Dance House Helsinki aims to make dance part of the everyday life of Helsinki citizens - and the city of Helsinki one of the leading capitals of dance. The project has been talked for years, even decades. Now it finally becomes reality: the building project located in Helsinki's Ruoholahti district will be completed in the year 2020 and is targeting an audience of over 150 000 people every year.
Helsinki-based agency Prakt was asked to design the brand identity for the project. The goal was to create a flexible and easy-to-use identity to serve the needs of the audience, dance professionals and partners. Vividness, lightness, diversity and clarity were found as the keywords of the brief.
The solution is based on versatile monogram-like building blocks and patterns, that keep the identity coherent but resilient. Just like in the up-coming building - a combination of the old Salmisaari Cable Factory and the to-be-build new wing - these blocks combine two elements to form a new entity.
In these typographic elements you can see the foundations of a building, constructions of a stage or facades of meaningful buildings - like temples and sanctuaries. The pattern can be used as a grid-like vehicle or as a frame, that keeps the applications recognizable despite of what happens inside the frames.
The identity aims to give a solid foundation for a building project big like this: there's still room for interpretation and the element based-approach allows the identity to flex.
