Founded in 1993 and named after its founder.

Ana Couto is a branding agency in Rio de Janeiro, named after the designer who set it up. The Brazilian trade site Nosso Meio gives its founding year as 1993 in a report dated 19 August 2020, and describes it as “the agency from Rio de Janeiro”. The same report sets out what the agency says it does: it brings together brand, business and communication strategy in branding projects that run from the development of brands, visual and verbal identity and experience through to user journeys and advertising campaigns, always with a method of its own.

That three-part idea runs through everything the agency has published about itself. When ABC da Comunicação covered the agency’s thirtieth year on 28 December 2023, it quoted Ana Couto, as founder, describing the agency’s evolution as a commitment to aligning brand, business and communication in a coherent way. The agency’s own method has a short name in Portuguese, É, Faz & Fala — roughly “is, does and says” — which it also gave to a festival it staged in its thirtieth year.

The studio has kept its founder’s name on the door through its whole history, which makes the name both a person and a company. Trade reports separate the two by context: Ana Couto speaks as founder, while day-to-day client announcements often quote a partner. In the 2020 Nosso Meio report the partner quoted is Fernanda Galluzzi, then described as executive partner-director of the agency; by September 2024 the same site was describing her as a partner and vice-president.

The agency’s scope widened over time from design toward a fuller service. The 2020 description already lists advertising campaigns next to identity work, and the client announcements of the 2020s, set out below, pair identity work with positioning, verbal identity and point-of-sale changes.

A thirtieth-year rebrand in lowercase and orange.

The agency rebranded itself in its thirtieth year. ABC da Comunicação reported on 28 December 2023 that the change people would notice soonest was the joining of the two words of the name into one, anacouto, set in lowercase. The report says the merged name stands for a shift to an integrated agency model covering both business-to-business and consumer markets, and that the choice of lowercase was meant to communicate simplicity and accessibility.

Colour was the second change. According to the same report, the new identity adopts orange, in a category that the agency sees as often run in black and white, and moves in tone from philosophy to the relaxed setting of a bar. The report says Brazilian character is treated as a practice rather than a slogan, and it describes a set of characters built around the name — CoutoEu, CoutoVocê, and the CoutoFãs and CoutoLovers — as an invitation for people to take part in the brand’s story.

The rebrand was planned as a sequence of events rather than a single unveiling. ABC da Comunicação said the new identity began a series of actions running through to the end of March 2024. One was the opening edition of the Festival É, Faz & Fala, held on 21 November 2023 and named after the agency’s method. Another was a book.

The book, A (R)evolução do Branding, was published by Editora Gente. ABC da Comunicação reported on 5 March 2024 that it was being launched that month, with a São Paulo launch on 6 March at the Livraria da Travessa in the Iguatemi shopping centre. The report says the book argues that the central mistake in branding is to reduce it to defining a mark such as a company logo, and it names Valometry, a tool the agency developed for value management that measures brand, business and communication metrics together. The same report says the agency was by then known as anacouto.

How a studio’s identity is built.

Studio identities in Latin America, South Asia and Eastern Europe tend to be built from a small set of moves. Many studios carry the name of a founder or of two partners, so the wordmark doubles as a signature and the studio’s reputation travels with a person. Others choose a coined word or an abbreviation that reads the same in the local language and in English, which keeps the name usable on a proposal written for a domestic client in the morning and an international one in the afternoon.

Bilingual working is a design problem in its own right. A studio may set its name in Latin script while its case studies switch between Portuguese, Spanish, Hindi, Romanian or Greek, and the type choices have to hold up across accents, diacritics and sometimes a second script. References to local craft, such as textiles, ceramics, signage or print traditions, often appear in the way a studio describes its own approach.

The most visible brand surface is usually the case-study website. Project pages, ordered by client and year, show the studio’s method more directly than its logo, and the layout, photography and writing of those pages become the identity that prospective clients actually meet.

Client work, dated.

The agency’s client work appears in the Brazilian trade press as a run of dated announcements. On 17 August 2020, Nosso Meio reported, the health-care group Hapvida, based in Ceará, announced that it had signed with the Rio agency. Fernanda Galluzzi told the site that one of the projects would be building and implementing the group’s branding, covering brand, business and communication strategy.

Two years later the agency took on a building-materials client. Nosso Meio reported on 29 September 2022 that Cerbras, a maker of ceramic tiles and porcelain, would soon have a new visual identity signed by Ana Couto, together with changes at the point of sale, timed alongside the 23rd edition of CasaCor Ceará.

A dairy rebrand followed. Nosso Meio reported on 24 September 2024 that Ana Couto had led the rebranding of Camponesa, a dairy brand owned by the Alvoar Lácteos group, with roots in Minas Gerais. The report says the work began with an immersion in the brand and in the culture of Minas Gerais, and that it shaped both the visual and the verbal identity. The new tagline was “Sabor se cria junto”, roughly “flavour is made together”. The logo and packaging were reworked while keeping the brand’s traditional blue and orange, the lettering was redrawn, white stayed the main colour on pack, and the “C” of Camponesa now sits in a splash of milk. Galluzzi said the task was to keep what the brand already meant to its buyers while taking it somewhere more refined.

The March 2024 book coverage in ABC da Comunicação also names Cosan, iFood and Brastemp among the brands Ana Couto has worked on.

For a design guide, Ana Couto shows a branding agency whose own identity changed late and on purpose: after thirty years under its founder’s name in two words, it joined them into one lowercase word and moved to orange. Compare it with the Brazilian studio in our Tátil brand guidelines. For this guide we use orange, burnt orange and near-black with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ana Couto’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.