We were engaged to redevelop Mount Gambier’s brand identity, which hadn’t been refreshed in more than three decades, and to reposition the region as a progressive, world-class destination to a local, national and international audience.

Comprised of iconography reflecting a mountain, trees and water, Mount Gambier’s previous logo communicated the region’s natural beauty in an overly literal way. While famous for its iconic Blue Lake, there’s much more to Mount Gambier; as South Australia’s most populous regional city, Mount Gambier is home to a thriving community and is a significant hub of economic investment.

The rethought logo still leverages the natural wonders of the region, drawing its colours from the pre-existing elements of the mountain, trees and water, but does so in a much simpler and more abstract way. This simplicity provides flexibility, allowing the introduction of photography to highlight more of the region’s personality, and allowing for a broad range of applications: from small lapel pins, to large signage installations.

The brand identity’s colour palette drew inspiration from the Blue Lake’s famously ever-changing colour. This was brought to life with a series of blues forming the brand’s secondary colour palette, allowing corporate stationery, publications, and signage systems to share this ever-changing characteristic of the Blue Lake.

A secondary, multicolour palette was also introduced to provide a more extensive and exciting palette to draw from when needed, such as across tourism-focused campaigns.

A key factor of the project's success was delivering a brand identity that could be easily managed and implemented autonomously within the organisation. To achieve this, we developed an overarching design style and designed a series of user-friendly templates, allowing the decentralised stakeholders to develop their own communication pieces while maintaining consistency with the broader place brand.

One of the project’s major deliverables saw the design and development of Mount Gambier’s website. Previously, separate websites existed for both council and tourism, but after extensive consultation and analysis of these two websites, a large overlap was found in their aims, content and audience. So, rather than overhaul both websites, the two were merged into one central, authoritative source of information on the city. The resulting website clearly and intuitively directs users to relevant information, whether they are citizens or potential visitors.