UKRAINE INDEPENDENCE DAY

NATIONAL BRANDING

DESIGN

BACK TO PROJECTS

While creating the concept of an open identity for the main national holiday we had to consider a few crucial criteria:

And, of course, it had to manifest our idea and vision of Ukraine today, at this milestone in its life.

CHALLENGE

Comprehensibility

Utility

Balance

Concept

It had to be in the broadest sense universally comprehensible for people of all ages, cultural backgrounds, tastes and localities: from East to West, urban and rural as representing a holiday common to all.
There is one country but our citizenship is vastly different.

It had to be both modern and also beckon traditional roots and familiar cultural codes: a balance between contemporary and traditional approaches.

It had to be easily recognizable, reproducible and integration-friendly for open use by anyone: businesses, media, government bodies, ordinary people.

So basically it should be a single form – a logomark that would work independently in any material and would not force people to sift through the lengthy logobook and choose among many variations, before putting one on a leaflet somewhere in Kolomiya.

In search of a symbol to tick all these boxes, we focused on the Flower.

solution

More importantly – a flower ideally translates our vision of Ukraine: a nation as a living entity, a single whole made of such, sometimes dramatically, different "petals".

The nation that grows and develops continuously, needs care and responsible handling, calls for attentive treatment and nourishment to thrive and reach its full bloom and potential.

Firstly, it is familiar to everyone while its shape is simple enough to fit anywhere.

Secondly, flowers are inherently intertwined with Ukraine and our ornamentation, symbols and culture.

"who we are"

Moreover, these 30 years did not happeny by chance – they are the result of ideas, aspirations and actions, sowed by previous generations of Ukrainians, having sprouted 30 years ago and which have been growing ever since, under our watch.

Symbol

Since flower petals mirror what was put in soil and what nourishes the flower, the petals of the logo bear stylized tridents as the main symbol of the nationhood – the ultimate accomplishment of the years of independence.

Logo

And this is another essential aspect of our 30 years of independence – the coexistence of the unique communities as a single nation.

And at this point we stopped and pondered.

Yes, we're all Ukrainians, and Ukraine is one, but unbelievable diverse at the same time - after all, we have as many as 25 regions, all with their peculiarities and cultural backgrounds, some so different from one another.

To highlight it we created 27 unique flowers for all regions and two cities – Kyiv and Sevastopol to use together with the national one.

As the reference for these flowers we chose the palette and emblems of the regional flags as the epitome of each region (it turned out in the process, many people had no idea those flags even existed, so here we unknowingly performed educational function as an added benefit).

For them we added two more alternative structural shapes for ease of use and variability.

regional logos

Cherkasy region

Chernihiv region

Chernivtsi region

Khmelnytskyi region

Zhytomir region

Dnipropetrovsk region

Donetsk region

Kharkiv region

Kherson region

Kirovohrad region

Kyiv region

Ivano-Frankivsk region

Luhansk region

Lviv region

Mykolaiv region

Odesa region

Poltava region

Rivne region

Sumy region

Vinnytsa region

Volyn region

Zakarpattia region

Zaporizhia region

Ternopil region

Kyiv

Crimea
(we chose to use the flag of Сrimean Tatars)

Sevastopol

MATERIALS

For the presentation of our concept

we created the video, that was premiered at the Annual Presidential Press-Conference and announced by the President V. Zelenskiy himself, and subsequently went on to be aired by national TV-channels and rotated on digital screens.