Exploring the creative and unique city identity design of a small Spanish municipality.
Ontinyent — in Spanish Onteniente — is a municipality in the Valencian Community with a population of about 35,000. It has a beautifully crafted, creative visual identity. The logomark consists of four rectangles, aligned to form a hashtag-shape, combined with a ring. Each adjacent, overlapping shape has a different color; light and dark green, brown, teal, orange, or red. The logotype uses a custom-made font that adopts the combined red-orange-colored tiles’s form for the Ns and, adjusted, for the Os. The colors are taken from the colorful façades of the houses at the edge of La Vila, at the cliff of the Río Clariano — one of the main sights of Ontinyent. The icon is also an homage to the city’s textile industry and the many historic buildings. For some use cases, the logo is made single-color, e.g., for the footer of the website.
The logomark’s tile-system is being used brilliantly in further material. On the website header of Ontinyent’s city council is an illustration of Ontinyent’s skyline. It depicts the bell tower, a former citadel, one of the bridges over the Río Clariano as well as its natural pool, a red bus, and multiple houses. These are drawn with the same style of overlapping shapes, borrowing the U-shaped tiles and forming a simplistic representation. Instead of being as colorful as the logo, each separate illustration uses only one, two, or three colors. Individual illustrations from the header image, that is the landmarks and sights, are used in the cover of Ontinyent’s official tourism guide. There is a grid of twenty squares, alternately filled with a meaningful image or an illustration with a hashtag. In addition to the icons of the header image, with hashtags like #riuclariano or #ponts (bridge), there are illustrations representing the textile industry with a knit, the Muslim and Christian history with an abstract crescent and a cross, and more. The colors are used sparingly but effectively. For instance, the light brown buildings have gotten greater detail by coloring some tiles in a beige tone. The simplistic and consistent illustrations make the brochure look modern and interesting.
Ontinyent has achieved a great logo that allows for a consistent and interconnected visual identity. Its visual system allows for a variety of different designs that form a coherent identity.
