Innative

The challenge: designing a visual system, branding and naming for a low-impact ecotourism project in the Colombian Amazon.

Graphic design for an ecotourism brand: In this project tourism is seen as a way for providing wellbeing to nature and to people that inhabit it. Innative is an online platform that communicates low-impact and community tourism projects in the Colombian and Peruvian Amazon. Communities that participate in this projects are changing their livelihoods, from an extractive economy to a model that is focused on nature conservation within their territories. The communities that are part of the project are changing their livelihoods. They are making a great effort to leave behind an extractivist economy for one of conservation. Were they seek to protect nature and the living beings that inhabit it.

The Entrópika foundation contacted us to assess them in the communication of their project. The brief stated the need of developing a branding with visual parameters that helped communities reach new travelers for their ecotourism projects. These projects are the result of their 10 year hard work with Amazon indigenous communities regarding nature conservation.

Co-creation

Our challenge was to define, hand to hand with the communities, the essence that characterized their projects, and to specify what they wanted to communicate to travelers that visited them. To make sure we told the story each community wanted to tell, part of our team travelled to the Amazon to meet the communities. We held brand workshops along with the communities, co-creating on the communication strategy for their tourism associations. We worked in an interdisciplinary team of sociologists and designers, as well as biologists from the Entrópika Foundation.

During the process, the communities decided to represent their tourism associations with species that were native to their territories. During the workshops we defined the values of Innative as platform for all tourism associations. We also defined the brand DNA of each of the community tourism projects. The naming of each association was the comon or indigenous name of the selected species.

We designed a system that allows each community to have its own identity and yet is part of a unity with other projects that are part of Innative. The system is inspired in traditional visual elements but connects smoothly to modern aesthetics. The center of the whole project, and visual identity is people. During the process we took a human-centered approach, so we also portrayed it in the visual identity. We proposed a graphic design where people would always be present, inviting others to support the change for the conservation of biodiversity in the Amazon rainforest. Ultimately, Innative seeks to invite others to be part of the change, by traveling in a sustainable way that retributes to nature while experiencing an authentic and unique experience in the heart of the Amazon Rain Forest.