UrbanBetter
Two strong brand identities for a powerful science mind
Professor Tolullah Oni is a Public Health Physician and Urban Epidemiologist, with a key focus on designing health into cities.
The brief
Born in Lagos, it is Prof. Tolullah Oni’s dream to make the world a better place by using Africa as a benchmark of how to fix cities, through formulas and studies that can be applied worldwide.
In 2020, she founded UrbanBetter, a movement that builds healthy African cities and societies through expansive transdisciplinary partnerships and projects.
Prof. Oni has long had a significant impact academically on urban epidemiology on a global scale through her association with Cambridge University and the University of Cape Town – but without a distinct brand presence. Our challenge was to create a stand-out brand identity for a movement, incorporating the existing academic legacy, assets and values of Prof. Oni and her cohort of researchers (Oni et al). This included the dual name generation, the brand positioning, logo development, website design and the development of all social media profiles.
The transformation
Dual brands. Complementary identities
Using our strategic and design expertise, BBA set out to create a fresh and contemporary identity to establish a brand with two sides that endorse each other (UrbanBetter + Oni et al). The main goal was to solidify all the work of this incredible science brain into one space, with a distinct look and feel.
Universally relevant, rooted in Africa
Inspired by Adinkra – pre-colonial symbols from West Africa informed by universal aphorisms – we developed a logo mark for UrbanBetter that spoke to both health (through the visual of a cross) and urban spaces (through the visual of a dot encapsulated in a circle).
A seriously playful approach to platform design
We designed and built a digital platform that incorporated both the serious and playful elements of these brands. The navigation menu hides and pops back into place as you scroll, cleverly highlighting which page you’re on. And clever use of the website’s grid delivers hard-hitting facts in an eye-catching way.
The showcase of cleverness
Together, these two make a fine pair.
Two complementary fonts, Founders Grotesk and Heldane, were chosen to reflect the two sides of this brand, placing the movement and the practice comfortable side by side.
