Finding Guarda’s inner potential.
Set in the mountainous region of Serra da Estrela, Guarda’s Polytechnic Institute suffers from many challenges: a serious demographic problem, low investment in the region and a increasingly competitive landscape in the higher education market.
In a challenging project that lasted over a year, Huse worked closely with Instituto Politécnico da Guarda to find out how the instituition and the region stand out from the crowd.
How can we remain relevant for the new generations? How do we attract students when we are so far from the bubbling coastal cities? How do we fulfill our role to actively contribute to the economical and social development of our region?
After a sturdy research phase where we interviewed the main stakeholders and looked at the higher education sector in detail, we focused on two main competitive advantages: the richness of the land with all it has to offer and the practical nature of the coursed offered at Instituto Politécnico da Guarda. In a world where educational systems are evolving towards hybrid models of theory and practice, polytechnic education is more relevant than ever.
All these elements set the foundation for a new positioning and narrative: the concept of “o potencial do nosso interior”: In portuguese the word “interior” has a double meaning as it can refer to one’s inner potential but also to the regions of Portugal that are not on the coast.
From there we focused on bringing Guarda’s inner potential to the new brand’s visual universe. We created a logo system by separating the 3 words in the brand’s name, in order to give each one the space it deserved.
We got inspiration from the landscape and how it is affected by the changing seasons to develop a chromatic pallette and a photographic style that defined our brand’s ecossystem.
Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter were each assigned to a specific communication target in order to inform communication behaviour both verbally and visually. The result is an incredibly rich and colourful universe, poetic at time and almost austere at others.
SCOPE OF WORK | Research | Strategy | Design
CREDITS |Brand Strategy: Huse Innovation & Paula Delgado | Brand Identity: Paulo Proença | Brand Ecosystem: Huse Innovation, Paula Delgado, Paulo Proença