Alex Lash Design | Temperate

Background

Temperate was a decision-support tool for climate adaptation planners. The application guided practitioners through interpreting climate data. It was primarily aimed at users who lack a climate background, but need to make critical decisions for their constituent’s changing climate. Temperate guided users through the process of creating a “vulnerability assessment” for their community, suggesting how planners could take action.

Temperate’s brand is designed to be friendly and unintimidating.

Branding research

Before touching a pencil, I researched tools already in the climate space. This allowed me to get a better sense of what would make Temperate stand apart from the already fairly crowded landscape of tools. I discovered several patterns:

Unsurprisingly, blue and green dominate palette choices.
Tool names are typically very literal.
Symbolism included environmental symbols, like leaves, sun or water.
Marketing efforts tended to focus on breadth of data available.

Our team brainstormed name ideas, ultimately choosing to reflect the aspirational goal: to keep our world’s climate liveable, or temperate, for all of Earth’s creatures.

We went with the name Temperate, inspired by geographically temperate climates. Temperate climates are those without extremes of temperature and precipitation (rain and snow), which made it a perfect analogy for the goal.

Creating Temperate’s brand identity

Once we had our name, I sketched out many directions for the logomark. The name gave me a lot to stew on, but I was looking for a way to have a visual representation of our SaaS product that wouldn’t get lost in a sea of other climate tool logos. Early designs were all over the map – nothing I drew felt quite right for making our tool stand out.

Early sketches for Temperate’s logo.

The winning direction was that which created a mascot. The mark references the collie dog breed (most notably the border collie). Known as a herding dog, the concept was that Temperate herds information and climate data all into one place. Our hope was that Temperate would become adaptation planners’ best friend in planning for climate change. Tying it together with the name, a thermometer makes up the nose of our mascot.

Applying the brand

I developed a bright color palette and set the wordmark in Ideal Sans. We hoped to make Temperate continue to stand out by giving it a sleek but unintimidating, human look. The typeface being used throughout the application is Klim Foundry’s National.

The application itself retains the bright energy of the brand. As our target users were folks tasked with planning for climate change, but likely without a background in interpreting climate data, I wanted to ensure that the interface was inviting, friendly, and unintimidating.

The brand applied to various screens in the application.

To assist with quick recognition of frequently dense terminology, I developed custom iconography to represent the various hazards, community systems, and types of policies that could appear in Temperate. While users would be unlikely to recognize these oftentimes complex concepts by the iconography alone, they assist with quicker recognition and add an element of polish.

Custom iconography, largely designed by extending Font Awesome iconography.

Check out the final product by creating a free account. or learn more about the branding process from a blog post I wrote for Azavea.

Background

Branding research

Creating Temperate’s brand identity

Applying the brand

Other projects