Branding and Identity for 'The Hive'

Harvest Digital Planning

We are Harvest Digital Planning an urban planning and technology company that specialises in communicating public sector urban planning, urban design and community projects via web-based media. Our services are aimed at making these projects more accessible to citizens by delivering engaging multi-media formats that help communicate information and encourage community participation online.

We are launching a new product – THE HIVE- an online platform that lets our clients (mainly public sector) take their projects to the internet to make their content more accessible and engaging as well as facilitating online participation. The platform is a planning specific CMS that lets users create and manage their own content and implement a range of functionality such as maps, polls, surveys, image galleries, videos, etc.

For example, the Hive might be used to create an engaging website for the development of a new transport plan, and the user might implement interactive web-mapping to show the key transport routes, as well as an online survey to help understand where people travel to and from.

We have named it The Hive as we want to convey the idea that are platform is a hub of activity where people come to learn and interact with the projects and each other. Subliminally, The Hive communicates the notion that we all work together to improve our surroundings and future.

We require a graphic design identity for the Hive that we can roll-out to subsequent marketing collateral such as a website, video and advertising flyers. At a minimum, the identity should include:
• a logo for The Hive,
• a primary and secondary colour palette and
• a range of typography that can be used for communications

We are also after mock-ups of how this brand might be rolled out across collateral like a marketing flyer and (optionally) a website. The mock-ups do not need to reflect real content, but rather demonstrate the implementation of the brand so we can get a sense of the proposed style. Preference will be given to submissions who take the time to go to this level of detail.

By way of example, the types of outputs we are seeking can be found at: http://identitydesigned.com/anders/

(this example is indicative only and we are not looking all of this)

Aesthetic.

We want the Hive to communicate a quasi-tech vibe as we are selling this as the future of urban planning. However, we don’t want to take this too far as most of our clients will be local governments who are fairly conservative. We also do a lot of community-based work so it needs to be mindful of this grass-roots element, meaning it needs to be an inclusive identity that is accessible to the lay-person.

Also, any branding should be compatible (but not too similar) to the existing brand of our business (Harvest Digital Planning).

We require all files as photoshop / illustrator file formats

We explicitly do not want to see an image of a bee used as a logo