Brick and beam, meet lab bench

Struo’s reputation has been hard-earned. Its founders devoted their careers to a highly specialized architectural practice attuned to technical specifications and regulatory requirements of scientific environments. They founded Struo in service to a sector that demands both unconventional design and uncompromising precision. The name Struo nods to this dual purpose: a Latin verb meaning literally “to build” but also to arrange, to regulate, to organize.

Struo’s work is astonishingly complex: it must take into account the logistics of transporting volatile chemicals and microscopic artifacts, vigilantly control air flow and light, create spaces for collaborative research and benches for experimentation. Yet the identity that Ummo developed is deceptively simple.

Our approach to the brand was informed by the visual language of technical design–high-contrast colors, legible typefaces, precise geometries. The primary wordmark sets Struo in a heavyweight letterforms built with right angles. The composition is particularly striking for the negative space formed within, and among, the letters. Individual characters feature heavy strokes and equally substantial counters. The succession of forms is in perfect alignment, reading as a single, rigorous structure–or perhaps a floorplan. As in a lab, the devil is in the details: tight radiuses subtly soften the edges of each letter, lending both lightness and legibility.

The geometry of the primary mark foreshadows other graphic elements in the brand suite, such as well-proportioned rectangular bars that appear in print and online applications. Struo’s secondary mark restates this theme. Its serpentine form recalls a DNA sequence while also introducing an abstract graphic pattern to the identity.

In its verbal identity, Struo takes a similarly direct, declarative approach. With the tagline, “Bespoke environments for groundbreaking science,” Struo unambiguously delivers its promise to clients in the scientific community. Elsewhere in its communications, Struo assures readers of its exceptional credentials: “we have designed more than twelve million square feet of places for scientists to dream and discover, to learn and mature.” As Struo positions itself as a partner to life sciences in Boston and beyond, its identity strives for common ground between pragmatism and aspiration–a path familiar to the sector that Struo serves.