Fauno

Visual Identity for fresh meat and Plant-based products

The Brief

Build a visual identity that unifies two product lines — fresh meat and plant-based foods — that most retail brands treat as opposites, under one cohesive system.

Main Challenge

Design a logotype-and-symbol system strong enough to carry both raw, primal cuts of meat and delicate plant-based products — without diluting either category.

The Business Problem

Most households buying fresh food today aren't buying for one diet — they're buying for a table where one person eats meat daily, another is cutting back, and a third avoids it most nights but not all of them. Retail brands haven't caught up to that reality: meat brands build trust through butcher-shop codes (blood-red, cattle-tag type, clinical whites), while plant-based brands build trust through wellness codes (pastel palettes, hand-drawn botanicals, softness). A shopper serving both needs at one table has to trust two completely different brand languages in the same cart. Fauno starts from that gap, not from a color or a symbol. The opportunity isn't to make meat packaging softer or produce packaging bolder — it's to give both categories a single brand a household can trust across the whole cart, not just one aisle of it.

Conceptual Axis:

Fauno takes its name from the mythological faun — a creature that is neither fully animal nor fully human, and doesn't need to resolve that tension to make sense. That unresolved duality became the starting point for the entire system: a symbol of instinctive balance, not compromise.

Why a Myth, Not the Usual Codes?

Most fresh-food brands solve the meat/plant-based tension by picking a side — a butcher-shop identity for meat, a wellness identity for produce — and running two separate visual languages, or none at all. That split creates shelf confusion and forces the retailer to carry two brand stories instead of one. Fauno's answer isn't to blend the two into something neutral. It's to anchor both in a single figure that was never divided to begin with. The faun doesn't compromise between animal and plant — it simply is both, at once. That's the actual product of this project: not a mascot, but a category argument.

Brand Name: Fauno

"Fauno" refers to Faunus, the Roman god of forests, fields, and fertility, traditionally depicted as half man, half goat. The name carries both halves of the business in a single word: the animal origin of the meat line, and the natural, vegetal register of the plant-based line. It's short, easy to pronounce across languages, and carries enough mythological weight to stay memorable without needing an explanation.

Three paths to Fauno

Path 1 was selected over Path 3 for two reasons. First, legibility of the concept itself: the full seated figure makes the faun immediately readable as half-human, half-goat — the hybrid nature the whole brand is built on — while the profile-only variants concentrate that duality into a single decorative gesture, more easily mistaken for stylized foliage than read as a hybrid creature. Second, the seated pose carries the brand's positioning structurally, not just symbolically: a figure at rest, grounded and stable, communicates 'instinctive balance' on its own, before a single word of copy explains it. Camino 3's hair-replacement variant was the more original idea of the two finalists, but it asked more of the viewer to decode at small sizes — the full figure asks less and says more.

The logo

The seated, contemplative pose that follows was chosen to embody that same idea structurally, not just conceptually — a figure at rest, holding both halves of the brand without tension between them.

Why a Silhouette, not an inversion

When the Fauno symbol sits on a solid color field — brand color or black — it is never produced by a simple color inversion of the linework artwork. A straight invert would flatten the figure into a set of disconnected lines floating on a flat field, breaking the sense of volume the illustration was built to carry, and reading as noisy or illegible at a glance — especially at small sizes.

Instead, the symbol is rebuilt as a dedicated silhouette: a solid figure with its internal contours — the curls of the hair, the ridges of the horn, the line of the profile — preserved as negative space rather than removed. This keeps the highlights and shadows of the original artwork visible inside the solid form, so the figure still reads as sculptural and dimensional on a dark or colored background, not as a flat stencil.

The silhouette isn't a simplified fallback for when color isn't available. It's a purpose-built version of the mark, engineered to survive high-contrast placement without losing the character of the original drawing.

Two Structures, One Mark

Fauno's symbol and logotype are built as two independent lockups — vertical and horizontal — rather than a single fixed composition that gets scaled down uniformly. At small sizes, a fixed vertical lockup forces the wordmark to shrink to the point of illegibility just to keep the full figure visible above it; a fixed horizontal lockup does the opposite, compressing the figure until its details disappear.

Structuring the mark as two independent, purpose-built lockups solves this directly: each version is optimized for legibility at its own range of sizes, rather than being a scaled copy of the other. The vertical structure is the primary lockup, used whenever space allows — it gives the figure room to read at full detail above the wordmark. The horizontal structure is used where vertical space is limited — packaging bands, headers, wide formats — without compromising legibility on either the symbol or the type.

The two are not a primary-and-backup pair. They're interchangeable by context: the choice is dictated by the shape of the space the mark has to sit in, not by hierarchy between the two.

Brand Extensions

Three product lines were defined to carry the identity across the full range:

From palette to Shelf

Each color above earns its place by doing a job at the point of sale, not just on this page. On pack, the color band isn't a decorative accent — it's the fastest signal a shopper reads before the product name or the cut itself: Terra means traditional meat, Verde means plant-based, Essenza means premium, before a single word is read. The packaging system that follows is where that logic gets tested — sorting an entire fresh-food range at a glance, across a refrigerated case a shopper walks past in seconds.

Typography

The pairing above carries the same duality at the letterform level: a serif with historical, carved weight for the mythological half of the story, and a plain sans for the everyday, functional half — strategy and shelf, in the same system.

The Balance Campaign

Every execution in this campaign follows the same rule, regardless of composition: meat and plant-based ingredients share the frame as equals — never one plated as the main event and the other as garnish, never separated into "before" and "after" halves of an image. Whether the ingredients are stacked, arranged flat, or plated together, the composition itself is the argument: these things were never meant to be ranked against each other.

That's a deliberate departure from how the category usually shoots food. Meat photography tends to dominate a frame; plant-based photography tends to apologize for itself with restraint. Fauno's campaign refuses both defaults — every composition gives equal visual weight to both, so the balance being sold is visible in the image itself, not just claimed in the headline.

The headlines built around this — "Balance begins on your plate", "Eat well, eat in balance", "No extremes, no compromises. Just balance" — all resist the two easy positions the category defaults to: pure indulgence or pure restriction. Fauno's campaign doesn't ask a shopper to choose a side of the aisle. It asks them to notice they were never required to.

The Merchandising

Canvas Tote Bag — Given at checkout or sold at a small cost, the tote turns every grocery run into a moving impression of the brand outside the store — the one piece of merchandising designed to be seen by people who aren't yet customers.

Wooden Cutting Board — Used at the exact moment the product is prepared, the board puts the brand literally underneath the meal — the closest a touchpoint can get to the moment of use itself, and the strongest tie back to the brand's "balance on the plate" positioning.

Cork Coasters — A small, repeated touchpoint for the home table, reinforcing the "eat well, eat in balance" ritual at the exact moment the product is finally consumed — where a food brand's relationship with a household is actually built.

Lunchbox — Carries the "eat well, eat in balance" idea into the one meal most likely to be either skipped or improvised — reinforcing the brand at the moment balance is hardest to maintain, away from home.

Apron — Worn by counter staff at point of sale, the apron puts the brand in the one interaction that happens with a person, not a package — reinforcing Fauno at the moment a customer asks a question or gets a recommendation.

Conclusion / Reflection

Fauno shows how a single symbol can hold two product categories together without flattening either one. The system stays expressive on shelf and functional across formats — recognizable whether it's on a cut of beef or a head of lettuce. What it isn't is neutral: it takes a point of view — balance over extremes — and builds the entire brand around defending it.

“The faun doesn't compromise between animal and plant — it simply is both, at once. That's not a mascot. It's a category argument.”

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