Conoce+
A medical conference where biology became the typography.
Services
Branding / Animation / Editorial / Signage
Client
Conoce+
Year
2024
[Brief / Overview]
Conoce+ is a conference programme on cancer research and clinical practice. It runs in Mexico, drawing two audiences into one programme: the researchers and oncologists who present recent findings at the lectern, and the nurses, clinical staff, and patient educators who carry the work into daily practice on the ward. Two registers, one programme, the same subject held at different distances from the patient.
The brief was to design an identity that holds in both registers. Clinical enough to belong in a presentation hall, warm enough to belong in a clinic corridor. Without diluting either, and without translating between them with separate sub-brands.
[Strategy]
Cancer is a subject most brands gesture at rather than name. Awareness imagery uses ribbons, hearts, gradients to invoke the cause without claiming it. Clinical imagery uses blue and white and the visual register of scientific instruments to signal authority without engaging the subject. Both treat cancer as something to handle delicately, to position around rather than design from.
The strategy was to design from. Cancer is a failure of mitosis: the cell division that builds every body, turned against it. If the conference exists to study the cell, the brand should be made of the cell. The visual material of the identity becomes the visual material of the subject.
[Design]
The O of CONOCE behaves like a cell. The letterform is shaped as a circular cell membrane. Ligatured with the N, it appears to be in the act of dividing: the moment of mitosis frozen mid-action. This is the brand's primary mark, a single letter that names the conference's subject by being it.
The motion system extends the cell's behaviour in time. The O proliferates, divides, resolves; biological behaviour played out as animation. The mark moves the way the subject does: replication followed by division followed by settling. The cell is not a metaphor. It is the conference's actual subject, captured in the geometry that names it.
The palette is purple, black, and cream. Purple is the colour cancer awareness already carries, a visual language the world began building decades ago, on ribbons, in marches, on wristbands handed out at fundraisers. The brand uses purple as found rather than inventing a new colour for a subject the world already recognises. Black and cream do the contrast work; the typography carries the system.
The typography is calibrated to hold two registers at once. Weight for the research presentations, restraint for the care-side materials. Same family, recalibrated for each room.
[Applications]
The identity runs across every surface the programme touches. Booklets and presentation decks carry the research talks; environmental signage marks the venue and the corridors between sessions; social and digital extend the conference beyond its dates; lanyards, name cards, and credentials hold the identity at the level of personal interaction. One mark across all of them, scaled and recalibrated but never broken.
The photography lives at the same level: real spaces, real people, the conference documented rather than stylised.
[Resolved]
What the design achieved was a brand willing to name its subject before the reader processes the name. The mark is a cell. The motion is a cell dividing. The palette is the colour cancer already carries. The typography holds research and care in the same register without translating between them.
Conoce+ is now running its second edition on the same identity, in active use across both audiences. The brand makes the conference legible to itself before any session begins. The cell carries the work that exists to fight it.
