Creating a Brand for the Urban Links Africa Programme for Connected Places Catapult
Urban Links Africa has been established by the UK’s national centre of excellence for urban innovation, Connected Places Catapult, to help partnerships between UK SMEs and South African/Kenyan organisations to develop innovative technology solutions to key urban challenges in some of Africa’s most rapidly emerging cities.
Logo
Multiple versions of the logo allow for proper use on a variety of background colours and imagery.
Where limited estate made the use of a full-size logo impossible, a simple text-based logo is used.
Colour Palette & Fonts
Using a warm tonal palette even for the cooler colours like grey and blue, the brand is approachable and reflects the cultural mix of the project.
Large headings use a clean, monospaced, stylised and slightly distorted font that confers a tech but also innovative look, while Paragraph titles & blocks use a slab serif font reminiscent of typewriters, that sets a more academic tone, but with a modern twist. It is an easy-to-read, dyslexia-friendly font that invites readers to jump-in. Finally, a more traditional sans serif font is used for references, graphs and footnotes, as its readability at small sizes and its cleanliness is welcome.
Webdesign & development
The website was prototyped by myself in Sketch, and was then shared as a functional mockup in InVision with an external agency, who could start the development of the platform based on a template the included all the necessary CSS.
The website was used for the launch of the programme up until the end of the Open Call (August 2020), from which a more complex platform was developed as a collaboration between Connected Places Catapult and TechCity Ventures, which you can visit at www.urbanlinksafrica.com.
Print Material & Documents
A series of reports, documentation and promotional documents were created, following the brand’s strong identity. Below is an example of a report created for the launch of the programme, which was unveiled at a public kick-off event at the Connected Places Catapult office in London.