MaRS Discovery District
A national innovation hub advancing research and entrepreneurship, brought to life through digital platforms and live experiences.
Project Overview
For more than a decade, we have worked alongside MaRS Discovery District, North America's largest urban innovation hub connecting science, technology, health, social impact, and capital. What began as brand implementation has grown into a long-standing creative partnership spanning hundreds of projects across digital, editorial, print, motion, events, and environmental design.
Our role is to understand the MaRS brand deeply enough to know how to use it well: protecting what makes it recognisable while continually finding new ways for it to remain engaging, relevant, and responsive to the work MaRS brings into the world.
The Challenge
Consistency is essential to building brand equity, but over time, consistency can easily become repetition. For an organisation built around innovation, standing still is not an option. MaRS needs to remain recognisable across a constant and varied stream of communications, while its identity needs enough range to respond to new ideas, audiences, subjects, and mediums. The work is a continual exercise in finding something new within an established system.
Our Approach
Our familiarity with MaRS means the guidelines are no longer simply a set of rules to follow. We understand the principles behind the system, giving us the fluency to know what should remain consistent, where it can flex, and when there is an opportunity to push it somewhere new.
Keeping the Brand Fresh
Across hundreds of applications, we continually find new ways to work with the ingredients of the MaRS identity. Typography, colour, imagery, scale, layout, and graphic elements can be recombined and reinterpreted depending on the message and medium, allowing individual pieces to feel fresh without losing the equity built into the larger system.
Putting the Brand in Motion
Motion has become an important part of how we extend the identity. For an organisation centred on technology and innovation, movement brings an energy to the brand that static applications alone cannot always provide. From digital communications and campaigns to screens, events, and environmental applications, we use motion to make the system more dynamic and responsive to the mediums in which it appears.
Visualising Complex Ideas
Much of what MaRS communicates begins with complex subject matter rather than an obvious visual story. We read the reports, work through the content and data, and understand the ideas before determining how they should be expressed.
Information design helps bring structure and clarity to that complexity. Through metaphor, unexpected imagery, illustration, typography, and graphic treatments, we find visual ideas that can make abstract topics more immediate and engaging without reducing the intelligence behind them.
Outcome
The longevity of the relationship has created a level of trust and creative fluency that allows the work to move quickly without becoming routine. Across hundreds of projects, we have helped MaRS build on the equity of an established identity while continually introducing new expressions, ideas, and ways of communicating. The result is a brand that remains recognisable without becoming predictable, evolving alongside the ideas and innovation it exists to champion.