VIDA Masterplanning + Design
VIDA is a small studio that works on big projects. From their offices in Australia and Costa Rica, they offer masterplanning, landscape architecture, and design for large-scale, conscious, and sustainable developments. Developments that range from hospitality to communities and residential works. It is a studio that lies between extremes, in that point between emotion and analysis, artisanal and corporate, small and large, reason and heart. With that balance as their starting point, they generate strategies for their clients, strategies that are born from the conviction that good business is part of good design —and that projects that make people feel good are good business. This is how the studio creates projects with great aesthetic, sentimental, environmental, and economic value.
VIDA’s conflict arose when attempting to communicate the amplitude of their services. They needed to change the erroneous perception of their studio as no more than a landscaping studio.
We created a design that reclaimed the organic aspect that is so fundamental in VIDA’s processes. We gave it order in the same way that they do for their own clients. The use of handmade elements and experiments with organic materials (even branches and rocks) give way to a brand that manages to create a balance between VIDA’s focus on both nature and analysis.
A sober and organized logotype is offset with a rough and imperfect isotype: reason and passion, technology and nature coexisting, as they do in this team’s essence. We see how clean, white backgrounds and simple fonts reflect their pragmatism and analytical efficiency. Handmade strokes and textures express the perfect imperfection of the natural processes that inspire them.
The graphics are applied to a wide variety of elements; from merch focused on a life of freedom, surf, nature, and work, to artwork for the studio’s walls. Their graphic identity immediately expresses their complex character in their physical and digital presence.
Visual and photographic language is also key. The type of photography we propose for VIDA —although always sensitive and well-curated— has to feel honest and close. It includes both the big picture and the small details, illustrations and blueprints, people, and the environment they draw inspiration from. In design, just like in nature, everything is connected.
The intention is to express the intelligent sentimentality that defines the studio. The balanced passion that allows them to see the potential of every project. The ability to be pragmatic dreamers: of understanding what is before they figure out what could be. That deep connection with nature and its systems, with our own humanity, and with the constant progress that allows us, through better planning and conscious action, to do things well.