The Commonwealth Parliamentary Association is an organization that exists to promote parliamentary democracy throughout the commonwealth and the rest of the world. Based in Westminster, London, the CPA has a network of offices throughout the Commonwealth. The organisation releases a lot of different material, including a website, newsletters and other printed matter.
When evaluating the existing brand and the accompanying materials, it was decided that there was a lack of consistency across the brand, it seemed old fashioned and there were no hard and fast rules about how it should be applied. On the positive side, the CPA was a widely respected body and had many years of tradition behind it.
After this evaluation process, we all decided that a new brand should be developed, which kept hold of the strong elements; the tradition and trustworthiness, but which also felt more up to date and modern. The balance between these was the key. We needed to reflect the colourful, global nature of the CPA. We decided to use the flags of the commonwealth to show this.
A single montage was created of the flags of the Commonwealth with the idea being that this could be used as a simple system through which web banners, book jackets, business cards and other imgery for outputs could be generated. This would give us the colour and freshness that we wanted to inject into the brand. We also designed a new logo which had a traditional, more historical feel. The combination of this new logo and the colour generated from the flags gave us the combination of tradition and modernity that we were looking for. We also provided the CPA with rules and guidelines on how to apply their new brand.