City of Sydney: Brand Systems, Campaign Roll-Out & Community Engagement

The brief: placemaking & community building at city scale

Every output has to satisfy stakeholders across the organisation. It has to be accessible to communities that speak different languages and read at different levels. It has to hold quality at billboard scale, on a bus shelter, in a report and on a phone. And it has to arrive on a date that cannot move, because festivals, launches and council calendars do not shift.

Across 10 years we have never missed a deadline.

01 Sydney Lunar New Year Festival

City-scale cultural campaign. Creative direction, cultural consultation, photography, campaign roll-out, partnership collateral.

The City of Sydney Lunar New Year Festival is one of the largest celebrations of its kind outside Asia. For the Year of the Dog, the brief was to design the full creative system for the city-wide campaign, and ReCo’s concept was selected through a highly competitive creative process. Alongside the creative work, ReCo provided cultural consultation to the City, ensuring the campaign honoured the traditions of the festival while speaking to the whole city.

We built the campaign around the emotional pull dogs already have on people, then made it specifically Sydney’s by casting local community dogs as the campaign’s faces. Each dog was scouted for personality, then matched to reflect the demographic and cultural breadth of the city itself.

Outcome. The most sought-after festival campaign by event partners. Genuine engagement from local community participants. A city-wide creative system rolled out across multiple touchpoints and channels, from rail platforms to street furniture.

02 Wasteland

Public installation and awareness campaign. Creative direction, hero art, videography, campaign roll-out.

Wasteland was a 24-metre installation suspended through 3 levels of Sydney Customs House, made from 120kg of marine debris collected from The Great Barrier Reef. Funded through the City of Sydney Art & About.

The strategy inverted the usual environmental campaign. Rather than confronting audiences with the problem, we gave them something they wanted to photograph, then let them discover what it was made of. Drone capture, indoor and outdoor, was designed into the work from the start to extend reach beyond the physical venue.

ReCo led creative direction across an end-to-end build with product designers, installation designers, local manufacturers, filmmakers, volunteers, and the City of Sydney Art & About program manager and marketing team.

Outcome. 50,000+ in-person visitors and 300,000+ online reach. Pioneered commercial marine debris recycling in Sydney. A modular installation system reconfigurable across future sites. Evidence that large-scale public interventions can shift attention on environmental issues without relying on confrontation.

Read the full case study →

03 City-wide street artist hoarding system design

System design, artwork design.

ReCo has been involved from day one of the City of Sydney Artist Hoarding program. Over time that hands-on process became a designed system: a framework that lets developers apply approved artwork to their sites easily, while holding both the City of Sydney brand and artwork integrity.

Outcome. A live citywide public art program turning construction hoardings into commissioned artwork. An effective design system that protects the city’s visual quality during periods of construction disruption. ReCo’s own creative work for Mundane Matters was selected for the inaugural round of public hoarding artworks alongside other Sydney artists.

[Read Mundane Matters case study →]

04 Resilient Sydney

Brand system and strategy delivery. Branding, program hero art, publication system design, accessible design.

Resilient Sydney is the city’s long-term strategy for community wellbeing, climate preparedness and metropolitan resilience, delivered in partnership across 33 Greater Sydney councils. Strategies of this complexity usually look dense and bureaucratic. The brief was to make the work readable, beautiful, accessible and trusted by every council and its community.

A full-year program of brand refresh and strategy design. Every output had to clear the Resilient Sydney committee sign-off.

The work included a refreshed visual identity tying nature, community and city outlook into one system, 4 flagship report designs translating complex resilience data into editorial layouts, partner-facing promotional materials, Sydney Town Hall launch event design, and a brand template system.

Outcome. A complete brand and strategy system delivered. 4 flagship reports translating complex data into readable, accessible publications, well received by council members and partners. A self-extending brand template system the team now uses to produce future materials independently.

05 Sustainable Sydney 2030-2050

Publication design and accessible design for the City’s flagship long-term plan.

Sustainable Sydney 2030-2050 is Sydney’s flagship long-term plan, setting the city’s vision for sustainability, resilience, transport, climate action and community wellbeing through to 2050.

ReCo delivered the design for the plan, translating a document of significant length and technical complexity into something a resident, a councillor and a partner organisation can each read and act on. Much of this work is not glamorous: it is careful content mapping, hierarchy, legibility and accessible document design, the invisible craft that decides whether a major strategy is actually read by the communities it is written for.

Outcome. The City’s flagship plan delivered as a public document that works for every reader it was written for. A fully accessible publication that meets government accessibility standards across print and digital, and a design language consistent with the City’s wider strategy suite.

06 City aquatic centres

Branding, campaigns and environment design across the City’s 6 aquatic centres. Seasonal campaigns, digital advertising, signage and wayfinding, on-site collateral.

Across a 5-year engagement, ReCo worked as the ongoing design partner for the City’s network of 6 aquatic centres, venues that serve everyone from lap swimmers and learn-to-swim families to casual summer visitors.

The work covered every touchpoint of the visitor experience: seasonal campaigns that shifted with the swimming calendar, digital advertising, signage and wayfinding through the centres themselves, and the day-to-day collateral that keeps 6 busy public venues communicating clearly.

Outcome. 5 years of continuous delivery across 6 centres. A consistent visual language across every venue and channel, from poolside signage to digital campaigns. A working rhythm the City could rely on season after season.

Project impact

Beyond the numbers. A record of holding deadlines, navigating multi-stakeholder approvals, and producing work that lands with both senior city leaders and the general public.

Key takeaways

Accessibility is the invisible craft. A strategy only works if every community can read it. The City’s flagship plans are shaped so the content itself is accessible to every reader, at every literacy level, in every format.

Engaging content earns attention at city scale. The Lunar New Year campaign worked because people wanted to engage with it. Sydney’s own community dogs gave the city something to love before it gave them a message. Content people genuinely respond to travels further than any media spend.

Editorial content is the key to rolling out government strategy. Resilient Sydney and Sustainable Sydney 2030-2050 succeed as documents because dense, technical strategy was treated as editorial, structured, paced and written for the reader. Editorial content done well is what turns a strategy from a document that exists into one that gets used.

Good design brings out the best of the content. Design is not decoration on top of the message. It is what makes the content and the communication work.

ReCo for the City of Sydney: FAQs

What has ReCo delivered for the City of Sydney?

More than 100 projects across 10+ years, spanning creative direction, brand systems, city-wide campaign roll-out, public art and installation, flagship strategy and report design, and accessible design. Work includes the Sydney Lunar New Year Festival, the Wasteland installation at Customs House, the city-wide street hoardings program, Resilient Sydney across 33 councils, Sustainable Sydney 2030-2050 and the City’s aquatic centres.

How do you make a long strategy document readable and accessible?

Treat it as editorial design rather than document formatting. Resilient Sydney’s 4 flagship reports translated dense resilience data into editorial layouts, and Sustainable Sydney 2030-2050 applied the same thinking to a plan running to 2050 — much of it careful designing and accessible document design. The test is whether a resident, a councillor and a partner organisation can each read it and act on it.

What makes designing for a city different?

Approval and accessibility. Every output has to clear stakeholders across departments. It also has to be readable by every community in the city and hold up at street scale as well as on a page.

Can ReCo work within an existing government brand?

Yes, and often the deliverable is the system itself. The street hoardings program began as ReCo adapting individual artworks to hold City of Sydney brand integrity, and became a framework that lets artists submit directly and the City approve once rather than approving every submission.