New adventures for an education brand...
Venture Thinking makes ideas fly. Heather MacRae, also managing director of Ideas Foundation, has an extraordinary knack for putting together expert teams for regional, national and international education programmes specialising in space, science, enterprise, art and maths.
I designed the brand identity for the consultancy 15 years ago. It has been a partner on some stellar projects, including Space to Earth Challenge. Now there’s a new project, Venture to the Deep, and it’s been time for a brand extension.
As it had been a while since we last reviewed the Venture Thinking identity, that’s where I started, tweaking the logo for social media and shifting the typography to Google fonts, to modernise the look and feel of the identity and make it easier to communicate consistently across different media.
Then I delved into Venture to the Deep. Explorer, adventurer and video game inventor Richard Garriott will be travelling to the deepest part of the world’s oceans, the Mariana Trench, in a specially-constructed submersible and the project is asking students for cinquains (five line poems) to take with him.
Picture research and images gathered-in from Heather showed that there would be some compelling imagery to use. So I looked for ways of using the Venture Thinking typography both as conventional logos and as overlays and containers for pictures. The Vs now float from the ocean floor, like plants or sea creatures. And there’s a deeper, greener colour, in a new palette of blues and turquoise.
The design results have gone into logos, new guidelines and document and presentation templates.
But I didn’t stop there. At concept stage I played more broadly with where we might take the logo and graphics next. That’s created a design system for extension brands. So when Venture Thinking makes its next leap, the identity will be ready to follow.
More on Venture to the Deep here.
