Origin Story
The Cat on the Mountain
A ferry ride I'd taken a hundred times. One day I actually looked up.
Amalfi — Salerno ferry, September 2014
A ferry ride I'd taken a hundred times. One day I actually looked up.
Some logos are designed. This one was found.
In September 2014, I was on the ferry from Amalfi to Salerno. Nothing special — I took that route a couple of times a week, sometimes as a guide with tourists, sometimes just for the ride. It was one of those crossings where you stop looking and just let the coastline scroll by.
But that day, something caught my eye. On one of the mountains above Salerno, the bare rock and shadows formed a shape I couldn't unsee — the silhouette of a cat, sitting upright, its outline as clear as if someone had drawn it there on purpose.
I took it as a sign. A small, quiet message from one of my favourite cities on the coast. The kind of thing you either notice or you don't — and once you do, it changes things.
"Cinereo" means grey in Italian — un gatto cinereo, a grey cat. It felt right: understated, local, and rooted in this specific place. The name and the mark came from the same moment. I didn't design a logo — I recognized one. The rest was just making it precise.
I didn't design a logo. I recognized one — in the rocks above the sea, on a ferry ride I'd taken a hundred times before.
How I went from a phone photo and a hunch to a vector file.
I pulled up a satellite image of the mountain and laid it over the shape I remembered. The cat was actually there. Ears, back, tail, all formed by the ridge where bare rock meets the treeline. I traced it by hand.
Then the slow part. Line weight, fill, negative space. Circular badges, open contours, solid marks. Dozens of wordmark pairings, type treatments, scales. You lay out fifty versions and wait for one to be obviously right.
The final version is the cat in profile, compact enough to work small. The "CINEREO" wordmark sits underneath. It prints clean at any size, in any color. The whole thing came from a specific place, not a brief.
The rest of my story, what I work on, how to reach me.
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