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The Cook Islands NEWS – As solid as the Islands we stand for.

The Brief:
Cook Islands News came to us looking for a refresh of their identity and a complete redesign of the layout and general design of their daily Newspaper.

The national daily newspaper of the Cook Islands is the country’s primary source of local news: relevant, factual and honest journalism with topics relevant to the people it caters for. These people include a combination of local readers (14,000), and visitors (5000 at any one time) to the Cook Islands. We developed an extensive brand strategy based on our communications and correspondence with the Newspaper’s managing editor, to discover where and how far we were going to take the new brand.

Our idea:
A true reflection of the People, Culture, Lifestyle and Islands; as solid as the islands we stand for.

The Cook Islands comprises of a large group of 15 islands with an assortment of media and publications. Cook Islands News prides itself on being accurate, honest and trustworthy, and on being a real voice for the people. They were a true reflection of the People, Culture, Lifestyle and Islands, but they were still feisty and uncompromising in their approach. With this all in mind, we set about implementing a design scheme to reflect this.

The Cook Islands, like all Pacific nations and cultures, has a rich history of traditional motifs, patterns and stories which are woven into the fibre and being of the whole community. We met with local master carver Mike Tavioni, an authoritative figure respected on the islands for his knowledge of Cook Islands art, culture and design. He brought us up to speed on the many different designs and also what was culturally sensitive or inappropriate. He encouraged us and gave his blessing to incorporate these traditional designs into our overall design.

To represent the People we used a variation of the pattern “Ni’ o Mango”, which symbolises strength, cunning, fearlessness, endurance and aggression. To represent Culture ‘Tikitiki Tangata’ was used. It symbolises the people of the Cook Islands united together through language, beliefs, religion and history. To convey the beauty of the Cook Islands lifestyle, the pattern ‘Ngaru’ was used. Traditionally it represents strength and peace. ‘Manu Tai’ symbolises safe journeys, bringing the Cook Islands together as one, and we used this to represent the Islands themselves.

A combination of these elements was crafted together into the final identity and rolled out across all the stationery and signage. We then redesigned the layout of every section – from the hierarchy of fonts, to the point size, kerning and leading of the body copy, right down to the weather icons. The result was that the entire look and feel of the newspaper came together into a bold new identity.

A special challenge of the exercise was to engage key staff (from a total of 19) in the process of redesign and to implement the new scheme without disrupting daily/nightly production of the newspaper. This required a parallel set-up, carefully timed cutover from old software (Pagemaker) to Creative Suite, introduction of a standard sixth column, new typography and new templates. To achieve this, we sent two designers to work on site with the client for several weeks.

Tags: Brand Strategy & Identity, Newspaper Design, Signage, Stationery, Typography

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