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About
Wilder Institute / Calgary Zoo was undergoing a complete overhaul of its Asia zone, rebuilding almost all of the habitats, interpretive installations, and the landscaping of the entire side of the park.
As a part of this, they sought to rethink the naming and visual langauge of the zone for the next few decades to come.
With changing attitudes & understandings of cultural appropriation and pastiche, a key directive was to develop a look and feel that avoided cultural representations and understandings of Asia — once commonplace in these sorts of public institutions — instead focussing on the ecological and geographical characteristics. This is, of course, a Zoo.
As established by the brand strategy, the single word this brand needed to embody was ‘Vastness’, capturing the breadth of different ecosystems, climates, and geographies across the largest continent, from the Southeast Asian tropics to the high alpine of the Eastern Himalayas.
We developed a name suggesting a place limited only by one’s own imagination; as endless as the landscapes themselves, setting this with custom woodcut-inspired letterforms.
To bring this name to life, we sought an illustration style depicting Vastness by way of chaos — everything, everywhere, all at once. We see layers upon layers of abstracted shapes of flora found in the animals’ natural habitats; trees, shrubs, bushes, flowers, fruits, leaves. Within those we find arrays of textures; bark, petals, stone, rock faces, root systems, rivers. These cues and nods show the importance of the immediate environments the animals live in, rather than focusing entirely on the animals themselves.
Each of these shapes and textures were handcut from paper and scanned in before colourizing, creating a wonderfully organic, loose, simple and playful Matisse-like feeling, leaving ample room for visitors’ imaginations to fill in the gaps as they move through the park, learning about each habitat.
