MDGA Brand Development

In 2020 I co-founded the Motion Designers Guild of Aotearoa, an organisation dedicated to bringing together the wide range of designers, artists and technicians that work in the field of Motion Design in Aotearoa New Zealand. Building on the community’s history of sharing knowledge and expertise, we wanted to create a local network that connects, nurtures and promotes local talent.

In order to help present ourselves as the professional organisation that we are, we needed a brand that would let people know we were reputable whilst still leaving plenty of opportunity for Motion.

Logo Development

By calling ourselves a Guild we bring to mind the history of artisans and merchants coming together to protect their craft and maintain standards, it brings to mind trade unions and working mans clubs. Monograms seemed to be the way to go but after going down this track I realised it would need to be modernised in order to reflect the digital nature of our trade and also to give us more opportunities for animation.

The final design, a abstracted monogram of MDGA, uses shapes familiar to anyone who has used a timeline. The implicit motion of the arrow shapes leaves plenty of room for us to bring it to life. The typeface is Geograph Medium from Klim Type Foundry.

For colour I went with navy, red and white for the hero version. These were chosen for their use on the New Zealand flag. I also devised a series of alternative palettes to give us options in appealing to different audiences and to give us flexibility in using them to for instance represent different kinds of events.