of Design Week 2025 (BODW) in Hong Kong, a leading international event in the world of design and innovation, the Consulate General of Italy in Hong Kong entrusted us with creating the official visual identity for “Curiosity”, the official keyword for the 2025 edition of BODW, which featured Italy as Partner Country.
We developed a symbolic, fluid and accessible graphic system, articulated into logos, animations, videos and editorial materials. The result shaped the entire communication of the event, enhancing Italian creativity and projecting our concepts on a global scale.
Speaking the language of the eye
The main challenge of this project?
Transforming an exquisitely abstract concept like curiosity into a visually meaningful identity, one rich in symbolism and at the same time accessible enough to be universally understood by a global, multicultural audience.
And how did we achieve it?
The creative team behind Curiosity — Nicola Micheli, Filippo Micheli and Riccardo Cavallo — will tell you themselves.
Illuminating ideas through brainstorming
Once the pitch was received, we immediately began exploring three design directions, developing logos that were simple and, above all, internationally readable.
Between custom-designed typefaces and references to the Memphis movement, we needed to find a balance between experimentation and clarity. All three proposals fully represented us, but the Consulate had to choose just one.
And judging by the final choice, what worked best above everything else was pure simplicity. In true “less is more” style, the more elements we removed, the more the proposal resonated (both with us and with the Consulate), because it allowed us to focus the message more strongly on the concept we wanted to convey.
Representing curiosity
“When it comes to visually representing curiosity, for an agency like ours that deals with image, vision, and the visual aspect of things, it was incredibly inspiring to find something that could perfectly embody curiosity.” (Filippo Micheli)
Even before sketching the drafts, we had already envisioned how they would look once animated. And that’s when we realized that some of them—mainly the one featuring light—conveyed exactly the idea we wanted: brightness, discovery, exploration.
Starting from this, we developed the concept, logo, and visual identity that became the foundation for all the event’s official communication: social media posts, institutional videos, web interface, posters, invitations, animations, and multimedia materials, published online (on the “@bodw+” social channels) in the months leading up to the event, and later projected on-site during the BODW, from December 3 to 5, 2025.
North By Northwest (Intrigo Internazionale)
Collaborating with the Consulate of Italy in Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Design Centre for “Curiosity” was an electrifying experience, but it’s not the only project we’ve developed with the Consulate.
Indeed, BODW is part of the broader framework of ITALIA on Stage, the annual festival celebrating Italian culture, language, art, business and lifestyle in Hong Kong with more than 50 initiatives divided into seven thematic categories, including design.
Within this context, we handled the design of the logo, the brand manual and the official booklet, helping strengthen the visual identity of the entire programme and enhancing cultural relations between Italy and Hong Kong.
