A city branding project
This proposal of a graphical identity for the island of Nantucket is the result of the combination of a series of exercises, by which the values and ideas that we assign to a location are explored to synthesize them in a clear concept.
1. Color
Nantucket is a location that almost owes its existence to the whaling activity of the past, and its chronicles are collected or imagined in many literary works. We can find stories about Nantucket written in classics such as Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”, or in more recent titles such as Philip Hoare’s aquatic trilogy (“Leviathan or, The Whale”, “The Sea Inside”, “RisingTideFallingStar”). To think of Nantucket is to think of the sea and the whales. A bottle of wine and its box as vehicles for the color proposal. Grey: the whale. Blue: the Atlantic Ocean.
2. Typography
Precisely because Nantucket is a common inspiration in literature, these posters are composed with a classical roman typography. In the first, the opening lines of “Moby Dick” are the rope and the harpoon that ends up piercing the whale. In the second, the coordinates of Nantucket in the map substitute its own outline.
3. Materials
There are two materials that accompany the history of Nantucket: iron and wood. Ships, rowboats, barrels, the houses in the seafront, the harpoons, the tools for hunting and for the processing of whale oil, etc. Two wooden tiles pierced by two pieces of iron. A dot and a dash. The possibility of building messages wherever we apply this system thanks to a universal language: Morse code.
4. Space
The sea is formless. No one can say they really know it, and it is challenging to think about it without getting lost in its dimensions. There is also no entry and no exit; it is an all-encompassing whole. This proposal of space as a lure to visit Nantucket is an allegory of the sea: no doors, no fully identifiable shape, susceptible to be interpreted by whoever and however they want.
The sea is formless. No one can say they really know it, and it is challenging to think about it without getting lost in its dimensions. There is also no entry and no exit; it is an all-encompassing whole. This proposal of space as a lure to visit Nantucket is an allegory of the sea: no doors, no fully identifiable shape, susceptible to be interpreted by whoever and however they want.
5. System of images
How to imagine Nantucket in the distance that separates me from it? Thousands of miles that can only be shortened by reading its stories and looking at photographs. The cold winter and its dense fog gradually clear up until the arrival of summer, when Nantucket becomes its own parenthesis: a vacation destination for people with high purchasing power.
