INAREA: DESIGN IN THE PLURAL
An independent Italian company vaunting over forty years of experience in the field of design at international level. A professional path that over time has woven together a series of design specialities, which we like to call our “design in the plural”. Our multifaceted approach seeks to ensure that our customers showcase their unique fields of expertise.
Design in the plural is our way of considering the skill set that comes together when building an identity.
It is design for change, expressed not only through symbols and metaphors but also with forms of narrative built on signs, words, images (static and in movement), objects (physical and intangible), sounds, voices …
The bottom line is that we work with – not for – the customer, preferring to engage with them: our design is always a shared process.
Together we analyse context, define strategies, strip complex content down to its underlying simplicity.
We develop identity systems for companies, groups, institutions, and organizations. We shape products and services, architectures for work and commercial or exhibition spaces, with relative signage. We design communication through publishing, web, typefaces, data visualization, audio and video.
Above all, we design relationships. To design leadership.
IMAGINATION AND METHOD
The most effective way to achieve a goal has always been to imagine it. We are “contract dreamers” because we give expression – form and content – to the customer’s idea of the future, working together. But our method is the highway where our imagination picks up speed. Our approach is based on repetition, meaning critical analysis and exploration:
Self, one’s own history, organization, context and objectives: namely, build shared awareness.
To think outside the box, shifting perspective, ideally linking what is the past to reasons for the present and therefore ideas for the future.
To assign meaning and direction to change, representing it. Through signs and languages, form integrates content and values offering them with simplicity and empathy.
Each point of contact with the inner and outer context, enhancing its role, meaning and coherence. The resulting system initiates and strengthens relationships and behaviour. This is design of leadership.
VALUES BUILD VALUE
In his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino suggests “certain values, qualities, or peculiarities” to save and entrust to posterity. We have embraced them for almost thirty years, applying them as the guideline values of our work and they now stand as cornerstones that sustain our daily business.
Whereby we mean “subtraction of weight” from every action and as a condition for the effectiveness of the idea. Above all, as a liberation from mental, cultural, social, and behavioural obligations.
Of thought and style, which translates into agility, mobility, ease. Qualities that allow us to leap from one area to another, without ever forsaking the significance your work deserves.
Meaning “a well-defined and well-calculated plan for the work in question” and “a language as precise as possible in choice of words and in expression of thought and imagination”.
“The power of bringing visions into focus with our eyes shut, of bringing forth forms and colours from the lines of black letters on a white page, and in fact thinking in terms of images.”
Understood as “a method of knowledge, and above all as a network of connections between the events, the people, and the things of the world” since “a totality that is not potential, conjectural, plural” is no longer conceivable.
A fundamental condition of our work since every project is based on the integration of diversity. This value must therefore be present in words, signs, languages, colours and any possible kind of expression.
A COMMUNITY MEANS ENERGY
Even before being a business, we are an open community.
The sense of participation and sharing is the underpinning of everyone’s awareness of being in the things we do. Because we have made a profession of what was always been a passion for all of us.
Our organizational model is inspired by the world of bees, insects with amazing qualities who have been a symbol of diligence, solidarity and integration since the dawn of civilization.
The Latin saying “Una apis, nulla apis” – a bee alone is not a bee – inspired us to adopt the bee as the icon of this community. People and ideas capable of transforming a thousand flowers into a single honey.