Obvio—A commitment to Vision Zero.
Creating a distinctive brand for innovative AI-driven road safety solutions.
Client — Obvio.ai
Location—San Francisco
Sector—Transport
What we did—Visual identity & Brand Messaging and Positioning including; Vision Boards, Logo System, Type, Color, Art Direction, Digital Brand Guidelines & Motionography
Year—September 2023
Client:
Obvio.ai is a new product focused on AI-driven traffic surveillance solutions headquartered in San Francisco. They are committed to reducing road accidents and making cities safer for people. Obvio collaborates with local authorities and traffic police departments in different cities within the US to provide road safety solutions that help make cities more secure.
It aims to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries by leveraging solutions involving real-time monitoring, incident detection, face recognition, and intelligent traffic management to increase safety, health, and equitable mobility for all.
Brief:
As a new AI product for road safety, Obvio wanted to create a digital brand identity to establish it as a game changer in the market. They wanted their digital identity to revolve around their human-centric approach toward using AI-powered tech to solve road safety problems. They wanted to communicate that the tech was designed to help people live safer and happier lives.
Obvio is about imagining a future with zero traffic accidents, zero injuries, and zero lives lost on the road to ensure higher safety, more happiness, and easier mobility for all citizens. So, the challenge became communicating this vision through each element of Obvio’s brand in terms of visuals, positioning, and messaging.
Solution:
Our team collaborated with Obvio’s cofounders to brainstorm on the company's mission and vision and help guide its brand identity strategy. Together, we landed on the ‘Vision Zero’ concept, which sums up the gist of Obvio’s vision. We expanded on the concept by exploring the correlation between citizens’ road safety and their happiness. Which is basically a fancy way of saying the safer people feel, the happier they are.
Deztopia designed a brand that highlighted Obvio’s ‘Vision Zero.’ The branding also uses a double arrowhead to symbolize the indirect relationship between road accidents and people’s safety. That is to say, if there are fewer accidents on the roads around people, they will be safer and, in turn, happier as a result. This relationship of lower accidents leading to safer and happier citizens is used across the brand to reflect Obvio’s vision. It’s done in a friendly and easily approachable way to reflect that the brand is for the people, even if it might be powered by AI tech.
Directly Related:
This means that roadside safety is directly related to the driver’s happiness. So safer roads directly translate to happier and fuller lives.
Vision Zero:
This is our North Star – it’s all about ensuring accidents hit zero and people get to move around hassle-free.
Obviously Integrated:
This signifies the seamless fusion of our technology within city infrastructure and the community to ensure safer urban mobility.
The final logo features softer and rounder edges to look more approachable and modern. It represents progress toward a safer and accident-free future with zero fatalities and injuries related to traffic.
Since the brand is about the safety of the people, the brand elements would be used in the streets, parks, roads, and other parts of the city's infrastructure. So, we carefully chose a saturated color palette that would stand out from nature. For example, a saturated shade of green that can’t be lost within trees. We combined these saturated palettes with more earthy colors to ground the brand while also creating a balance between innovation, modernity, and approachability.
Brand Icons and Numeric Symbols:
The unique logo mark provided endless possibilities to expand it to create unique icons and digits. For consistency, we designed custom icon sets and ten-base figures on the same grid as the logo for Obvio. This helped us build a unique look for the brand’s digits and icons and make them easily recognizable as Obvio’s standout branding.
