Japanese Botanical Gardens Re-Opening
Japanese Botanical Gardens are a local botanical garden that houses plant specimens from all around Asia, with a focus on Japanese culture and botany. The gardens have been closed during the world pandemic and have been using the time to make renovations and add new sections to the garden. To commemorate their re-opening, they wanted to have a fresh look created including a logo, poster, social media advertisement and some new merchandise for the gift shop featuring the new logo and look.
The goal of the new designs are to make people aware of their re-opening and renovations, and generate curiosity amongst their new and returning customers. To that end, I created a fresh logo based on the famous cherry blossoms in their garen and around the city, and a poster using a bonsai style tree floating in midair. I wanted the poster to be somewhat surreal to invoke curiosity in the user, and to also pay homage to traditional Japanese art.
For the logo itself, I used an energetic typeface to represent the excitement of the re-opening. I was inspired by traditional Japanese woodblocks to create a flat, stamp-like logo. These combined together created an easily read, versatile logo that can be used on a variety of applications and still stand out beautifully.
For the commemorative merchandise, I created a pattern that could be used on multiple pieces. It is shown here being used on a water bottle. I also decided to re-purpose the imagery from the poster to create a second merchandise design that can be used on other flat merchandise pieces in the future. Using the water bottle and notebook as the starting pieces for the new designs are meant to inspire customers to purchase them and use them while they explore the new sections of the garden as well as the revitalized and renovated sections.
Moving on to the social media marketing, I used different elements from the new designs to create an eye-catching 3 panel advertisement announcing the re-opening. The goal of the advertisement was to let current fans of the garden get familiar with the new branding, and to announce to current and new customers the special events that were planned.