Allie Heesh and Sara Silva Santos brush, paint and scan for upa!

In Portuguese, upa! is the kind of word you’d use to encourage a child to get up, to urge someone to keep going or to cheer a friend through a difficult moment. It’s enthusiastic, supportive and colloquial. It doesn’t translate neatly but carries an immediate emotional weight. For a new bouldering centre in the university city of Coimbra, independent designers Sara Silva Santos and Allie Heesh built an entire identity around this single word. The founders of upa! arrived with clear intentions shaped by their time working in Berlin’s bouldering clubs. They knew the environment they wanted to foster: friendly, slightly challenging and deeply connected to its local community. “Their brief made it clear that the identity should feel rooted in the local context, reflecting Coimbra’s personality and culture,” Sara explains. That emphasis on place naturally led the design team toward finding a name in the local vernacular. Working with copywriter Andreia Luísa on the naming, the team identified several qualities the identity needed to embody: challenging rigidity, creating breathing room for Coimbra’s student population, hinting at the physical act of climbing, and evoking an emotional response. "Andreia landed on a brilliant solution: a word that encourages you to go further, ‘Up, up, you go,’” Sara shares. The tagline Escalódromo de Coimbra accompanies the name, a playful nod to one of the city’s academic traditions that immediately signals what the space is about whilst serving as a subtle homage to local heritage.