Mekong Culture WELL
Logo design for a Michigan State University program about the Mekong River.
Logo Design
Awareness
The Mekong River is home to over 60 million people across China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. It's rich in biodiversity, but climate change, dam construction, and industrialization threaten both ecologies and livelihoods. Designing an icon for this project was initially challenging due to the diverse range of cultures involved. Early concepts featured curved forms symbolizing unity, but as the design evolved, it incorporated elements such as the Mekong catfish, the river, the rice plant, and the fisherman, reflecting the relationship between the river and its communities.
If you would like to learn more about this project, you can find it here!
Role
Logo Design: Developed an icon that embodies the project’s environmental values while giving it a human-centered appeal.
Challenge
Identifying Visual: The program had only a name and lacked signs that would help students and participants recognize or understand its purpose.
Diverse Audience: The Mekong River runs through multiple countries, each with distinct cultures and history. I aimed to avoid overly simplistic or stereotypical visuals, striving instead for an authentic, illustrative logo.
Approach
Shared Values Focus: Rooted the design in communal themes tied to the river: unity, sustainability, and cultural respect.
Review & Iteration: Coordinated meetings to refine early sketches and worked with a group of the project to discuss different perspectives.
Outcome
Clear and Meaningful Identity: Resulted in a dynamic, illustrative logo that resonates culturally and symbolically. The design integrates key elements like the Mekong catfish, river lines, rice plant, and fisher to reflect both the ecosystem and livelihoods. Earth-tone colors represent the sediment-rich river and the land it nourishes, offering depth beyond typical blues in water.
Client: Mekong Culture WELL
Art Direction: Amanda Flaim
Although we have different backgrounds and histories, our shared goal is protecting the Mekong River and promoting cultural understanding.
The Mekong Culture WELL stands for Water, Ecology, Land, Livelihoods. These vital terms served as a starting point for me to imagine visual elements that could represent the importance of sustaining the Mekong River.
Mekong Catfish
The catfish is native to the Mekong basin and is the largest freshwater fish, but the species is considered endangered due to overfishing and habitat loss.
Mekong River
The river itself are repeating lines and visually acts as an extension of the catfish's tail and boat for the fisher.
Rice Plant
This grain is an essential source of food for over half of the world and nearly the entirely of Asia. In many cultures, it symbolizes fertility, abundance, and good health. Vietnam's largest rice-producing region is also along the Mekong delta, where the river flows into the South China Sea.
Fisher
The last visual element of this design is a fisher to represents the livelihoods dependent on the Mekong River.
In most cases, we associate the color blue to bodies of water. However, the Mekong River is an important source of moving sediments downwards to the delta, creating more land and replenishing soil to Cambodia and Vietnam. With the rise of dams and industrialization along the river, less sediments are being allowed to flow downwards.
While incorporating blue would make sense for a project focused on environmental sustainability and a river, I ultimately decided to utilize earth tone colors.
