ETAU Architectes is a Brussels-based architecture firm specialised in the design and management of private and public large-scale projects. We were tasked with refreshing their identity and creating their new website in order to better reflect who they are and what they do.

ETAU is also an unfortunate acronym that, read as a French word, means “clamp”. Our first move was thus to go from a logo that people read to a symbol that people see. We made a point of removing all the superfluous visual weight from their identity to make the undesirable association even less intuitive.

We wanted the design to really embody ETAU’s take on architecture : sober, relevant, contemporary and sustainable. To reflect that, we worked around very simple shapes, a minimalistic colour-palette, and a very simple structure. By going for this kind of understated elegance, we meant to let their pretty pictures do all the talking.