IMAGO is the visual identity project for Valle Camonica, Italy’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, renowned for its prehistoric rock engravings—an archive of signs that predates and underpins the very origins of visual communication.
The project stems from an attempt to reinterpret this ancestral language not as a symbolic archive, but as a formal system, translating it into a contemporary identity that connects the memory of the territory with today’s visual culture.

The challenge

The challenge was to engage with a millennia-old heritage without reducing it to quotation or folklore. Rather than representing the engravings, the goal was to understand their underlying logic in order to build an institutional identity that feels authoritative yet alive.
The system needed to speak to different audiences—both those who inhabit the valley and those encountering it for the first time—while remaining flexible across media, spaces and scales, and maintaining strong visual and cultural coherence.

The solution

The project is built around a custom logo and a bespoke typeface, developed in collaboration with Omnitype, which reinterpret the rock engravings as essential, geometric signs. The forms originate from the stone itself, but are abstracted and reassembled into a contemporary, fluid and universal visual language.
The colour palette, composed of earthy and mineral tones, reinforces the connection to the valley’s materiality and light, avoiding any didactic or literal representation of the landscape.
The result is an open and modular visual system that holds together memory and future—a continuous dialogue between nature, sign and culture.