Brand guidelines
SĂŠcosa brand guidelines
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Š SÊcosa The Gourmet Insecterie All rights reserved. 2015
Brand guidelines
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SĂŠcosa brand guidelines
Welcome! Welcome to the brand guidelines of Sécosa: The Gourmet Insecterie. These guidelines illustrate the core values and elements behind our brand. They contain everything you need to know about how the Sécosa brand should be used in order to ensure that the brand remains consistent throughout all areas. Using our brand correctly is very important to us. We have spent a great deal of time researching, designing and implementing our brand so we ask that this guide is always referred to and adherred to. In order to develop a unique and yet trustworthy brand, it is vital that all members of the Sécosa team and those implementing the brand’s message understand the guidelines and apply these rules and values to all areas of the brand at all times. — Sécosa team
Sécosa brand guidelines
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SĂŠcosa brand guidelines
Contents 05
Welcome
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Typography
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About SĂŠcosa
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Colour
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Our Mission
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Imagery/illustration
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Why Insects?
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Infographics
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Brand Values
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Posters
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Tone of Voice
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Postcards
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The Brand Brand name
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Photography
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Social Media
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Website
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Logo/logotype
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About Sécosa Sécosa was established as a way to educate consumers and remove the taboo associated with consuming insects. Many Western people shudder at the thought of eating insects. Here at Sécosa, we want to show consumers that insects are not only a sustainable and healthy form of protein, but they can be very tasty too! We believe that the best way to introduce insects to Western diets is by presenting them in familiar forms. Knowing where your food comes from is important to us. We believe that choosing local food is vital for a sustainable food industry. Our insects are sustainably raised on plant-based diets in local farms, before being put to sleep, dried and then milled into a nutritious powder.
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Sécosa brand guidelines
Our Mission Our mission is to educate Western consumers about the healthy and sustainable qualities of insects. We hope that through education, the West will be more open to the inclusion of insects in their daily diets. Insects are a sustainable and nutritious alternative source of protein to meat, but with added health benefits too! We are committed to producing high quality food in a sustainable, ethical, and environmentally friendly way.
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Why insects? One of the largest problems facing the food industry is our over reliance on meat as a form of protein. Today more of the world’s population are embracing meat in their diets which has negative environmental impacts. Following research, we discovered that there are three alternatives to conventionally raised livestock: In Vitro meat (cultured meat), Cannibalism, and Edible Insects. In Vitro meat is not comercially viable yet, and cannibalism is unlikely to be welcomed by Western society! Insects, however, are already consumed by 80% of the world. They are a sustainable, nutritious, and delicious source of protein.
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SĂŠcosa brand guidelines
Brand Values Food, sustainability, innovation, fresh, health, people At Sécosa, we are passionate about and get truly excited about food, sustainability and new innovations that are occuring in both areas. Through our research, prototyping and experimentation in the kitchen we are trying to change the future of food and assist in developing a sustainable food system for future generations. We try to maintain our sustainable ideals in everything that we do: from food, to packaging, to raw materials etc. Using good quality, healthy and sustainble produce is very important to the Sécosa brand. We are involved throughout the whole process of bringing our food from field to fork. Only when we are completely satisfied with how our ingredients are grown or raised do we feel comfortable preparing and making our products available to the public. We feel, ultimately, that the presentation of our food is the most important for our consumers. Although in design it is widely considered that form should follow function, in this instance the presentation of our food is key to successfully communicating the Sécosa message to our consumers and encouraging the West to embrace entomophagy. In order for them to overcome the digust many of them feel at the thought of consuming insects, we must appeal to their senses. Sécosa brand guidelines
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Using the freshest, high quality ingredients, SĂŠcosa creates beautiful aromas, textures, flavours and through the senses entices the West to taste the unknown.
Photograph posted on the SĂŠcosa Instagram account.
