BOND turns the ‘Archipegalo of Finland’ into a living typeface for Saaristo’s wild-hearted identity

Comprising 40,000 islands and islets, the ‘Archipegalo of Finland,’ Saaristo, is a place like no other, taking the title of ‘the most diverse archipelago in the world.’ It’s a place that needs to be seen to be believed. To attract more visitors, they reached out to BOND’s Helsinki studio to help them do just that with a visually arresting identity. “Our goal was to visually capture the feeling of being there – to ensure the identity felt true to the place, not like something imposed from the outside,” Senior Designer Kasperi Salovaara tells us. “It was all about distilling the essence of Saaristo into a visual language that felt both authentic and evocative.” The team was free to take a more conceptual approach than typical tourism branding. Anchored by a set of guiding themes – simple and rich, thoughtful and kind, wild-hearted and true – BOND let Saaristo speak for itself. “The entire brand is shaped by Saaristo,” Salovaara reveals. And it is. To build the logo, he tells us, “We spent countless hours exploring Google Maps, convinced that with 40,000 islands, we could find every letter of the alphabet hidden in their shapes.” They combed through the map, screenshotting and pinning potential island forms one by one that could serve as letters. For consistent detailing across each letter, each chosen island shape was first printed, then hand-traced before being scanned and meticulously redrawn in Illustrator.