TASMANIAN

Creating a universal story-telling device for Tasmania

In 2018, Brand Tasmania was established as a branding authority to identify and tell a better, more realistic story about the state of Tasmania, Australia. Their mission is to inspire and encourage Tasmanians in their quiet pursuit of the extraordinary. From here, the TASMANIAN brand was born.

One of the first steps in this task was to define a unifying cultural expression for the state – for it’s people, products, experiences and places. The ‘TASMANIAN story-pairing’ is the backdrop for Tasmanian people and their stories. As Senior Designer of this project, I found a way to “show” charismatic Tasmanians and their ventures, what drives them, their struggles, their successes, their spirit of invention and cooperation. The story-pairing concept harnesses the power of place/person/product and carries the duality of struggle and flourish, or light and dark, or survival and abundance that underpins many Tasmanian stories. 

In a story-pairing there’s a vertical split in the word TASMANIAN between the final ‘A’ and the ‘N’, with a different image on each side of the split. The image on the left in the story-pairing conveys the inherent beauty of the environment, mixed with the challenge, struggle and perseverance that our ‘place’ requires of us. This aligns with the TASMANIA component of the wordmark. On the right of the story-pairing is the culture: what we do and create, how we contribute, aligns with the N. (The TASMANIAN brandmark is an adaption of the brand created for Tourism Tasmania.) The TASMANIAN story-pairing is a carefully considered device that is  unifying in its essence and purpose, yet can be used to tell an infinite number of stories and visually express the indivduality of each Tasmanian. It is this story-telling that allowed Tasmanians to see themselves reflected in the brand of their place.

Photography plays an extremely important role in the project – in content, composition and style, but especially in potency. Representing a mixture of custom-shoots, privately negotiated acquisitions, the photographic selection and pairing required lengthy and careful knowledge of the people who create them and where and how they do it. This then set the visual tone for the project going forward as the TASMANIAN brand has been used by Tasmanian people, experiences, products and businesses.

Accolades

Finalist: City Nation Place Awards 2020 
(Best use of Design category)

Winner: City Nation Place Awards 2021 
(Best Place Branding)

Article on Story-pairings here.

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