The Herzegovina-Neretva Canton is a 4401 km2 Neretva River valley area, located in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Shift designed a comprehensive brand identity for the Cantonal Tourist Board, inspired by its distinctive visual features and the region’s exceptional amount and duration of sunshine.
The logo features a customized postal stamp form, which captures exactly that emotion we were trying to express through this identity. The postal stamp motif expresses the essence of the travel and leisure industry through a range of unique and often subjective associations for each person. It can be linked to postcards which travellers send to family and friends, as it symbolizes sharing of happiness during a visit to inspiring travel destinations.
Our client showed an understanding of the importance that brand communication plays in the region's tourism promotion success, as the key to making a tourism brand successful is to make sure it "speaks" to its international audience. Shift started with exploring and considering a range of feelings and words that tourists may connect with Herzegovina, followed by the features that Herzegovina is known for. We furthermore defined the Herzegovinian mood primarily by utilizing colours for symbolic effect. Using the colours blue and yellow to express the natural features of the river Neretva and the sunny climate helps the brand communicate even more effectively. One of the most valuable features of this visual identity is that the effect of this typographic logo is universal — even across languages. The "GO" within the name makes a recognizable verbal identity and it is emphasized as a universal call to action for the global traveller.
The new identity can easily be deployed over various media and is flexible to grow and develop as the brand grows and over time, create strong emotional ties for the target audience. The accompanying brand book contains elaborate detail to allow the client to produce an extensive range of promotional materials which are based on a standardized graphic system for the consistent treatment of images and content.
