Context
ROCO Chicago started as a project of the Romanian United Fund, built entirely through community contributions, the “I'm IN!” campaign in 2021, with 300 people starting to donate monthly, run by volunteers, with no significant paid staff.
The stake for the brand: to look just as solid and professional as any established cultural institution, despite its completely grassroots origin. The visual identity had to make the difference between “a group of people with a Facebook page” and “an institutional community center.”
Brand idea
The organization's naming, “ROCO” (Romanian Community Center), was proposed entirely by our agency, along with the whole visual identity. The final “O” in the logo is reinterpreted as a reference to Brâncuși's “Table of Silence,” surrounded by a circle of “chairs” (dots) colored in the shades of the Romanian flag, red, yellow, blue, a direct cultural reference, but abstracted into modern brand language, not folkloric. The system later evolved with a more minimalist monochrome typographic variant, for lifestyle applications such as merchandise.
The original, color logo with its cultural symbolism, versus the evolved monochrome typographic variant for lifestyle applications.
Applications
From business cards and presentation materials to merchandise and event posters, the system covers both the community's business communication and its cultural one at the same time.
The original, color logo
Business cards, with the Romanian United Fund partner
The evolved monochrome variant
Applied on merchandise, for a more lifestyle tone
Business Network Day
Networking event for Romanian professionals
Romanian Blouse Day
Celebrating the Romanian blouse and cultural heritage
The system, in detail
01
Three pillars
Consciousness, Coherence, Care: conscientiousness in application, visual and verbal coherence, care for the brand's integrity even in materials with limited circulation.
02
An exact color palette
Rigorously defined Pantone, CMYK, and HTML codes — ROCO Blue, ROCO Red, ROCO Yellow, ROCO Sky Blue, ROCO Grey — a level of rigor typical of large corporate brands, applied to a community organization.
03
How the brand is used
The Brand Manual holds a complete system of examples anyone can understand, to protect the brand's consistency when applied by dozens of different volunteers, not an in-house design team.
04
A proprietary photographic style
Colorful, optimistic, dynamic, “happy friends,” “kids learning,” for visual consistency even in the photo materials used by volunteers.
Result
The system built for ROCO Chicago is robust enough to work applied by a network of volunteers, not an in-house brand team.
From merchandise to events and official communication, the brand keeps the same visual coherence from its founding (2021) to today.
The result isn't just a logo. It's a brand manual that any volunteer can apply correctly, without knowing anything about design.
More applications
