Visual Identity Project
On 24 October 2022, Horsham Rural City Council approved a plan to introduce a new visual identity for the municipality across the next two years.
Why is a new visual identity needed?
The current purple and green logo featuring Mount Arapiles has served the organisation well since 2008, but it is time for Council to move forward, refresh and modernise its corporate identity.
What will it mean for Horsham?
This new branding will improve our image, give us focus and open up a new way forward in promoting our municipality as an attractive place to live, work and invest. It's about creating a new vision and key messages to communicate to visitors, families and industries to bring them to Horsham. The new branding will appear on locality council signs, building signs, websites, and all external correspondence.
How was the new design developed?
The design has evolved from the welcome sculpture recently installed near Sawyer Park. The Community Vision themes including the four pillars of sustainability, liveability, accessibility and community was the inspiration for the new sculpture, the new Western Highway entrance signs and now the new logo.
This is more than a logo, its iconic values are aligned to the things that set the Horsham municipality apart from other regions - our geology, agriculture, waterways and soils. The design expresses the way Horsham values its people and connection to the land. Themes of water, layers of woven landscape, light and shade, people, activity and movement. The shapes incorporate iconic Wimmera aspects such as reeds, crops and yabbies and the typography is inspired by stencilling on historic landmarks in the city and the lettering used on wool bales. The design is distinctive and creates a meaningful and long term legacy for the organisation and the community.
Mayor Gulline said “As a Councillor group we were very impressed with this (design) work, and we requested to have the designs adopted as our municipality-wide identity”
How much does the new visual identity cost?
The project will be funded across the next two financial years, with $287,000 to come from external Grants Commission funding in 2022-2023 and a further $500,600 allocated from the long term capital plan (brought forward one year to 2023-24). A large component of this expenditure ($488,000) is part of Council’s normal budget allocation relating to corporate identity (focused on signage replacement).
The funding of the re-branding does not impact in any way the committed budget for roads and other core services in the 2022/2023 budget.
When will the new branding be rolled out?
The switch to the new visual identity will not happen overnight. This is a large scale project encompassing many areas across Council and the implementation plan was yet to be finalised. Detailed work on a design suite of the new logo graphics will be the initial work undertaken to ensure that we have a flexible design suitable for all planned uses.
Horsham_Brand_presentation.pdf(PDF, 26MB)