ABOUT

Project Overview
In 2011, a notable Indonesian business magazine known as SWA Sembada contacted DM ID for a rebranding. SWA magazine is quite a legendary business magazine that started to launch in 1985. Their need for rebranding is caused by the emergence of international business magazines released in Indonesia such as Fortune Indonesia, Forbes Indonesia, and Bloomberg Businessweek Indonesia. Those international business magazine brands going local are starting to pose a threat to SWA magazine as those magazines come with more polished looks and consistent layouts. These magazines already have a cohesive design language across their products, communications, and media. SWA leadership and stakeholders are in fear that their outdated look and inconsistency would deem their brand irrelevant to the modern-day business magazine target audience.

Solution
In this project, I'm working at DM ID as a brand designer under a creative team led by a Creative Director. Our team started to do a visual audit of the existing SWA magazines and their whole brand identity, in this phase our team uncover the strength and weaknesses of the current brand identity using SWOT analysis. In contrast, our fellow brand consultants in the agency conducted a competitor review and mapped out the new brand strategy for SWA. All the findings and discoveries and brand strategies done by our fellow brand consultants are then compiled as a presentation known as 'Brand Essence', which contains a new direction for the brand. We as the brand designers use the brand essence as the groundwork to start conceiving initial concepts and ideas for the brand identity. I along with the other two designers started to design different routes for the new visual identity. Me contributing two design options, while my two friends contribute one option respectively. One of my two design routes was eventually chosen by the client as their main identity (and still in use until this day). We give a title to every design route we present to our clients. And the chosen design route is titled 'The Layers of Knowledge'. As the name suggests, I'm using a philosophy of the learning process, that one must acquire layers upon layers of knowledge until he/she becomes an expert. Layers of knowledge that we always find in a book, are the tool necessary for one's improvement. In terms of visual, layers also resemble magazine pages that stores knowledge, specifically business knowledge. I visually translated these layers of knowledge philosophy into a design language. Where the layers are represented as transparent shapes in a gradient red overlapping into one another, ultimately transforming the shapes into alphabet S, W, and A. This overlapping transparent visual element is later utilized as a design language, which appears cohesively across all media and communications.