Zago, LLC

For one month, Zago transformed the lobby of the UN General Assembly with twelve beanbags representing CO_² emissions per capita for selected countries.

See the making of here.

For the project site click here

We're proud to announce that our Nine Planets Wanted! project was included in: I.D. Magazine's Annual Design Review, AIGA 365, and Type Director's Club 55.

We would like to thank our partners in crime at the UNDP office who made this project possible.

If you would like to hear the story behind the project, watch Manuel's recent presentation at Mindlab in Copenhagen.

Treating civilian war victims and propagating a culture of peace is the mission of this unique humanitarian organization, founded in Italy 12 years ago by surgeon Gino Strada. Emergency operates in the following countries: Sudan, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq, and has additional programs in Sri Lanka and Italy. Some of their most impressive achievements include the treatment of more than 2.5 million patients and ensuring the Italian Parliament's total ban of landmine sales and production in Italy.
 
We approached the organization five years ago with the recommendation that they update their online presence. They accepted and we quickly became involved in a larger project: the launch of the organization in the United States.

Visual identity, collateral and website for Conference on Designing for User Experience, San Francisco Nov 3-5 2005. Organized by the AIGA, SIGCHI and SIGGRAPH.

Natural spring water may be good for your health, but bottles themselves threaten our environment by swallowing landfill space and increasing air pollution from incineration. With CarpetsInter we launched a new product line: EcoSoft® the next generation of recycled carpet baking.

Soft on the environment, Soft to the step and 100% recyclable.

HMV, Yahoo, MTV Networks, Samsung, Music Gremlin, Virgin, Imesh are some of the distribution partners that rely on the services, infrastructure and licensing capabilities of MediaNet. Through Medianet’s customized media download and subscription services, top global companies seamlessly distribute content through their own brands. So when the company contacted us to redesign their identity we were challenged with creating a brand that would be memorable while at the same time communicates trust, reliability and technological savviness.

We were asked to create a piece for Transition to a Green Growth Economy, the panel discussion organized by the Danish Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs during COP-15. The resulting animation is a time-based evolution of carbon-dioxide emissions as a result of growth. The 60 minute piece was projected onstage during the talk and distributed to the audience as a take-away flipbook at the event. Even though the outcomes of the conference did not meet the world's expectations and its needs, we at Zago are eager to continue our involvement with this issue.

Human development is about putting people at the center of development. It is about individuals realizing their potential, increasing their choices and enjoying the freedom to lead lives they value. Since 1990, the United Nations Development Programme's annual Human Development Reports have explored challenges including poverty, gender, democracy, human rights, cultural liberty, globalization, water scarcity and climate change.

Migration, both within and beyond borders, has become an increasingly prominent theme in domestic and international debates, and is the topic of the 2009 Human Development Report. We were honored to lead the design of this year's report. Our challenge was to create a engaging experience while keeping the document's academic and policy nature intact. We created a design that supports the topic of migration and human mobility, simplified the nature of the information design and reworked the report's overall template to prepare it for the next 10 years of use.
The report will be available October 5th, 2009

We played matchmakers and connected Cameron Russell and Alex Vladick. They got together a talented team who volunteered to join 350.org's Global Day of Climate Action. Who said activism needs to be dull and unfashionable? Watch full video here.

Before joining Zago, Muriel worked as an art director and designer in the studio she founded in Geneva and served numerous clients in Switzerland. In 2005, she moved to NYC to work with Stefan Sagmeister and various agencies. Innovative conceptual thinking combined with an uncompromising visual sense guides her practice. Muriel has created several award-winning visuals for campaigns in the cultural field (Fête de la Musique 2005-2007, Fureur de Lire 2001-2003) and for humanitarian organizations (Children in War, ICRC, 2002). Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich and has been featured in the leading French and German magazines Etapes and Novum. She has won several national and international competitions and awards, including recently a European Design Merit Award for best annual report.

Muriel holds two M.A. degrees from the University of Geneva in communication & media studies and philosophy. She studied in Switzerland and Germany. She is a native French speaker, fluent in English and German.

After experiencing the realities of life in the red district of Calcutta, Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski produced and directed the Academy Award ® winning documentary "Born into Brothels". As a result of the documentary and the attention that it generated Kids with Cameras was formed. It is a non-profit organization that teaches the art of photography to marginalized children in communities around the world. Our involvement started early and included positioning, strategy, Identity and web design.

Art exhibitions can illustrate selected human rights topics from around the world. They build awareness and encourage dialogue. They can be organized to bring together experts and professionals addressing the subjects exhibited. With ICTE we worked on achieving these very goals.

ICTE facilitates conferences in the field of tolerance education and human rights.

