Oliveira Almeida Brand Identity by Ricardo Filipe Lopes da Silva is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2022 A' Design Award in Graphics, Illustration and Visual Communication Design Competition Category.
IronGraphic· 2022
Oliveira Almeida Brand Identity
by Ricardo Filipe Lopes da Silva
Client: Oliveira de Almeida Advogados
A' Design Award Winner in Graphic Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #126100The Design
About Oliveira Almeida Brand Identity
Having the mission of defending the right causes and putting invaluable legal evidence together in order to bring effective solutions to customers, demands a lot of organizational discipline and flexibility. The brand depicts these efforts thoroughly and goes beyond the visual identity. Turning the logo into an office device not only puts together paperwork but helps the brand to stick into clients' memory.
The Recognition
About the A' Design Award
Oliveira Almeida Brand Identity is an Iron A' Design Award winner, a prestigious recognition granted to good designs that meet the professional and industrial requirements expected from well-designed creations. Iron winners demonstrate great skill, high specialization, expert understanding, and creative capacity of their creators. Oliveira Almeida Brand Identity is expected to be a highly regarded, admired, and cherished creation that is practical and innovative. This Iron A' Design Award-winning design integrates industry best practices and has competent technical characteristics linked with know-how and talent. Oliveira Almeida Brand Identity is respected for its thoroughness and is designed to provide quality of life improvements that help make the world a better place.
Interviews
Grand Interview
Your innovative transformation of the paper clip into a tie-shaped brand element for Oliveira Almeida Brand Identity demonstrates remarkable creativity - could you elaborate on how this concept evolved from initial observation to final implementation?
The transformation of the paper clip into a tie-shaped brand element started with a simple but revealing observation: a lawyer’s daily workflow revolves around organizing, interpreting, and navigating extensive documentation. The paper clip—humble yet essential—became the perfect metaphor for discipline, structure, and clarity. As the idea matured, the symbolic connection between a lawyer’s professionalism and the elegance of a necktie emerged. Merging these two objects created a form that felt both familiar and innovative. Through iterative sketching and refining, the concept evolved into a unified emblem that embodies order, nobility, and the everyday practice of law.
The etymology-based color palette of Oliveira Almeida Brand Identity beautifully merges the green tones of peace and victory with earthy plateau colors - what inspired you to dive so deeply into name origins for your color selection process?
I approached the color palette by exploring the linguistic roots of the firm's name. “Oliveira” opened a rich chromatic narrative, pointing directly to the olive tree and its established visual language of greens that historically symbolize peace and victory. “Almeida,” with its Arabic origins referring to a plateau, guided me toward earthy, grounded tones. This etymological dive allowed the palette to feel naturally connected to the brand's identity. Instead of using arbitrary colors, I created a palette that captures heritage, geography, and meaning—giving the brand visual depth and authenticity.
In developing Oliveira Almeida Brand Identity, you chose to move away from traditional law firm symbols like scales of justice - how did you balance breaking convention while maintaining the gravitas essential for legal branding?
Breaking away from traditional legal symbols required a careful equilibrium. The challenge was to avoid clichés—scales, swords, columns—without diminishing the seriousness expected from a law firm. The solution was to lean into symbolism drawn from the lawyer's actual working life. By focusing on tools and behaviors inherent to the profession rather than mythic or historical imagery, I created a brand that feels contemporary and grounded. The resulting identity maintains gravitas through simplicity, geometry, and material quality, while also signaling a fresh, honest perspective on legal practice.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- As a defender of righteous causes, the firm has the mission to put invaluable legal evidence together in order to bring effective solutions to customers. To better depict the brand values, the logo combines a necktie that represents nobility and a paper clip that not only fulfills its primary function of holding paper together but symbolizes order. These elements are present in lawyers 'daily lives, and turning them into a day-to-day device will help the brand stick to clients' memory.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Tie-shaped clip in solid Brass - 8 mm (width) x 30 mm (height)
For the stationery, Visual Identity guidelines were provided to ensure that all the materials will be done correctly. All the graphics and illustrations were vectorized and saved as print-ready files. - Tags
- law, order, tradition, lawyers, law firm, brand, paper clip,
- Production Technology
- The project was designed in Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo to keep the vector and photo montage quality. The logo design was built based on the Golden Ratio rule by using a Phi grid order to appear in the most harmonious way. On the production step, the designs were delivered in RGB, CMYK, and Pantone colours. The Tie-shaped clips were crafted in solid brass.
- Design Challenge
- One of the challenges was to bring unexpected symbols from the law and order environment to life for a physical experience, without losing the classic feel. To depict the name of the firm and tie it together with the activities of the lawyers, I dug into the etymology of Oliveira de Almeida to extract the right colour palette. This gave the final touch to the brand identity.
- Research
- Besides the research on how the public perceives law firms. The colour scheme was carried out based on the etymology of the firm's name. Oliveira simply means Oliveira which contains a wide range of green colours, from dark to light tones. On the coats of arms, it is the symbol of peace and victory. About Almeida, this comes from the Arabic terms the meaning al, table meaning maida. In the geographical sense, it means something like a plateau or flat soil which contains earthy colours.
- Inspiration
- The idea emerged from observing the daily responsibilities of a lawyer, constituting a fundamental principle of advising clients wisely. Interpret laws and apply them to specific cases, gather evidence for a case, search public records and other legal records. These processes require a lot of organizational discipline to collect the paperwork orderly or to change specific documents whenever necessary. So, nothing is more suitable than a paper clip.
- Project Duration
- February 2020 to April 2020 in Curitiba, Brazil
- Operation Flow
- In general, law firms tend to use symbols extensively such as the scales of justice, swords, or anything that involves classic architectural elements. And to stand out from the competition surged the idea of creating something that goes beyond these symbols and visual identity. Thus, the fabrication of the tie-shaped clip came to life in order to invite the client to have a practical experience with the brand. On the of it, the color palette applied to all media and office tools reinforces the appearance of the brand in such a way that the target audience will recognize it in the absence of the logo.
- Image Credits
- Image 5: Photographer Luke Michael, Angel holding round wreath statue, 2017.
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