Fresh From The Field: Body Island / Motu Tinana — By Design Dairy
How do you express embodied cross-cultural, physical narratives, empowered through the imaginative sharing of art and life in a brand identity? To find out Design Dairy danced us through the detail of their new work for Body Island/Motu Tinana.
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The brief
Body Island/Motu Tinana are a production and alternative therapy company that create multi-disciplinary dance performances and films, and offer community training and one on one healing.
Body Island exists to express embodied cross-cultural, physical narratives, empowered through the imaginative sharing of art and life. Creative Directors and partners, Kelly and Nancy, wanted to develop a new brand identity that would invigorate and better represent the diverse offering. Their brief to Design Dairy, was for a design system that felt energetic, modern and unique, one that could function harmoniously for the two main streams of their work: their artistic performances and film productions, and their health and the wellbeing offering.
The design response
Each Body Island work, whether a film or production, has its own story and distinct visual feel. This meant their design identity needed to be both impactful and subtle, adaptable enough to work well at any size and maintain its distinctiveness, without dominating.
Design Dairy approached this challenge with the principle of whanaungatanga foremost in their minds — expressing the interrelation and kinship between all elements of creation, within the living and spiritual realms. The strategy was built on bringing fluidity and tension into the relationship between the Body Island brand and the subject matter of any particular element.
This allowed each element — conceived of as a ‘performance’ of the brand — to reflect a unique perspective. The design identity would provide the stages for these performances, imagined as shifting, inter-related islands within a cohesive whole.
The idea of stages and performances steered the design development. The twin logo marks (one in te reo Māori, one in English) are the strongest expression of this idea. These marks needed to work at both a micro and macro level, both identifying the brand and creating a lens into the work. The type is formed from loose, island-like shapes that are imperfect and reflect the liminal space where bodies of water and land meet — and the push and pull this creates. They also echo the movements of human bodies, referencing the dance and performance roots of the organisation.
The colour palette is derived from the whenua, a natural and neutral yet vibrant expression of the land and its movements. It provides a soft stage upon which the colour and energy of Motu Tinana’s works can be performed.
The title typography uses Basis Grotesque Mono. Its angular rigidity contrasts with the fluidity of the logo mark, but we introduced some tension to this relationship through unusual typesetting and spacing, as if the precise shapes of the text are being pulled towards a more changeable state. It’s a little like the structural elements of a stage performance, the scaffolds and lighting rigs, designed to support the movement and enhance the depth of the performance.
Body Island are such a unique proposition — performers and health practitioners balancing social, cultural and economic objectives. They are an artistic endeavour, a health and wellbeing initiative, and a business.
This meant they needed a brand identity that could embrace this fluidity and tension. By creating an unconventional stage upon which the work could perform, we gave Body Island a new and exciting way to promote their multicultural and multidisciplinary works. While part of a whole, each performance can come from a different practitioner and have its own unique and localised viewpoint and creative expression.
The design team
Jonathan Templeman — Creative Director
Frank Turner — Senior Designer
https://www.designdairy.co.nz
https://www.instagram.com/design.dairy/
The client team
Body Island / Motu Tinana
https://www.instagram.com/bodyislandnz/
https://www.bodyislandnz.com/
