Biofactorías

While many companies are slowly changing their policies, improving their corporate responsibility and reducing their footprint, only just a few are really investing resources and energy not just to adapt to a new paradigm, but to change the rules of the game. Aguas Andinas, the company that supplies all water services to the city of Santiago, decided to join this latter group. 

To move from a linear to a circular economy, they created Biofactoría, the company’s new wastewater treatment plants for the production of resources such as electricity, natural gas, agricultural fertilizer or clean water – with a special feature: as they produce their own energy to function, biofactories do not generate waste or impact on the environment nor consume fossil energy. They have gone from a processing approach where resources are extracted and then processed – thus generating waste – to factories supplying resources obtained from what it used to be considered waste.

From the beginning of the project, we partnered up with Aguas Andinas and their team to develop the brand for Biofactorías, conceiving a powerful brand's strategy as well as building a genuine and attractive visual language that would help increase the awareness among their audience. We had to create a familiar identity, close to the common public, easy to understand and, even more importantly, easy to love. The choice was to define an identity built on the concepts of interdependence, construction, biodiversity, positivity, and innovation while at the same time being playful, inviting, and friendly.

The work didn’t stop at the logotype of course. We conceived a series of hand drawn illustrations to be associated with the new branding, both to counterbalance the geometric essence of the identity and to vehicle visual information in an enticing way. The custom typeface “A granel” was created to be used across the whole system, together with a specific set of colors, born to be associated with elements such as water, air, biodiversity, and so on. Eventually, in a world running out of resources and plenty of visual stimuli, it’s our duty as designers to use modern, disruptive and consistent design to connect projects like this with its audience.