Third City are a new PR and communications agency that have years of experience in their industry. They came to us as they needed a visual identity that represented this. The name Third City is an idea that comes from the Italian renaissance. Our approach was to visually marry the ideas of the cultural change and upheaval of the renaissance with the growth of cityscape and of their company.
We felt that the epic and painterly qualities of the renaissance forms and landscapes and the visual language of geographical diagrams and maps could be combined to create an organic and emotional visual identity.
To represent the growth of the company over time, a logo form was created that would grow over the space of a year across multiple media, from online through to 365 unique business cards. The life state of the form for each day of the year is printed on the business card for that day. This was achieved using 3D modelling techniques, the latest HTML5 and Javascript online coding and a new digital print process that allows for uniqueness in mass print production.
The growth of this organic form begins life as a simple, organised and primitive shape and every day that goes by, a new set of connecting lines and a point is added to the form. Over time this form goes through periods of upheaval and growth pains that can be seen in it's increased tendency to extrude and behave unexpectedly. At it's most mature stage of growth, the form becomes more organised once again, but more complex and circular in shape, eventually resolving into a stable sphere.
For the logo typeface we chose the Gotham font for it's association with architecture, cityscape, avant garde and it's clean and iconic uppercase letterforms. The identity colourway is intended to be as vivid, clean and simple as the companies approach to idea generation in PR and communications. The approach to layout was centralised but with the use of offset and overlayed grids, to reference the complex but often centred approach to layout used in Italian rennaisance paintings. This painterly aesthetic can be seen in the use of lighting, texture and vivid but sensitive use of gradients within the form. This can be seen most effectively in the business cards where they have achieved an almost watercolour quality.
