Indigenous Art Gallery Branding & Identity Design
Munimba-ja means ‘welcome place’ and is an Indigenous run Aboriginal Art Gallery/Shopfront/Culture Place on the Sunshine Coast in Maleny – Jinibara country.
Tasked with the rebrand of the space as they aimed to unveil the new spelling of their space and for an overall branding refresh, we realised we needed to work closely with the team to be true to the story behind their space – this meant adapting our usual workflow and involving them more in the conceptual and creative process.
After some discussions, the team landed on exploring the concept of a meeting place between salt water and fresh water, as this directly spoke to the meeting of the two founders.
We went away and developed some initial ideas around how this could be represented in a brand mark, and we wanted it to be fairly simplistic but visually capture the theme of convergence and liminal places, playing with colour, symmetry and form.
Founder and visual artist Libby Harward then took our composition and translated the design using different mediums, and this is where the magic happened.
We LOVED the organic and imperfect shapes that came from Libby’s experimentation, and this inspired our three vectorised designs for final selection. Paired with each were clean typefaces to offset the organic brand mark.
After some tweaks, the final design was selected, and we established colour palette rules to distinguish between the Welcome Place and the Gallery Shop. The end result is a nod to tradition and the founders’ stories, with a modern edge.
We then rolled the branding out across signage, posters, a brochure and swing tags, and also built their website. We just loved seeing how the new branding could work in so many applications.