Public Realm Lab
Following a number of collaborative community-based projects between the two practices, Susu Studio was engaged to refresh Public Realm Lab’s communications – an increasingly pressing task with PRL under renewed attention and accolades for their outstanding work with built environments.
PRL has long been challenged with defining their broad range of services and niche perspective. As they put it, “we offer a new way of understanding and creating places. By joining the dots between strategy, culture and place we create settings where your people thrive.” The next challenge was how to communicate this idea through their own identity.
The identity was built on deep strategic foundations with detailed workshopping and discussions, akin to PRL’s own work. Boiling down their services and approach lead to an unconventional solution for their identity which carefully balanced notions of purposefulness, insight and complexity with adaptability, unconventionality and humbleness.
With the visual language representing new and contemporary design thinking, it was important that the application of the identity (through presentations, documentation, social media and website) embodied PRL’s trustworthiness and authority in problem-solving for complex projects; Projects with urgency, places of cultural significance and audiences often with low design literacy.
Core to the visual language was a custom-built typographic system that visually emulated PRL’s mission of ‘joining the dots between strategy, culture and place’. Elongated dots were arranged at three different angles and constructed into alphabets to represent these areas of their practice. PRL’s mantra that ‘place is never neutral’ was also baked into the type as alternating arrangements allow the logo to adapt and present in new ways.
— Services
Identity
Publication
Printed Collateral
Web Design
Illustration
Custom Typography
Social Media
— Credits
Type: Gruppo Due
Photography: Tom Ross