About…The bear

I am…

Guillaume Mistral, founder of the company ZB8 and « linchpin » of the company.

To explain what « agitates » me today within ZB8, we have to go back a few years. I am a university student by training, more precisely in economics and management. I « pushed » this course to a doctoral thesis. As part of my research in 1994, I had the opportunity to have access to an innovative tool for the time — the Internet — allowing me to carry out bibliographic research remotely on library servers of American universities. But this privileged access to the Internet and the nascent Web impacted my curiosity and especially changed my trajectory.

First entrepreneurial experience

I finally stopped my studies and consequently my thesis in 1995 to create with friends a first company, Ermen in this field called at the time New Information and Communication Technologies.

Like many players in the internet bubble, our start-up did not survive this prosperous period in innovation and discovery of the application areas of the Internet in general and the web in particular. From this experience, it remains for me to have lived from the inside this disruptive era and to have accumulated a great maturity in innovative project management at the beginning of my professional career.

Salary parenthesis… for 22 years

I was able to exploit these skills as a salaried manager, working for nearly 22 years in an IT department and then in a communication department in a training center with a regional dimension. Then, chance – but isn’t it rather fate – put me back on the track of entrepreneurship in 2018.

ZB8: communication… and drone

ZB8 was born in December 2018. The production of communication tools, both printed and digital, is ZB8’s core business. But, perhaps always attracted by technical and innovative objects/subjects, I explored a booming field: aerial image capture by drone. 

Integrating the drone into a professional activity is neither immediate nor innate. After a practical and theoretical training, I obtained my certificate of aptitude as a drone remote pilot in 2019 which gives me the professional quality in this field of activity.

A polar bear as a badge?

In my questionnaires for the study of visual identity projects, I often refer to the Scalae Naturae, — the scale of nature — elaborated by the philosophers of antiquity. Among other questions, I ask my clients if they feel more animal, vegetable or mineral.Humans have always drawn on the living (animal, plant) and non-living (mineral) worlds to symbolize their belonging to a group, to a place,… and ultimately be recognized, identified, singularized.
So I answered this introspective questioning. There was an obvious preference for the animal universe and more precisely, the polar bear.
He is an outstanding hunter. Before embarking on the pursuit of opportunity, he will spend time researching, observing and studying it. Once identified, he will pursue it with determination.Strong and adaptable, he has excellent survival abilities that help him overcome any type of obstacle. He knows where to spend his energy and does it at the most appropriate time to conserve it.
The animal and its symbolism fit perfectly with what I wanted to convey through my corporate visual identity.

And what about the « ZB » logotype?

I wanted to place a part of intimacy in the logo of my company.

Without revealing here all this part of intimacy, the acronym ZB is a reference – among others – to the two surnames in connection with my Italian origins.

Golden ratio… and Lemniscate

And finally, the number 8!

Initially I wanted to include a reference to the golden ratio (1,619 rounded to the thousandth).It is one of the explanatory keys to understanding structures of the physical world, and especially for the criteria of beauty and harmony. This symbolized what my projects must aim for, apply to them the spirit of the golden ratio, the « divine proportion ».

But « ZB 1,619 » wasn’t very « glamorous » for a logo!

So with a small calculation of the numerical root by recursive reduction of the number, I got the number 8. And chance doing (sometimes) things well, this number can be recognized, once verticalized, as an infinite sign or lemniscate. And this last temporal reference finished convincing me to make ZB8 the logotype of my company.