Curridabat Ciudad Dulce Place Branding by Fabrizzio Mendez is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2021 Silver A' Design Award in Graphics, Illustration and Visual Communication Design Competition Category.
SilverGraphic· 2021
Curridabat Ciudad Dulce Place Branding
Client: Kerigma
Silver A' Design Award Winner in Graphic Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #107169The Design
About Curridabat Ciudad Dulce Place Branding
Curridabat Ciudad Dulce is a place branding program created for a city in Costa Rica. The brand supports the Ciudad Dulce, or Sweet City, vision, which promotes a positive experience for all citizens by taking inspiration from nature. The visual system is built from repeated shapes, patterns and structures found in the natural environment, with hexagon patterns recalling beehives as the main element. The flexible identity is applied to printed and digital materials, buildings, outdoor signs and public furniture, so diverse audiences can recognize the city easily.
The Recognition
About the Silver A' Design Award
Curridabat Ciudad Dulce Place Branding is a Silver A' Design Award winner, an extraordinarily prestigious recognition granted to top-of-the-line, gorgeous, and impressive designs. Silver winners are tremendously brilliant and exceedingly creative works that illustrate the outstanding expertise, talent, and acuity of their designers. Curridabat Ciudad Dulce Place Branding is expected to be a wonderful, showpiece work that is remarkably professional and profoundly innovative. This Silver A' Design Award-winning design is a highly notable, admired invention that benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Curridabat Ciudad Dulce Place Branding is a vastly envied creation that evokes desires, introduces positive feelings, and sparks amazement and wonderment.
Where to Get It
Strategic Brand Identity Design Services
We create strategic brand identities that connect organizations with their audiences. Our award-winning team combines deep research, creative excellence, and 25+ years of expertise to develop flexible visual systems that differentiate your brand in the marketplace.
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Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- Just as nature uses principles to function, develop and organiztion, a city can also use these principles to create community and develop. With this idea in mind, we chose aspects of harmony, organization, and logic that can be found in nature; such as fractal geometry, symmetry, spirals, stripes, fractures, etc. In the end, we chose the patterns of nature which show a coherent and organized growth. This reflects the methodology of Curridabat Ciudad Dulce. We also decided that the brand should be flexible so that it can express the diversity of the city's audiences and activities.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The use of circumscribed hexagon-shaped patterns of nature (as in beehives) is the axis on which the visual system is supported, which will facilitate the identification and differentiation of the brand in all graphic materials with which audiences interact.
- Tags
- Curridabat, Ciudad Dulce, Branding, Costa Rica, Place Brand, Kerigma Branding, Flexible Brands, City Brand
- Production Technology
- Once the essence of the brand is defined– which serves as the basis of the project – a divergent creative exercise is made to capture relevant ideas and visuals, which will then be tested and filtered in another convergent exercise, from which 3 different creative paths that work are defined. Finally, the most suitable one is chosen to meet the objectives of the brand. The Adobe Creative Cloud design tools were used for final realization.
- Design Challenge
- The challenge was to build a visual system that reflects a city that cares about the well-being of its inhabitants, not only humans, but also non-humans, such as pollinators (bees, butterflies and hummingbirds), as well as plants and trees, along with all other organisms, which are recognized as citizens. This new identity should reflect that the vision of development is inspired by nature, with a balance between the rational-scientific and the emotional-holistic elements. In addition, it had to be flexible enough to support the diversity of programs, projects and activities that different audiences interact with.
- Research
- Several in-depth interviews were conducted with key people in the local government. We review various demographic studies of the city, as well as documentation explaining the vision of Ciudad Dulce. We carried out an audit of the graphic materials and communicative efforts that had been used; also, we analyzed aspects of the city and its people, among other things. All this to fully understand the essence of the brand. The objective was to define a brand that adequately reflected the innovative vision that the city had been successfully implementing for several years. This defined the essence of the brand, the differentiating attributes, the values, the archetype of personality of the brand and its main purpose. From here, the design of the logo and the rest of the visual system continued.
- Inspiration
- Ciudad Dulce (Sweet City) is a methodology based on nature; its purpose is to promote a positive experience for all citizens, by seeking inspiration in nature. Thus, it is from that inspiration that this flexible brand arises; it is built from shapes in repetition, patterns, organization, and structures present in the natural environment. These can be found in something on a large scale, such as city topography, or something as small as the veins in a leaf or a fingerprint.
- Project Duration
- This project was developed in the city of Curridabat, in Costa Rica. It started in July 2018 and ended in April 2019. Since then, it has worked together with the local government of Curridabat to expand other derivative projects and to accompany them in the process of brand implementation.
- Operation Flow
- The vision of development in Curridabat Ciudad Dulce is part of the creative and generative logic of nature. This logic is reflected in everything the brand does to reach the diversity of the citizens. The hexagon patterns visible on all physical and digital graphic materials, outdoors, buildings, public furniture and more, make it easy for audiences to live the universe of the brand.
- Team Members
- Fabrizzio Mendez
Yesenia Salazar
Carolina Carrillo
Jeisson Sibaja
Gabriel Jimenez
Beatriz Aguilar - Image Credits
- All photographs by Fabrizzio Mendez
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