On the Clock: Celebrating
Building a brand identity for supporting marginalized communities
On The Clock is a non-profit design studio, established to serve smaller and marginalized communities. The studio offers design services tailored to meet the specific needs of these communities, with the aim of empowering them to grow and prosper.
With Koto Methods our campaign is an address based on rethinking, re-contextualizing, and having further conversations on the health industry's approach by creating education tools and strategic ways for design to become progressive and serve as a means to help and understand chronic diseases.
Contributions
Tools
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Our challenge was to launch Koto Methods as a campaign that aims to reorient the health industry. We needed to create a branding strategy, a strategic position and visual identity that would help the campaign to build towards creating content and direct education resources. The goal was to modernize the current systems of communication and packaging within the health industry, with an initial focus on diabetes. Our aim was to ultimately helping to accelerate the transition of general education of both understanding and supporting those who are experiencing diabetes.
When we were creating initial concepts for our brand, Koto, we took inspiration from the Japanese musical instrument with movable bridges and 13 strings. We wanted our logo to reflect the curved shape of the wordmark, so we incorporated an arrow and a person into an iconic symbol that could be moved in any direction.
We designed three distinct variations of our logo, each intended for use in different contexts such as large spaces, websites, social media, digital, or print. The rounded shapes and forms of our brand system should be easily recognizable at different touchpoints.
Complementing our logo marks is the Urbanist typeface. Friendly, unique in its designed forms and rounded shapes, but is not inherently corporate, but is constructed to be geometric and accompanied within the packaging and design systems.
Our goal for Koto's packaging was to stray away from the traditional, clinical look of industrial medical packaging. We aimed to develop a more friendly and approachable visual system that simplifies the process of taking medicine and makes it more understandable for diabetics and for wider audience to understand those precautions. We designed the visual system in a way that incorporates minimalist design and typography. This ensures that all touchpoints of the packaging are easy to access and use.
We also created a manual system that can be used across all touch points, whether digital or print. This system provides instructions for diabetic individuals and also helps people better understand diabetes in general.