For the full branding project, please go to "SustaiN Conference".
SustaiN is a professional organization consists of experts, academics, practitioners and bureaucrats who are motivated by the awareness of its social responsibility to achieve a sustainable future for Human Security.
In 2014, they are holding their 5th conference after the success of the last 4 years. Their last conference attracted more than 500 participants from all over the world, especially from Europe, Africa and Asia.
The 2014 conference will take place in Bali, Indonesia and also be the first time it is hosted in a foreign country other than Japan.
We acknowledged that SustaiN Conference changes their logos every years. However, because the change of the logo is just the year number. The motif of the conference does not change much through time. Moreover, the current logo of Conference contains too many details and colors, which do not show the professional quality and while decreasing the impact on users. For those reasons, we come up with a suggestion that SustaiN Conference should have a new and unchanged logo.
Through making some research, we found that there are six main topics that the conference will focus on which are: Energy and Environment (EnE), Sustainable Tropical Forest (STF), Sustainable Agriculture (SA), Sustainable built environment in tropical hemisphere countries (BE), Disaster Management (DM), Social and Politics (SP). This fact helped us to come up with the idea of using hexagons, which had six sides with equal lengths.
Then we make research about the hexagons to find that whether the shape suited our requirements or not. We found that hexagon represented balance and union. It was also the symbol of truth, harmony, equality, reliability and perfection. Moreover, hexagons also existed in nature as the images of honeycombs, which on the other hand represented the bee’s society – a sustainable and stable structure. For all of those reasons, hexagons seemed to be an appropriate choice for the logo, as we wanted to bring stable, balanced, reliable, and united feelings to the design.
In addition, we considered the infinity symbol as another inspiration because it brought the feelings of sustainable. We also think about the letter “S”, the initial letter of the word “SustaiN”, and the letter “N”, which was unusually put in uppercase.
In terms of typeface, we chose Bariol and Arial as the main typefaces for the brand. Arial is considered as one of the most Humanist typeface. Both the letterforms and the spacing between characters is designed to make it more readable and legible at various resolutions. Therefore, by applying this typeface, we can maintain the readability and legibility of the logo in different sizes. Above all, with Bold weight, the logo can spread out the feeling of being strong, formal and stable. On the other hand, in order to create contrast for the signature, Bariol is chosen with Regular weight. The roundness of Bariol not only brings the friendly feeling, but also keep the formal look for the whole logo. Because of Bariol's legibility and readability, it's also used for content text. Also, the variety of the Bariol family in style and weight will help in terms of creating information architecture.
The color scheme that we choose for the brand is an analogous color scheme of green and yellow. Green is the color of nature, balance, stability, growth, renewal and rebirth; whereas, yellow relates to knowledge, communication, creativity, and sharing. The reason for choosing analogous color scheme was that it would create the harmony and unity for the whole look of the brand and the website. Moreover, for a website about academic studies and researches, it is not necessary to create too much contrast and highlight, and the analogous color scheme seemed to be a ideal choice as it would avoid distraction while users read the content.