Pickering Public Library Rebrand

SAFFY approached us to engage in a strategic rebranding process for their client, Pickering Public Library. Our goals were to: 

• support the Pickering Public Library in developing a new identity and brand story which reflects their overall/longterm vision; and
• ensure that the values from the Strategic Plan are reflected in the work.

Creating new futures

The Pickering Public Library (PPL) works in collaboration with its users to co-create and nourish a future in which there is room for everyone to grow and thrive.

The Pickering Public Library provides vitally important services to a broad, diverse and shifting demographic in the Pickering/Durham region. These services and programs, and, more significantly, the values and vision that underly them, disrupt, challenge and reimagine broader trends that further divide, disenfranchise and marginalize. 

Every time we cultivate, nourish or frequent the library as a public space, we engage in a radical act; we negotiate across difference, we recalibrate and broaden our horizons and sense of possibility, we challenge disinformation and build empathy. As publics, we work collectively with each other and with Pickering Public Library, to simultaneously meet today’s needs and transform and shape tomorrow’s possibilities.

This approach focuses on the outcome of these radical acts and positions PPL as a model for a preferable future (one that challenges the probable one). The library as it exists inherently disrupts trends; both personal ones (leaving space for personal transformation and growth), as well as societal ones.

Key questions:

• What is the power and radical potential of PPL?
• What role does PPL play in a changing city? A changing world? 
• What is the preferable future modelled at PPL?
• How does PPL work alongside and in collaboration with its users to transform tomorrow?

Key relationships: 

• “World as it is” and “world as it could be”
• “Probable future” and “preferable future”
• Library (institution) and society

In this approach, we focus on library as a site of transformation—as a door through which one shape is multiplied. This duplication suggests many future possibilities (for example: a safer future, a creative future, an equitable future, a curious future, a transparent future). What once felt like the end of a sentence (period), becomes an opening to a new chapter (ellipses).

The final work includes the redesigned logo suite (with a primary and secondary logo lock-up design) and brand standards guidelines.