In a service economy, the quality of work is inseparable from the quality of the worker. Beyond the competition among firms and products, there is novel competition among workers themselves, who actually have become a part of the marketed products. In a service economy, producing very often requires establishing a relationship, therefore stressing one’s singularity. Workers are less and less valued for what they have in common with other workers, and more and more for what in them is singular, different. They have more autonomy, but their real asset is no longer their common worth, rather it is what cannot be pooled, i.e. their singularity.

356 pages of architecture, interior design and contemporary art sandwiched in a die-cut cardboard cover!

The Waldzell gathering is a global dialogue for inspiration and change. Each meeting bridges the gap between enthusiastic professionals and a new generation of creative thinkers. It is a platform for disseminating, generating and preserving wisdom. Our task was to connect Waldzell's spirit of curiosity and reflection with a new identity and communications platform for the Institute.

We worked with with Adidas and RunnersWorld to create an online tool so that amateur and professional runners could choose the correct shoe to run in. “What difference does it make?” you may ask. Well, “There's no single 'best shoe' - everyone has different needs. All sorts of things - your biomechanics, your weight, the surfaces you run on, and obviously, the shape of your feet - mean that one person's ideal shoe can be terrible for another person” so there you go, choose wisely!

This project was executed in collaboration with our friends at Blank Mosseri.

The late architect Philip Johnson designed what he called a “habitable sculpture”, a 28-story residential tower with cubist angles. Johnson, at the age of 95, said of the project “It’s the best building I ever designed,” he said. “It is my last opportunity in New York to do something good for the city and something good for art.” We were fortunate then to be working on making this project a reality. The campaign that launched the project "Be a Friend to Art" has been recognized by the MOMA and the Getty Museum. This project is ongoing and we hope to be able to announce the day when ground will be broken to honor Johnson's vision.

We have been given the task to transform an OEM manufacturer into a leading global brand.  Taking inspiration from machine and hand-woven processes, the lotus and flora of Thailand, we designed this symbol for CarpetsInter, the leading carpet manufacturer in Southeast Asia. The mark is a small part of an extensive corporate identity re-design and re-naming project that we are currently leading. Our goal has been to transform this OEM manufacturer into a leading global brand. 

Our copilot at Zago Brasil, Julia’s experience includes building creative brands, marketing campaigns, and illustration work in both the corporate and non-profit sectors. Before joining Zago, Julia designed in the fashion industry and produced a one week symposium on contemporary design dynamics.

Julia holds a double degree in Product and Graphic Design from Rio de Janeiro's School of Design and completed extension programs in Anthropology and Photography. She is a native Portuguese speaker and fluent in English.

Columbia University is one of the most renowned educational institutions in the United States. Nevertheless for its students the quality of basic services and the means by which they are administered shapes their opinion of the institution and marks their experience. With the Department of Student Services we worked closely at bridging the gap between students and administration, creating a dialogue that helped both groups become more aware of each others’ needs and expectations. Ultimately we created a channel that gave the necessary feedback for the relationship to evolve, for services to improve and for satisfaction to increase.

We recently collaborated with our friends at Tellart to design a pong game for a party at Bulo. Some of us have now gotten addicted to the game. Stay tuned for a little league tournament coming soon to a design studio near you.

2009 Aspen Design Summit invited 64 designers, educators, researchers and representatives from NGOs, foundations and businesses to collaborate in addressing large social problems.

Read here what fantastic discovery we made while there and why we should all support SHE!

We lost! Just like our beloved national soccer team: sometimes we win, sometimes we lose – rarely of course, and usually to really good teams. This time we lost to Pentagram which isn't so bad. A bit like losing to Germany in the final.

Unfortunately, there are no prizes for coming in second in our profession. Here's the campaign we would have worked on.

Sign up for the petition to bring the World Soccer Cup to the U.S. Maybe we'll get to see Italy win against Germany as consolation.

50 of today's most important design thinkers, innovators, rebel rausers came togehter to share, provoke and learn from each other. To learn what this 'secret" event is about you can read an inteview with Michael Dila here

Nereo was born in 1967 in Basel, Switzerland.  He studied design at the Basel School of Design.  After working for 5 years in his own design studio, Nereo moved to New York and founded the design firm ZAGO.  In 2006, he opened a second office in Rio de Janeiro.

Human Rights Watch is one of the world's leading independent organizations dedicated to defending and protecting human rights. Their objective coverage of rights violations around the world gives voice to the oppressed and holds oppressors accountable for their crimes. The organization recently approached Zago with the goal of redefining its online strategy.
By shifting the distribution of information from published reports to compelling multimedia content and newsfeeds, the new website is a powerful media channel that can flexibly deliver content while increasing Human Rights Watch's outreach and advocacy initiatives.

