A new world.

New Zealand Childcare Association: Brand evolution

Brand Creation + Integrated Campaign

The Challenge

Te Tari Puna Ora o Aotearoa / The New Zealand Childcare Association (NZCA) is a national organisation focused on providing new knowledge, fresh thinking and best practice for early childhood care and education. Our task was to create greater value and profile for their three key services – Teacher Education, Professional Development and Membership of the Association. By leveraging each other and their ‘parent’ brand we aimed to create a broader view of the offer and capability of the organisation to students, teachers and ECE centre owners.

The Solution

At the foundation is NZCA’s absolute commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi – setting them on a pathway that leads to understanding, sharing, care and trust between Pakeha and Maori and establishing an equal voice for each culture that is respected and heard. Te Tiriti o Waitangi, alongside Matauranga – the concept of knowledge and scholarship, and Te Puna – the metaphor of a young child, makes up the three prongs of the heru which represents the organisation in their logo mark.

The understanding of this provenance heavily informed not only the design output of our task, but also the process we chose to follow in reaching it, alongside the NZCA. We worked with Tim Worrall – well known consultant and Ta moko. Looking to explore the extension of the concepts of Matauranga, Te Puna and Te Tiriti into the naming, visual and written expression around the organisation’s three key services.

Together we developed three ‘metaphoric territories’ to describe the three key services and a forth that tied them together. These metaphoric territories were the genesis of a new name for the service in both Maori and English, the visual elements to support that name and verse to tell the story behind it. We created a colour palette to support each service, along with a kowhaiwhai in range of detail levels for dedicated use in communications around each service.

The Result

Launched in early 2012, it is still early days in gaging the effect of the design however engagement in all three services has steadily increased since launch. Our efforts with the NZCA and Tim Worrell have also been recognised by the Designers Institute with a Silver pin in the Best Awards Nga Aho catagory.

DNA are enormously proud of the results – ultimately presenting a truly bi-cultural presence to an organisation responsible for engendering that philosophy in future New Zealanders.