Identity, branding and communications pieces for AILA Awards.

Background

The Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) is a non profit professional institute and peak body for landscape architecture in Australia since 1966. AILA focus on quality public places, stronger communities, and environmental stewardship through ecological restoration. AILA runs an annual architecture awards and asked Relative Creative to design an identity that could be adapted over the next three years and across State chapters.

Our approach

Relative Creative established an identity that undergoes subtle changes between 2023 and 2025. The AILA awards branding celebrates both the natural world and the human intervention, management and custodianship of landscapes, offered by landscape architecture. The organic, natural world, is represented through the typography of the Year Element. This is balanced with the designerly typography for headers and body copy, with circles, curves and edges modifying an otherwise straight-up sans-serif humanist font. The DNA Element is inspired by the 23 different categories of the awards, corresponding with the 23 pairs of chromosones, commonly found in each cell of the human body. This is an intentional inclusion of the human intervention in the organic world through landscape architecture. Contrary to usually scientific visualisations of DNA strands, the DNA element in AILA branding includes the messiness and rhizomatic complexity that more closely represents what DNA might actually look like, and it reminds us of the presence of the human hand, as with the presence of the human, all 23 chromosome pairs, intervening in landscapes.

The branding colours comprise of the colours we often see represented in the many climate zones/classifications across Australia. Chapter colours loosely represent their geographic alignment with these climate zone colour classifications. Together, they provide a sense of the coolness, warmth, temperate and other breadths of Australia’s landscape.