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SĂŠcosa brand guidelines
Tone of Voice Sécosa was established as a way to educate consumers and remove the taboo associated with consuming insects. As this is an area that many consumers find uncomfortable, the Sécosa tone of voice needed to be human and trustworthy. The Sécosa brand introduces consumers to the unknown. In order to do this effectively and successfully, Western consumers must immediatly feel at ease and trust the brand. Developing a more human and local brand was paramount. When consumers feel they trust what you are communicating, they are more inclined to let their curiousity get the better of them and consume the unknown: edible insects.
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The brand Sécosa’s brand aim is to break down the taboo held by many Western consumers towards entomophagy. As a result of this, brand empathy is vital in Sécosa’s branding. Using consumer research and bodystorming, we learned the importance of empathy in the brand. Only when we truly understood the reasons for the West’s repulsion towards entomophagy can we develop a brand to tackle this issue. Placing ourselves in the shoes of our consumers is imperative in order to know and feel what they are experiencing when faced with an insect. Our focal point and main finding from consumer research is that Western consumers are distanced from the sources of meat protein they eat everyday and are comfortable consuming animal protein. If we treated insects in the same way, we feel that consumers would be more open to entomophagy. When Western consumers do not come in contact with the eyes and other body parts of animals raised for meat, they are more willing to try it. In order to break the entomophagy taboo, Sécosa would use the same approach: remove the legs, eyes, feelers; anything that could be visually linked to an insect. In the West, often the meat we eat is not visually similar to the animal it comes from. 14
Sécosa brand guidelines
The distane between the animal and the end produce sold to the consumer.
Empathy allowed us to understand the distance between the food we can buy and the animal the meat comes from. Understanding our consumers inspired us to produce insect food that contains insects, is high in protein, but the consumer would not immediatly draw visual similarities between the insect being eaten. We hope that in the future as entomophagy is more accepted in Western society, using whole insects could be an option. Unfortunately, we feel that the West isn’t ready to be brought face to face with insects just yet!
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The Brand Name The brand name Sécosa comes from the Irish ‘sé cosa’ which means six legs. Sécosa is an Irish brand. Using the Irish language allowed us to not only describe what the brand does, but present ‘six legs’ in a different way. Sécosa is an innovative brand that creates new recipes that have not existed before. The brand name needed to reflect this: taking two well known Irish words and fusing them into a new word that had not existed before.
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Sécosa brand guidelines
Logo/logotype The Sécosa logo is set in Sini, a hand lettering based typeface designed by Hiekka Graphics in 2003. Sini is a warm and friendly typeface with a balanced visual appearance. As Sécosa’s aim is to make Western consumers as comfortable with the idea of eating insects as possible, using a welcoming typeface in the logo in order for consumers to feel that they can trust the Sécosa brand was vital.
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Logo/logotype 1. Full logo
THE GOURMET INSECTERIE
2. Logotype
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SĂŠcosa brand guidelines
Logo do’s and don’ts
Always leave a suitable amount of area around logo.
The logo can be white on orange or orange on white.
Logo can also be grey on white.
Do not use other colours in the logo.
Do not change the letter spacing.
Do not stretch the logo horizontally.
Do not stretch the logo vertically.
Never change the typeface used in the logo.
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Typography - logo Typeface Sini Hiekka Graphics 2003
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SĂŠcosa brand guidelines
Typography - main text Typeface Avenir Adrian Frutiger 1975
ABCEFGHIJKL MNOPQRSTUV WXYZ SĂŠcosa brand guidelines
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Typography - hand lettering The Sécosa brand uses hand lettering in all elements of its print and digital design: packaging, posters, infographics, postcards, leaflets, napkins, on the website and on its various social media platforms. Creating a consistent and yet varying visual language ensures that the Sécosa brand is easily identifiable, but is consistently producing new, fresh visuals to engage consumers. Using hand lettering was a stylistic choice but was also chosen for reasons of empathy. Since Gutenberg’s printing press, typography has been one of the most widely used forms of communication. Hand lettering, like typography, uses letters to communicate information. Unlike typography, hand lettering requires the letters to be drawn by hand, and not typset using a computer or typeset to be printed using a printing press. It allows information to be communicated to individuals in a personal and yet playful way.
