Niedersachsen.next – Brand Architecture & Corporate Design

Niedersachsen.next

Niedersachsen.next GmbH brings together the State of Lower Saxony’s initiatives in digitalisation, innovation and skilled workforce development. Over time, a large number of independent presences had emerged – but with no unified image externally, just a collection of stand-alone offerings. Our brief: create one recognisable brand out of many senders, without stripping each initiative of its own identity.

Rather than starting with designs, we began with the brand itself: in an upstream brand workshop, we developed a positioning and set of values together with the key stakeholders and derived a brand architecture that gives each initiative its own space while contributing to a shared overall presence.

From the strategy, we developed a visual identity with a clear colour and imagery system. Its most distinctive element is the ‘Fast Forward’ arrow – a scalable, language-neutral symbol that works equally well on a beach flag, a poster or a navigation bar. We rolled the system out consistently across print and digital: physically via posters, roll-ups and beach flags; digitally via a WordPress multisite that brings the decentralised areas together under one roof and connects to the innomatch matching system.