ŁÓDZKIE – BEST VISUAL IDENTITY FROM THE PUBLIC SECTOR

The project was recognised with a bronze medal in the Transform 2014 competition in London under the “Best visual identity from the public sector” category.

THE CHALLENGE

The Łódź Province as one of the larger and more important ones in Poland already had a logo. The logo was an abstract overformalised symbol allegedly referring to the art of a Polish constructivist, Katarzyna Kobro, who was artistically active in Łódź. Her art, however, has remained quite hermetic and unknown to broader public. The logo was strange, detached from reality, extremely complex and completely alien to the districts and communes the province is made up of. Any attempts to build the brand of the Łódź Province with it were doomed to failure. Towns, communes and districts did not feel their link to the province as an artificial administrative area. Any initiatives to make them widely use the Łódź Province logo failed because their individual identities and coats of arms seemed more important to them.

The client was not even aware of the problem as they asked bna/ to prepare a development strategy and ...to equip it with the existing logo, standardise the existing identity system and possibly extend it. A challenge for us in this case was to persuade the client that a new strategy and diagnosis of the problem required a complete change of the concept, function and design of the brand – a whole new identification system. At the conceptual and execution levels, our challenge consisted in developing a vision and a role for the Łódź Province brand that would be attractive for the entire region, for the cities and towns that have never identified with the Łódź Province before. In practice, this boiled down to a model of a group identification system that would be a hybrid for the entire province, all cities, towns and landmarks of the area.

RESULTS

The rebranding generated strong enthusiasm among cities and towns, districts and communes that immediately accepted and identified with the platform and the brand identification system for the first time in the province’s history. Implementation of the system does not pose any problems. To the contrary: all the evaluation surveys conducted at implementation events (Roadshow Consultation, Regional Mixer, Łódź Province Promotion Forum) indicate the system was received very positively.

See more at behance.