Safe City – City of Sydney

The City of Sydney has a range of initiatives and programs to tackle the city’s safety problems, such as domestic violence, social housing, alcohol & drugs and street safety. The lack of visual system made all these initiatives and programs inconstantly presented. The public was also unaware of the huge amount of effort that the City of Sydney has been putting in.

Safe City is created to group all these initiatives and programs under one umbrella program to ensure consistency and increase recognisability. Safe City serves as a signature to support the City of Sydney master brand.

A psychological approach

The brief was to design a wordmark using ‘Safe City’. Although ‘Safe City’ tells what the programs are about, the word ‘Safe’ to some people could be alarming and implies that the city is unsafe.

To eliminate prejudgement, the program should create positive impression that communicates the benefit of ensuring safety – it is about people’s well-being, a carefree inner-city living lifestyle. To build trust in the audiences, the wordmark should look friendly and approachable.

The direction is executed through the use of round typeface and colours. The composition of the words suggests cityscape.

Violet is chosen as a primary colour for its influence on creating harmony of the mind and the emotions, as well as its vitality given by the mix of red and blue.

Considering that it is very easy to lose consistency as the Safe City materials will be produced by different teams at the organisation, primary colour violet is strictly used across all marketing collateral. A selection of pastel colours is only used sparingly to differentiate the initiatives.

Note: Safe City is copyrighted and owned by ©City of Sydney.