Brand architecture: aligning two independent entities through design

Consolidating rather than rebuilding

The work with the agency InSign followed the same pattern as on BSSI: a joint brief with the Marketing department, then positioning and graphic vocabulary proposals from their side.

What that setup actually produced deserves to be said without embellishment. The shift toward empowerment and the reintroduction of the crown into the brand assets were things I had already begun to implement gradually, project after project. The work on voice and tone and on graphic vocabulary served to maximize those initiatives rather than to replace them. What the rebranding did above all was validate and consolidate scattered efforts inside a positioning strategy that holds end to end.

It is a way of working that requires accepting that recognition comes afterwards, when a third party formalizes what you were already doing.

Adding a mark without upsetting the balance

The crown brought back came from the founders' heritage, "Les Rois des Lunettes", the Kings of Eyewear. That left the substantive problem: integrating it without touching the proportions between "Bollé" and "Safety".

The position taken was to treat it as an addition, not as a redesign. A well-known brand is recognized through relationships the eye has memorized without analyzing them, and redistributing those relationships to make room for a mark amounts to breaking the very thing you are trying to build on. Adding an element to an existing typographic composition looks harmless; in practice every detail counts in a logo, and the work consisted of finding the exact scale at which the crown integrates without becoming a foreign body and without disappearing.

The cartouche, or how to correct an old imbalance

The scale work brought a pre-existing flaw to light: the "Safety" baseline placed under the logotype produced an impression of precarious balance, which adding the mark made more visible still.

The answer was to enclose the whole in a cartouche, which gives the block back the stability it lacked. Rather than treating that cartouche as a fix, we made it an asset: handled as a clip-on logo, set on the left edge of a document, it becomes a label certifying provenance. A composition constraint turned into a signature you apply, reusable across all communications.

The two-facet crown, carried through to the product

Integration did not stop at the collateral. Over a longer stretch, I worked with the product designers so that the product guidelines would evolve and take on the new brand codes.

The centerpiece of that work is the two-facet crown, whose principle comes from the BSSI identity designed the year before: two tones simulating a central ridge that catches the light. What was only a construction detail on a logotype becomes, once molded onto a frame, a figurehead and a direct evocation of protection. The mark stops being applied to the product, it becomes part of it.

Mint Grotesk, chosen for what it lets you say

The typographic choice landed on Mint Grotesk for a precise reason: the type designer drew an outline version alongside the plain one. That is not decoration, it is a composition tool.

The heavy weight in capitals and the play between thicks and thins make it possible to set powerful taglines, consistent with a graphic vocabulary of empowerment. Above all, having both versions available allows two-dimensional taglines, such as "See more" set above "of what you work for". The outline placed over a background image speaks of transparency and fineness, the plain speaks of robustness and contrast. That is exactly the duality of a pair of safety glasses: holding up in demanding situations while staying discreet enough to be forgotten. The typography states the product promise before the text has even been read.

The wearer as icon

Management talked about a "USA first" style. I read it differently, in a way more workable for the creative side: move the narrative from risk to empowerment, and treat the worker as a figure rather than as someone carrying equipment.

In practice, the iconography breaks with the cold codes of B2B. The wearer becomes the protagonist of his or her own performance, and the floating hero packshots borrow from lifestyle codes rather than from those of a technical catalog. This position was not born here: the "bold adventurers" of the Universal Goggles narrative and the extreme-environment staging of the Platinum campaign already came from the same intention, that of building an inspirational dimension going beyond risk messaging and factual reassurance.

It rests on a conviction whose treatment as a boundary I have never understood. B2B and D2C communication get set against each other as though they addressed different species. A distributor, a corporate buyer and a private individual are human beings first, with emotions and a visual culture. Forbidding yourself inspiration because the person opposite is a professional amounts to giving up a register in order to respect a convention, and to giving up the simplest message an equipment brand can send: that it respects and admires the people who wear it.

Turning down the color code, proposing color grading instead

The segmentation by market, Tactical, Healthcare and Industry, was brought by the agency and signed off by management. Its planned translation was literal: one color code per segment, applied to typography and to solid areas.

It seemed to me that this rigidity would destroy brand unity at the very moment we were trying to assert it. Three strict color systems coexisting under one logo produce three brands, not one range. So I proposed a subtler translation, moved from the guidelines to the color grading of the key visuals: rather than applying a color, push the segment's dominant hue more or less strongly in the grade.

That shift changes the nature of the rule. It installs an implicit convention rather than an explicit code: an image worked in violet light will almost always belong to the Blue Light segment, a laboratory setup will carry blue-white dominants, and the boundary with the blue world of Healthcare is dosed rather than decreed.

Its main value lies elsewhere. The strictness of the segmentation becomes adjustable to the medium: heavily contrasted on internal brand material, where the point is to show the diversity of the portfolio, more blended in external communication, where the reader has to perceive a single brand before distinguishing activities. One identity can therefore serve two opposing arguments without contradicting itself, which a strict color code would not have allowed.

A system, not a set of guidelines

The final scope gives the measure of what was deployed: a logotype and its rules of application, a typographic system that carries meaning, an adjustable color convention, product marking built into the design guidelines, and the full set of printed materials.

What holds all of this together is not a standards document but a principle for deciding: every element added had to be justifiable by what it allows you to say, not by what it allows you to standardize.

A brand manifesto, between heritage and future

Commissioned by the Board to formalize Bollé Safety's repositioning, this anniversary book records the transition between 130 years of history and a forward-looking strategic vision. More than a collection of pages, the object becomes a pivot: it gives physical form to the convergence between industrial foundations and the ambition of a world leader in eye protection.

The visual identity is expressed there through a handling of white space around the images that channels the flow of information, turning the graphic guidelines into a language where safety becomes a way of living. Production, entrusted to Imprimerie des Deux Ponts, was the occasion for a trip to the Grenoble plant to settle materials, finishes and press color checks; a valuable moment that reconnects with my earliest experience in print, in order to deliver a lasting collector's object that stands on its own.