Rare Diseases South Africa

UNI

The conceptualisation process for Rare Diseases South Africa (RDSA) began by creating a Brand ID for the NPO and then looking at this alongside the brand’s key issues; trying to guide a solution for these issues according to the brand’s positioning and values.

The concept chosen to best communicate this was, UNI. UNI looks at the idea of trust, community and rarity by playing on the first three letters in ‘unique’ and ‘united’ as well as standing for ‘you and I’. This concept plays on the idea of a ‘unique you’ whereby, essentially everybody in life wants to stand out from the crowd and be different in some way - while still fitting in or being accepted by this crowd. UNI explores the concept of everybody being unique in their own way while still being a part of a bigger unity of unique individuals - a rare community of people. This further evolved into the tagline, “You and I, Uniquely United” with copy reading that RDSA creates unique communities made up of rare people. This resonates with RDSA’s mantra, “Individually we are rare, collectively we are strong.”

Our visual execution of UNI works toward communicating the key issues of creating a sense of belonging to and making individuals feel good as potential supporters of RDSA; as well as convincing corporates that RDSA is a legitimate, trustworthy brand that will help them succeed in partnering with RDSA.

In order to best communicate this, we developed a visual concept called mimesis through the use of origami. Mimesis is a play on the word mimic which is essentially what origami does – represents something ordinary in a uniquely developed way. This medium of origami represents folding to create, interconnect and build which is essentially what RDSA is trying to do in terms of creating, building and connecting communities of trust and rare individuals.

We also used the imagery of the South African 'big five', made up of the lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and the African buffalo. Seeing all five animals on a game drive is considered rare which links back to our project whilst still speaking to our South African audience.

In this team I took on the role as art director and lead graphic designer.

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