Innovation Bay

Innovation Bay Rebrand

Creative Direction:

Kevin Tran

Strategy:

Damien Attenborough, Kevin Tran

Design:

Rekha Dhanaram, Kevin Tran

Year

2023

Established in 2003, Innovation Bay is a community of founders, investors and leaders from across Australia’s startup ecosystem. We were invited to rethink their branding to reflect who the organisation had grown into after running for 20 years.

A priority was bringing clarity, structure and meaning to their identity architecture – creating a family of four sub-brands for their communities with flexibility to grow in future.

WORLD OF STARTUPS

Brand Strategy

Creating connections is at the heart of everything Innovation Bay does, so we built their brand identity to reflect the relationships, networks and infrastructure they provide.

The Innovation Bay logo is a monogram of the organisation's initials and communicates the three fundamental values of the brand: connection, collaboration and inclusivity.

After interviewing community members, investors, advisors and the team, one particular insight stood out:

“The audience we’re talking to is not just founders. It’s CTOs, comms people, anyone who makes a startup successful… If you drew a Venn diagram of all of that, in the middle is Innovation Bay."

This led us to our brand idea, ‘World of Startups’, which reimagines the tech ecosystem as a landscape of natural environments where different groups can meet and collaborate.

Logo

Creating connections is at the heart of everything Innovation Bay does, so we built their brand identity to reflect the relationships, networks and infrastructure they provide.

The Innovation Bay logo is a monogram of the organisation's initials and communicates the three fundamental values of the brand: connection, collaboration and inclusivity.

Communities

We used this metaphor to create evocative names for Innovation Bay’s communities based on their audiences and characteristics:

🌱 Canopy – The rainforest is a diverse, fertile environment with potential for rapid growth. Here you’ll find early-stage founders trying to elevate their startup to new heights.

🏔 Summit – The mountains are a formidable environment where you’ll find only the most intrepid – leaders of Australia's most established tech ventures.

🌅 Horizon – Far in the distance, you’ll find angel investors looking ahead for exciting new opportunities.

✨ Aurora – Up in the atmosphere, playful lights in the night sky are a social playground for VCs.

Masterbrand

In our visual system, we use a ‘connected grid’ as a structural guide, which underpins everything we design, informing the proportions of our layouts, how we use graphic assets and the geometry of our brand symbols.

Geometric shapes from the brand logos become abstract expressions of the interactions taking place within the communities. Each sub-brand has its own individual identity tied together by a consistent design language.