I MILLE

The destination is the journey

Client

Industry

Consultancy
Communication
Advertising
Publishing

Disciplines

Art Direction
Content Creation
Writing

To celebrate our 20-year history, we decided to design, write and publish a book. A collection of essays to ask ourselves what still needs to be done, rather than looking back at what we have already accomplishedHow do we invest our skills and experience in design, communication, branding, business and technology to help organizations and brands grow, transform and stay relevant to people? What will it take to stand out in the future for us and our partners?

Problem

We wanted to celebrate the 20th anniversary of I MILLE, without looking back in self-indulgence. We wanted to talk about our skills and experiences, without bragging. We wanted to affirm our idea of creativity as a tool to solve business problems. We wanted to answer a question: when everything changes and hardly earned positions are disrupted, how to stand out and stay relevant through time?

Solution

To meet these challenges we decided to give I MILLE’s people the floor, doing something quite different from what we are used to: designing, writing and publishing a book, that we named STANDOUT. Twenty chapters, one for each year of I MILLE’s life, where our Leadership Team reflects on what it will mean in the future to stand out through communication, design, strategy, writing, technology and creativity.

For the book cover, we 3D modeled the letters that make up the words “stand out”, depicted as they try to break out from a surface, like something that literally wants to stand out. We then framed the lettering from twenty different perspectives, creating random and unpredictable visual effects: each perspective was used to design twenty different covers of the book.

Twenty years, twenty covers, twenty articles, twenty points of view, to craft an object that embodies:

an unusual cultural experience, requiring awareness, attention and dedication, both for those who wrote it and those who choose to read it;
an unconventional celebration that uses the anniversary to look forward, towards the future, rather than retracing the past;
a visual experiment that represents our way of seeking creative solutions that reject protocols, standards, trends and standardization.

In December 2023, we printed the book and gifted it to all our clients, partners and friends. Now we have published a digital version on our website, and also turned it into a series of video pills spread through our social media channels. For those who wish to read and collect a physical copy, it can be requested here. The expedition continues!