A team of multidisciplinary designers (graphic, interactive, industrial), with projects as diverse as their talents, Tellart's work blends physical computing with design-driven innovation to empower everyday life. 

From designing fast-prototyping tools for Nokia to creating medical simulations of obsessive compulsive disorder, Tellart has big ideas and the ability to find quick, tangible ways to implement them - even if it means hacking the occasional pedometer or Wii remote. 

As part of our continued brand strategy and positioning engagement, Zago created a new logo and tagline to place Tellart at the intersection between physical and digital design.

United Services’ mission is to bring a new level of professional commitment, integrity and trust to the execution of large infrastructure projects in the Middle East. We worked with these three core values as the starting point for the development of their corporate identity. Our challenge was to build a brand that could navigate the diverse cultural spaces that the company operates in while maintaining the integrity of its message.

Finally a trend worth following. Nereo and Renata decided to build a green roof on top of their apartment building in Rio. Yes, they went crazy with the structural reinforcements and general opposition to the idea. So why have a green roof?  Why not? It is nice to look at, it brings peace and well-being to those around it, it provides excellent isolation from the summer heat, it has great acoustic insulation, it reduces urban temperatures, it reduces the impact of CO2 and nitrogen emissions and neutralizes the effect of acid rain, it reduces the volume of rainwater and its impact on city sewage, and it puts urbanites in touch with nature.  Want more? If you would like to know more about how to actually build your own green roof contact Nereo.

At 18 million residents and growing, NYC is full of unique characters. Connected by the paths we take in and around the city and the neighborhoods we call home, our shared, conflicting, even combustible views are a big part of what makes New York great.

Interview NY is an interactive art project, started by Andrew Elliott and Cameron Russell, that aims to amplify these connections and contrasts. The idea is to interview every single person living in New York City to collect and share your answer to three questions:  What are you proud of? What are you scared of? What gives you hope?

Interview NY approached Zago to collaborate in the design of an imaginative and expressive identity that would match the non-profit's autobiographical aim while encouraging viral participation. We're proud to be a continuing pro-bono partner with INY and will post updates as the campaign and website get underway.

For the past 10 years, Manuel has helped his clients bridge business and design by combining a deep expertise in developing and implementing communication strategies with an unmatched ability to craft compelling visual story-telling. In 1998 he joined Zago and helped shape the design consultancy into a world-class Corporate Identity and Visual Communication practice. Under his leadership the studio broadened its scope of services, industry reach and its creative vision. Zago’s clients include Fortune 500 companies, international non-profits, start-ups and global brands. The studio has received several prestigious awards, won international competitions and its work has been accepted into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty Museum.

Manuel holds an MFA in photography and related media from the School of Visual Arts, where he also taught as a faculty member, and a BFA in Photography from Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C.
He also completed the Harvard Business School design leadership program and is currently a member of an advisory board for Human Rights Watch.
Manuel has lived in the Soviet Union, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and England, before relocating
to the United States in 1988. He is fluent in Italian, Spanish, and English, and can be contacted at manuel@zagollc.com

Yes this is what is like to bike to work in NYC!

Now more than ever, it's time to pursue our true passions.  Majora Carter is just one example of an everyday person engaging her community, and herself, for the better.

And she's not the only one.

On a new public radio program called The Promised Land, Majora invites visionaries from around the world and around the corner to share innovative ideas that are transforming the way people live. As friends of Majora, we were honored to design the identity and website for The Promised Land.

Subscribe to the podcast via RSS / ITunes

A shortcut to the chaos that is your lunch hour, Gomobo lets city-dwellers Skip the Line(R) and order food on the go. Your online or text message order is prepaid and ready for pickup when you arrive at the restaurant. The service is receiving rave reviews and saving tech-savvy take-out eaters' valuable time.
We were early adopters of Gomobo and happy to design their new logo and in-store signage system.

You can sign up for the service here

Tai Ping is a custom carpet and rug company that serves the luxury market with custom solutions for prestigious interiors - from hotels and casinos to Park Avenue residences, private jets and yachts. Our challenge was to translate the attention to detail and quality that is infused in their products to their communication material. We enjoyed the opportunity to work with them on their annual report and website.

“Climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity at the start of the 21st Century. Failure to meet that challenge raises the spectre of unprecedented reversals in human development.“

We could not agree more with this statement after having worked with the UN on the Human Development Report that for 07/08. Our work included mapping many of the most disturbing data and scenarios for the report and creating a series of advocacy posters. The project is still ongoing and we will be keeping you posted on the next effort.