The emblem is one of the first things we consider when planning every Ubuntu Summit. This may seem like a minor factor, but it’s essential. We wish our emblem to mirror the Summit’s location and to provide a way of its cultural identification in an inclusive and welcoming approach.
We enjoy design challenges like these and the places they take us. However, they’re tough and take time. How do you symbolize a location and a tradition, with maybe many years of history, in three or four colors at a size that may print on a T-shirt or beanie?
Design by geography
For our two earlier summits, we used well-known monuments from the cities hosting the occasions: the Charles Bridge stretching over the Vltava river in Prague for 2022 and the Freedom Monument in Riga last year. We felt these appropriately labored because they were identifiable, seemed good at a small scale, and represented neighborhood building, inclusivity, and help.
Emblem is a go-go
Nonetheless, this year proved a little bit more difficult. The Summit is being held October 25 to 27 in The Hague, a beautiful metropolis on the sting of the North Sea within the Netherlands, not too removed from Amsterdam.
The Hague has some magnificent buildings; we used this as inspiration for our first strategy.
Our first design was for the tower on the Peace Palace, which is part of the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice. This seemed pretty good, but it was barely too slim, and at this scale, we didn’t suppose the tower was distinctive enough.
We then tried utilizing the Ridderzall (Corridor of Knights), which is part of the Binnenhof and one of the oldest parliament buildings on the planet. This was a more in-depth match to our earlier designs, but there were additional elements to attempt to simplify while being distinctive enough.
Lastly, we thought we’d attempt our most blatant concept: an outline of one of many windmills you discover in The Netherlands. We appreciated this quite a bit, and this design was near being chosen; however, finally, we thought it was a little bit predictable and pedestrian. It’s a bit too protected. As a substitute, we needed to attempt one thing bolder, and in all our analysis about The Hague, we stored seeing photographs of storks…
Hovering to new heights
Due to the encompassing wetland, storks are interwoven between The Hague’s historical past and tradition.
Photographs of storks consuming an eel have even become the town’s logo of luck and prosperity. There’s one within the metropolis’s coat of arms, for instance, and this gave us a novel alternative to create an emblem in an approach we’ve not tried earlier, based mainly on some wildlife.
As quickly as we noticed this sketch, we all agreed it was each a refreshing change and one thing very Ubuntu-like. It represented each the tradition of town and the tradition of our neighborhood.
This was the thought we needed to pursue further, and it’s the thought we’ve finally been engaged in ever since. And now it’s completed.
After seven different revisions and a few essential tweaks to the eel (ask us for the bloopers, privately), we currently have our Ubuntu Summit emblem design, 2024, for The Hague…