ASEAN DRR - Building a Brand

Building a brand by picking up the pieces of existing brand elements that had initially been designed by different people and companies.

It is a time consuming task and sometimes involves more time than to build a brand from scratch, but to be honest, it as well is a common case, since branding services are most commonly required when there is something missing. This is a showcase of an NGO brand named ASEAN DRR (Disaster Risk Reduction by Integrating Climate Change Projection), and how we brought order to their branding project.

Step 1 - Start with Understanding the Whole Project

Always know what you are working on. See design as problem solving, to solve the problem you need to understand everything about the problem.

First, we started to get our hands on project materials where the content was summarized in forms of factsheets and youtube videos, containing all information such as project outline, activities and goals. Giving our creative team the homework to understand the project inside out and to see the whole project the way that the IGES Team would, those that were managing and conducting this project.

With internal creative discussion, we opened discussions and tested our understanding and corrected each other's understanding of the project during several meetings. During the concept phase and inspiration phase (moodboarding) we as well had a look at similar projects out there and got information and samples on how they present their content on websites and factsheets.

Step 2 - Building a Brand Vision

No Vision, no connection to your target audience. The vision should be a common goal that is engaging to your target audience.

To be able to build a vision for a brand project, you need to see the brand from the eyes of the target audience and draw an image of how you want the brand to look.

In the case of this brand project ASEAN DRR, we saw the desired perspective from the ASEAN communities and the governments with the aim to build strong communities. So we built the vision around "Resilience of Communities against the impact of disasters." By imagining nature, local communities and portraits of people.

It was the idea to reflect the beauty of the local community and its people and the nature surrounding them.

The main points to understand in the project scope in order to continue to an actual branding concept was the following:

Specific Objectives
Key Activities 
Outcome 
Project Structures

Awareness, to give Sense to a Vision

Life needs to make sense to make someone happy, so does a brand or a project.

It is common sense that every company or organisation has a problem that they are trying to solve so this is the step where we basically define it in detail in a statement:

"We are living in a changing world, where nature is unpredictable, and disasters are on the rise, especially in developing countries where communities are on their own to adapt."

Vision

The vision statement is becoming the vision where everyone in the organization and as well the people participating can relate to.

"Our Vision is to support Communities to build resilience to a changing world, changing nature. Easing the effects of disaster. We believe that together we can adapt and build resilience for all of us."

Crafting a BrandHook

BrandHooks of course need to be created. It is a representation of the values that we mentioned before.

In the case of ASEAN DRR we represent nature and satellite photos to connect to the respect of nature. Drone images and videos of communities and portraits of individuals with "Together and We"

Step 3 - Building a Brand Base and Adapting all Elements

Of course with all the brand fundamentals in place we still have the situation where we have a bunch of elements that are not flowing together and miss the unity to be represented as one brand.

A started but not fully finalised website 
Some PDFs of factsheets with content 
A logo which misses the connection to value and vision 
A video that lacks the message.

Therefore we tried to start to pick out all the good elements we had and tried to design a base for the brand. In this case, we picked out the good things to start building a brand with the first visuals and structure of the brand, which in this case was the website.