After intensive work, we at vandog agency love to renew our energy in peace, quiet and unity with nature. There is an ideal place in the dirty and bustling Kyiv for us — The Botanical Garden Named After Grishko, which has a very complicated and long official name and an even more complicated logotype.

As a result of another meditation among the greenery and floral aromas, we've got a super cool idea to make the botanic garden as great and peaceful as we see it for all the rest of Kiev citizens, to make it a place they would like to come. So we decided that we will do for the Botanical Garden what we do best — communication strategy and branding.

First of all, we asked ourselves, what do people think about the botanic garden? And here's what they think: Nothing has changed there since the times of the USSR and there is absolutely nothing to do out there. These were the objections we had to deal with.

Since the botanical garden is the most ecological place in Kyiv, and the eco-trend in Ukraine is only gaining popularity, we realized that this is the direction in which the future brand of the botanic garden should move. Therefore, we formulated the big idea as next: The new botanic garden is your ecospace.

Your ecospace means uniting people who do care what will happen to the planet in a hundred years perspective. This means a place with the main eco-activities in Kyiv and popularization of eco-trends.

We understood that it would not be easy to change the botanic garden so radically and immediately, so we highlighted several stages for these changes.

The first stage is a new positioning, name and identity. As it's said: as you name the ship, so it will sail. Therefore, to make the botanic garden a simple, open and friendly place for citizens, we shall simplifie its long and complicated name. We wanted the Botanical Garden to become what the people call it - the botgarden n.a. Grishko.

While searching for an organic form for the sign of botgarden, we had the nature as the reference and discovered the most harmonious figure — a pentagon. The pentagonal structure is fundamental in countless number of plants and flowers, and we noticed that the design of the main orangery of the botanic garden is also built on the basis of a pentagon. So we realized that this is exactly what we need. As a result — we built the sign on the same natural pentagon principle.

Colors and identity. We wanted the visual communication of the botanic garden to be simple, colorful and optimistic, so we chose an open color palette that will broadcast the energy of the new garden.

We have also created brand heroes from historical personalities of the botgarden n. a. Grishko: Mykola Kholodny, Volodymyr Lypsky, and Mykola Grishko himself. To make this party less boring, we added Oleksandr Fomin (there is another smaller botanic garden in Kyiv named after him, so they are some kind of competitors), who would be an opponent in the battles with Grishko.

And of course, we have created a cool eco-merch design, the sales of which will be an additional source of income for the garden.