Next Iteration of Sammaan’s Identity & Signage

The last edition of the Project Sammaan newsletter saw Codesign finalising and sharing the BoQs for all 14 typologies of the community toilets. That task, once complete allowed us to focus on the more pressing communications challenges, namely the character designs for the facilities’ signage and the main Project Sammaan identity itself.

Male clothes washing sign

The character designs that have been finalised represent the people of Odisha in a stylised manner. Care has gone into selecting the physical features, as well as the attire and cultural cues such as jewellery and accessories depicted in the character designs. The primary aim of the designs has been to develop characters that are approachable and friendly, while still exemplifying values such as cleanliness and responsibility that the Project Sammaan facilities hope to inculcate.

Female facial expressions

Building on the finalised characters, the next step for us has been to expand them into a complete set of poses and facial expressions to represent and illustrate the various features of the Project Sammaan toilets, while ensuring the appropriateness of the poses and maintaining a consistent character design. While the characters themselves were created in collaboration with an external illustrator, all iterations on refining the character designs and creating relevant posed images of the characters is being conducted in-house. This character development is underway and will continue to be refined over the coming weeks.

Another milestone has been the finalisation of the tile pattern that will be used in the facilities. The pattern has been derived to reflect cues from the visual context of Odisha and will become an iconic visual part of the facilities’ facade, secondary only to the logo.

The Sammaan facility’s facade tile pattern

Creating an identity program for the Project Sammaan toilet facilities has proven to be one of the more challenging aspects of the project from a communications perspective. The crux of the challenge lies in capturing the core values of health and well-being that the toilet facilities need to communicate, while being inclusive (speaking from within the community, instead of a prescriptive ‘outsider’ tone of voice). We hope to share the updated identity in the coming weeks.