Toronto Mesh
Print/Brand Communications
Print/Brand Communications
Print/Brand Communications
Print/Brand Communications
Print/Brand Communications
Print/Brand Communications
Print/Brand Communications
Print/Brand Communications
Print/Brand Communications
Designer(s)
Henry Wilkinson
Duration
13 Weeks
Recognitions
Toronto Mesh aims to help communities create better networks with open source and peer-to-peer technologies that promote digital literacy and privacy. This brand is focused on helping continue our core values of community involvement, peer learning, and civic participation. As of 2021, most community networks and mesh-centric community groups do not have established sets of brand guidelines — at least not ones that are publicly available. With the creation of these my goal was to set a new standard for what outward-facing material from these organizations can look like and give further credibility to community networks overall.
Logo
For this brand I wanted to avoid any explicit references to the wifi logo which is the obvious first image that comes to mind when thinking of wireless networking. Toronto Mesh is seeking to build a community network, not just give away free wifi. The logo system comprises a typographic logotype as well as a logomark, both of which share the same overlapping circles with randomized colours inspired by the overlapping nature of mesh networks, dot matrix printers, and the many multifaceted community driven approaches to building networks in the commons. The logomark also contains a fun puzzle, see if you can figure it out yourself by writing out the logo as binary converting spaces to zeros and the filled in dots to ones! You have to use a binary to ASCII converter website to understand it... unless you're a robot ;)
Brand Guidelines
Every good brand has a robust set of guidelines behind it! This document covers everything from logo and colour usage to defined typesetting styles for titles. Being a community group based around open-source it only made sense for Toronto Mesh to use open-source typefaces! I selected Space Grotesk for titles and display use cases, and Inter for body copy and pretty much everything else. Inter is quite a neutral choice on the surface but its large character set and great Opentype feature support makes it a compelling one... In my opinion anyways, some of my classmates have certainly created edgier fonts! Colours are defined in a myriad of ways including both 8-bit sRGB and linearized floating-point sRGB, I've never come across other guidelines that do this and have had many scenarios working in applications that only accept linear values where I have wished that these just be made available and now they are! For a closer look at the brand guidelines you can download the pdf at http://wilkinson.graphics/downloads/toronto-mesh-brand-v001.pdf
Diligently Dithered
From the start I wanted to use this project as an opportunity to investigate methods of conforming images to fit an organization's branding. Lots of brands already do this with patterns, overlays, and with duotone colour processes, but none of these approaches seemed to be a good fit for Toronto Mesh. A friend of mine had recently done a deep dive into different dithering algorithms and he inspired me to look closer at this method of image filtering. This brand uses Bayer matrix ordered dithering to manipulate nearly any photo into one that has a unique filtered look and conforms exactly to the organization's colour palette. I'm really happy with what it adds to the overall aesthetic of the organization as well as the process outlined in the guidelines created to reproduce this styling in a predictable and accurate way.
