Client
Newcastle City Council
Category
Environmental Branding, Art Strategy
Location
Newcastle
Working closely with landscape architect team LDA Design, United Creatives were appointed to conduct an Environmental Branding exercise within the city of Newcastle. This concluded in a toolkit of illustration relevant to the city and which formed the basis of a design code for new public realm.
Environmental Branding is the process of acknowledging, preserving and celebrating the spirit of a place. Collectively, it is the set of design aesthetics, visual signatures, materials and approaches to architecture and design that together make our cities unique and give them their character and identity.
Our work is a visual commentary on what makes Newcastle Newcastle.
Colour and Materiality
A colour and materials palette was sourced by celebrating the colours already strongly associated with Newcastle, these were the colours that constantly appear and reappear across the city.
Working to ensure a common palette is adopted where possible, within new schemes strengthens a sense of place and forms the 'visual glue' between different urban areas within a city centre.
When faced with the selection of new materials for public realm projects, we worked to create a synergy between colour and materials that collectively forms a go-to palette for a wide variety of landscape architecture uses.
Environmental Branding Overview
Part design toolkit, part aesthetics overview and yet all ‘Love of Newcastle’, this book links out to a set of drawings resulting from our Environmental Branding process as well as setting out guidelines for signage, communication and an arts plan.
Celebrating Craft
The hot riveting process is riveting. A glowing red hot stud is pressed into steel to form a mechanical bond. These little full stops of confidence welcome visitors to Newcastle and have done so for decades.
Introducing this visual signature into the city centre street furniture ties it into with the much loved bridges that span the Tyne. Durable, proud, resilient, Newcastle.
Celebrating Arhitecture
A visual celebration of the organic that is present in built-form, the domed patterns that appear on important city buildings are celebrated by being used in new paving and landscape schemes.
Adopting local and relevant graphic styling into a new landscape architecture design language reinforces links to the past whilst paving the course for a brave new design code.
Georgian Vibes
The Georgian architectural style is synonymous with Newcastle; sturdy, generously proportioned, built to last, celebrated, robust and confident.
To blend old with new, many of these motifs can be repurposed into contemporary schemes to give them new life and relevancy. With a requirement for new visuals signatures in public realm design, seeking to showcase forms in the fine grain detail of landscape architecture sensitively unites the city.
Light Columns
At United Creatives we relish tough graphic challenges and the lighting columns for Northumberland Street are just that.
The project demanded a fusing of lighting, art and environmental branding with a rigid grid system for nighttime LED lighting that in turn conceptually echoed the organic wooden posts that guide pilgrims out to Holy Island at low tide.
