AHOY - our top 20 - Breathe Cities

Breathe Cities

Branding the essential: pushing for healthy air in every city worldwide with a new logo, templated style guide and website

We created the visual brand and website for Breathe Cities, a new initiative by C40, Clean Air Fund and Bloomberg Philanthropies working to enable 100 major cities globally to halve air pollution and climate emissions by 2030, and galvanise action to deliver clean air worldwide. The goal was to raise awareness and mobilize a wide audience policy makers, prospective partners and grantees, and the air quality community. Our strategic insights ensured an authentic, strong, global and timeless brand that can be further developed as the program evolves.

Tonality

Positive, clear, inclusive – we created an upbeat identity that feels fresh like the air we all want to breathe

Brand strategy

We started out with a workshop, collaboratively debating and ultimately defining Breathe Cities' vision, mission and its brand promise, leading to our definition of its brand personality, tone of voice, and desired look and feel

Based on these insights, we created the visual brand

a dynamic yet timeless logo, a bold yet cool color palette, and modern yet approachable typography with a secondary font to accommodate non-latin languages

Design elements

Inspired by the nature of clean air, we played with the symbolism of 'wind', and 'windows'...

Clean air profoundly impacts health outcomes

and Breathe Cities is dedicated to illustrating the critical importance of cities the air we breathe.

Website design and content creation

We used a modular approach to the website, keeping text short yet insightful, and supporting it with uplifting, global and diverse photography and video with subtle animation

Introduction of Breathe Cities

inside the Clean Air Fund's 'pollution pods' at COP28