History of Cuba Street and our alternative histories

We figured that if we were to rewrite the history of Cuba Street, then Krista and I would first have to be familiar with the current history and determine ways in which we could flip it on it's head. An example of this being, that in 1850 large scale land reclamation occurred therefore an alternative history could be if that reclamation had never happened and that part of cuba street would still be underwater, creating the theme "under the sea" 



After a lot of discussing we came up with the following 7 themes for each of the seven zones:

Upper Cuba Street - Bohemian Zone (feat. coffee bean stomping ) - references 1926 when Alfred Fagg started roasting coffee beans for espresso and dropped beans outside the door so when they were walked over, the aroma would be released.
Lower Cuba Street - Under the Sea (references land reclamation)
Glover Park Zone - Red light district "speak easy" style (references the saucy culture cuba st used to have) 
Leeds Street Zone - A technology focused zone - opportunities for digital art etc. 
Te Aro Park Zone - Pride Activation zone - as the royal oaks hotel had a bar upstairs which was home to a lot of wellingtons LGBTQI+ community. 
Hannah Courtyard Zone - Maori culture activation (if the Europeans hadn't have settled)
Swan Zone - The future - this zone would be home to what we envision the future to be like. 

We feel that these zones give a really unique interpretation of the past present in future, but fitting with Cuba Streets Brand, they do it in a very weird and wacky way.  We also opted for these zones not only to reference history, but also fit in with what Cato's original logo design was trying to do, which was be as inclusive to all communities as possible and encourage everyone to feel welcome and included. Cubadupa has always been a festival with something for everyone and we waned to enhance that. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Posters (Week 10)

Image
Moodboard:  Poster collection: We have decided to use posters to communicate the different zones further. We have continued the colours from the logo though to the posters and each zone that they belong too.  Our original concept was the bottom row of posters with the small squiggle then forming up from cuba dupas logo into a cloud of 'reimagining history' to represent the imagination of someone looking back into the past (Our Brand Essence). We then started playing around with different techniques to play with the colours, logo and illustrations and using different ways to apply our idea.  The solid background with the 'peep hole' of re imaging history was one of the concepts we decided to take further in week 10. We then started developing this further into animation.  This animation is to represent the different zones joining together again into the logo to represent they are all one.  
Read more

Interim presentation

Image
.   From our audit and talking with Jerry, we recognised there was a huge opportunity to focus on the history of Cuba street . As Gerry stated, this is a festival which could only take place on cuba st, it wouldn’t work in the middle of Ponsonby for example and we really wanted to emphasise this importance.However when talking with Andrew, he reminded us of the weirdness and wackiness of cuba dupa and how we needed to find a way to flip that on its head, which is how we came to our central brand essence In this initial conceptual stage, we wanted to connect to history and so opted for a clock to be symbolic of this. However, after producing these concepts, we felt that when abstracted out, it didn’t maintain this meaning. Which lead us onto exploring other ways we could convey the history of cuba street and came up with the idea for the alternative histories, we  notice that cuba street gets divided into 7 different zones for cuba dupa, so we opted for 7 dif...
Read more

Brand Identity (Blurring the lines)

Image
This week Holly and I have been looking at Cuba Dupas identity. We have decided to use animation on the logo to enhance it and help communicate blurring the lines.  The Animation we have so far is staying with the existing branding font colours and 'breaking news' vibe, however we have added an icon to create an abstract logo. The logo we have come up with is the street layout of Cuba Dupa and the different sections within these streets which will represented with different colours (pulled from the existing colours). The reason for the repetition of different fonts are to appeal to different audiences. Holly and I really liked the original logo however we understand why it was changed to a more modern type. Therefore Holly and I wanted to infuse them both. The repetition is to represent the chaos at cuba dupa. The next step for animation will be to have the different sections pull apart with their names on it allowing our audience to understand the lo...
Read more