You cannot improve what you cannot measure — so Brandient built the brand for Romania’s first national student-testing platform
Bucharest, June 2016
BRIO®, launched on Children’s Day 2016, set out to change Romanian education by giving it standardized measurement — the work of Dragoș Iliescu, PhD, President of the International Test Commission, with his mentor and co-founder Professor Emeritus Thomas Oakland (1939–2015), one of the fathers of standardized testing. Brandient created the brand: independent and institutionally credible enough to lead a new category, yet approachable enough to win over the young.
Its symbol fuses an eagle with a pencil, carrying both ideas at once: an uncompromising commitment to education, and the elevated, all-seeing view a measurement authority needs.
By all means, operating improvements would not be possible without accurate measurement. We have put tremendous effort into designing this evaluation system in such a manner that it ensures independent processing while offering solid data as a final outcome.
—Dragos Iliescu, PhD. Founder, Chief Scientist, BRIO
Brio is the result of four years of work by an excellent team of experts in psychometrics, IT and mathematics, led by Dragos Iliescu, PhD – professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Bucharest and the founder of TestCentral (the editor of scientific psychological tests in Romania). Dragos is probably the most renowned Romanian personality in the field of psychological testing and organisational psychology, and President of the International Test Commission. The co-founder of Brio is Professor Emeritus Thomas Oakland (1939-2015), Dragos Iliescu’s mentor, widely known as one of the fathers of standardized testing. Brio is endorsed by Gazeta Matematica, through the well-known professor Radu Gologan, the coordinator for the Romanian Olympic Team for the International Mathematics Olympiad.
Brandient is the award-winning brand strategy and design company, with offices in Bucharest and Singapore. Find out more about us and about our work.
About Brandient
Brandient is an independent brand strategy and design consultancy founded in Bucharest in 2002 by Aneta Bogdan, Cristian Kit Paul and Mihai Bogdan — never part of a global network, working directly for the owners, CEOs and boards of its clients, with an all-senior team and category exclusivity. In over two decades the firm has created or rebuilt more than 300 brands, 279 of them published as case studies at brandient.com/work — from Romania’s national leaders to brands carried worldwide. The firm has been active in Southeast Asia for more than a decade. The work has earned 84 international awards and distinctions — most recently a Red Dot (2025) and two Graphis Golds (2026) — 64 documented mentions in international design books and publications, and, in 2015, a place among the inaugural inductees of the REBRAND Hall of Fame, alongside Interbrand and MetaDesign.
About Brio
Brio is Romania’s standardized-testing platform for schools — built on a bank of more than 20,000 calibrated test items covering every grade, founded by psychometrician Dragoș Iliescu, and now running national assessment programs with partners from UNICEF to the Ministry of Education. Brandient created the brand in 2016: the Brio case.