Asialink

Asialink is Australia's national centre for engagement with Asia, based on the Melbourne University campus in Parkville.

Over the past 30 years, they have built deep expertise in the areas of business, diplomacy, education and the arts, each business unit leveraging their strengths to build enviable reputations in their fields. In 2024, a new strategy was borne: one Asialink that spoke in a unified voice, rather than a series of distinct operations that shared a name.

Getting the branding right was key to this strategy, and it was with delight that I assisted them with this.

A consultative process

I engaged extensively with the team before any work was started to hear about how they worked with the brand: both things they enjoyed, as well as their frustrations. There was a unified voice amongst the team that they wanted a brand that was flexible to their needs - with such disparate audiences and channels of engagement, the tendency had been to use in-house design capability to find new ways of meeting their needs.

I knew that if a single, unified brand was to work, it had to have multiple elements and ways of being applied so that everyone could get what they needed in order to communicate and connect with their market. I concentrated on building a flexible and distinctly ‘Asian’ colour palette, where primary colours could be combined with a range of secondary colours to create unique combinations. A typography system with four typefaces, rather than the standard two, so that the various business units could select fonts that best met their needs.

And a suite of simple ‘shapes’, driven from Asian cultural icons, that could act as simple elements when applied with block colouring, or as frames for a series of carefully curated photography from every corner of Asia. This was complemented by some simple patterns that could also be applied in a myriad of ways, bringing additional leverage to the dynamic brand.

This was some of the best fun I’ve had with branding in my whole career as a branding designer — thank you, Asialink, for the opportunity!