The ANBG Visual Identity
Client: The Australian National Botanic Gardens
Year: 2025
Project Breif
The Australian National Botanic Gardens (ANBG) is the only botanic garden in the world dedicated exclusively to Australian native plants, a living archive of the nation’s botanical heritage. This project reimagines the ANBG’s visual identity to better reflect its vibrant, diverse, and evolving environment.
Centred around a dynamic identity system, the design draws on a curated library of stylised plant forms, from the bold Waratah to the delicate Lomandra, each derived from native species found within the Gardens. Using a generative code framework, these botanical shapes shift in position, rotation, and scale across applications, ensuring every touchpoint feels bespoke, alive, and deeply rooted in place.
The identity’s botanical colour palette pairs rich greens and earthy neutrals with vibrant floral tones such as Golden Wattle and Desert Pea, evoking the seasonal richness of Australian flora. A carefully balanced typographic system combines the elegance of Bodega Serif with the warmth and accessibility of A Day Without Sun, ensuring the brand feels both sophisticated and welcoming.
The project extends from digital platforms to physical applications, including interactive web elements and on-site interpretive signage, such as laser cut and full colour plant information plaques. This adaptable, cohesive system ensures that every interaction with the Gardens, whether online or in person, celebrates the beauty, diversity, and cultural significance of Australia’s native plants.
Process
The development of the ANBG dynamic identity began with early typographic explorations alongside a single plant, the Golden Wattle (Acacia pycnantha), Australia’s floral emblem. These first design stages paired experiments in type styling with the Wattle’s circular bloom structure, vibrant yellow palette, and symbolic value as a unifying and celebratory plant. Initial outputs included vector studies of the Wattle’s form and mock-ups for signage and print, which explored organic layering, bold colour, and the idea of an identity that felt alive and embedded in place.
As the project progressed, it became clear that one plant alone could not reflect the breadth of the ANBG’s botanical diversity. The Golden Wattle became the seed for a larger system, a curated library of stylised shapes drawn from multiple native species. Each form was refined for clarity and visual cohesion, then paired with a botanical colour palette designed for flexibility and contrast.
This colour matrix was developed to ensure harmonious pairings across the dynamic identity, defining which botanical hues can sit alongside each other and applying separating strokes where contrast is low to maintain clarity and visual balance
To bring this system to life, a generative p5.js framework was developed to randomly position, scale, and rotate these shapes while ensuring colour compatibility through the predefined matrix. This allowed for endless variation without sacrificing legibility or balance. The identity was tested across a range of applications, from digital interfaces to physical interpretive signage, including full-colour and laser-cut plaques. The result is a living visual system that evolves with every application, reflecting the richness and vitality of the Gardens themselves.
Outcomes
The Outcomes of this project included a dynamic identity, a website landing page, social media assets, a series of informational plaques and a brand guidelines booklet.
Dynamic Identity:
The dynamic identity formed the foundation of the project’s visual language, combining a curated library of stylised native plant forms with a botanical colour palette and generative placement system. This living framework ensured that every application, from print to digital, felt unique yet cohesive, providing the creative and structural basis for the website, social media assets, and informational plaques that followed.
Website Landing Page
The website landing page applied the dynamic identity through a generative header that shifted its botanical composition with each visit, creating a sense of freshness and movement. The layout integrated the ANBG’s refined typography and colour palette, ensuring brand consistency while guiding visitors seamlessly toward key information such as events, visiting details, and educational resources.
Social Media Assets
Social media assets leveraged the dynamic identity to create visually striking and varied content, with each post featuring unique botanical compositions generated from the approved shape library and colour matrix. Headlines and key messages were skewed along the contours of the vector plant forms, creating a sense of organic flow and movement that tied the typography directly to the botanical elements, maintaining brand recognition while keeping the feed visually engaging and adaptable for campaigns, event promotion, and audience engagement across platforms.
Information plaques
The informational plaques applied the dynamic identity in a physical context, pairing vibrant botanical compositions with concise, accessible plant descriptions. Each plaque featured species-specific colour combinations drawn from the matrix, ensuring clarity and harmony, and in some cases, integrated laser-cut elements for added texture and tactility. Typography was set for maximum legibility and consistency, allowing the botanical graphics to provide the visual dynamism while the text remained clear and easy to read in outdoor settings.
Style Guide
The style guide documents the visual language of the ANBG dynamic identity, detailing its botanical colour palette, approved typefaces, shape library, and application rules. It provides clear guidance for maintaining consistency across all brand touchpoints while allowing flexibility for the generative system to create unique, site-specific compositions.
