ACCOUNTABLE NATURE
Rebranding
“Accountable Nature” is an exhibition of individual artist, Tomokazu Matsuyama. His bicultural environment of Japan and US triggers his works with blend cultures.
His unique application of Japanese typical palette and pattern as well as the urban theme creates his distintive styles. Among his works in the exhibition, there are not only large paintings, but also sculptures which echos to the concern of nature.
This exhibition was held in the Long Museum, Chongqing, China.
Rebranding Process
Rebranding Process
To start the rebranding, the most crucial thing is to analyze the distinguishing styles of Matsuyama. His works are mainly on canvas, painted either in acrylic or oil. The irregular shapes of the canvas provide more organic feels of nature to his theme.
Matsuyama talently blends his bicultural understandings into his painting series. He combines the techniques of traditional paintings with the western paintings and forms his own identities.
Here are some key words I conclude from his works:
Nature, forest, ecology, organic, bicultural.
I firstly decide the palette. Matsuyama is talented to use the palette from the traditional Japanese paintings (due to the limited techniques of dye, there are various distinctive palette for traditional paintings in each country). Therefore, I pick some high-contrast colors to be the base of the palette first.
As the event is holding in China now (and there are also Kanji, which means Chinese characters, in Japanese), I decide to use a bilingual system to design the mark. I arrange both two logos into a 2*2 grid, so they are more organized and unified.
I choose to deconstruct the mark in my animation. This idea comes form the concept of “accountble” from the exhibition — as nature is accountable, the mark is also “accountable”.
Here are some design samples in still images:
Breaking down the characters and letters is the main progress of developing this design. I try to deconstruct some strokes to imitate the fallen leaves and represent the topic. I have tried to abstract part of the square area in the characters (as you have seen, the gradient square), but finally I choose the version of the pure text, which can provide a better effect on creating animation.
Still, the gradient is kept to be the palette in the animation.
There is a interchangable system of the bilingual wordmarks.
Further Application
The logotype system has been applied to still and animated poster, screen animation, etc.