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Sécosa brand guidelines
Typography - hand lettering At Sécosa, we believe the best way to really understand your food is to prepare it with your hands: we don’t use pasta makers, we knead and roll our own pasta. Our hands are our most treasured implements. Using hand lettering to reflect this was the obvious and empathetic choice. What better way to keep the Sécosa brand to a personal and local level than through my own handwriting? It doesn’t get much more personal than that!
Hand lettering used on sauce packaging
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Bread wrapper uses flowing hand lettering. Flowing pattern is based on groves and intersecting pattern found on the bodies of crickets and locusts.
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SĂŠcosa brand guidelines
Front of pasta packaging also uses flowing hand lettering which is based on groves and intersecting pattern found on the bodies of crickets and locusts.
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Colour - primary palette The colour palette used in the Sécosa brand comes from the insects used in our food. The aim of Sécosa is to promote insects to Western consumers successfully. In order to do this, we include visual links to insects in our branding. Including the colour of an insect rather than an image of the eyes and legs of an insect gives consumers visual clues as to what they are eating, but when they do not come in direct visual contact with an insect, Sécosa believes they will be more willing to introduce entomophagy to their diet.
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Sécosa brand guidelines
Colour - secondary palette SÊcosa’s colour palette is warm, welcoming, complimentary and contrasting. Using approachble colours is important in order to develop a brand that consumers feel they can trust.
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Imagery/illustration The imagery used throughout the SĂŠcosa brand does not include direct images of insects. This is a specific branding choice. In Western society, we are very distanced from the food we eat. For example, the meat we buy in a butchers rarely can be visually linked to the animal it came from. SĂŠcosa uses this idea throughout its branding. From our market research we discovered that many Western consumers feel physically ill at the thought of consuming insects when they come in visual contact with them. During food tasting, when they saw their eyes or legs, many refused to even taste some of our food samples. We eat with our eyes. Removing any direct visual image of an insect means that consumers do not make the direct link with the six-legged creature and the food. Insects are food for 80% of the countries in the world. It is important that we break the taboo held in the West and transform the Western idea that insects are considered only pests, to insects are a sustainable source of protein.
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SĂŠcosa brand guidelines
Spinach and Garlic
Tomato and Basil
Spicy Arrabbiatta
Mushroom Alfredo
Illustrations for packaging. In keeping with the hand-rendered aesthetic created through the use of hand lettering, our illustrations are loose and hand-drawn.
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Sécosa’s six reasons to eat insects infographic
This is used on the website as a simple guide to easily explain the benefits and perks of entomophagy.
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Sécosa brand guidelines
Infographics Infographics communicate a large amount of information in an accessible and simple way. Sécosa uses infographics in order to distill the facts and figures of entomophagy to Western consumers. Using eye-catching colours and simple imagery, complex data can be communicated effectively to the West. Sécosa’s infographics are designed using our brand colours and simple illustration style. They are warm and inviting to encourage consumers to read the information contained within the infographic. Sécosa’s aim is to persuade consumers to taste the unknown, but we also want consumers to understand why eating more insects and less meat is important. Infographics allow large quantities of information to be condensed into smaller manageable quantities. As a result, the information can be communicated to the viewer, understood and then, hopefully, acted upon!
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Posters Our posters, like our infographics, use simple, clean illustration to successfully communicate complicated ideas and statistics. Posters offer an effective and inexpensive way to get a message out. Sécosa is promoting a new idea to Western consumers. Our posters include the use of a warm and welcoming colour palette, clean, minimal illustrations, hand-lettering in each heading, a short paragraph to explain in greater detail the issue being communicated on each poster, and negative space to draw the eye to the Sécosa logo. The posters all follow the same grid. Continuity and variation allows consumers to recognise and identify the posters as part of the Sécosa brand. Repetition means that as consumers are seeing the same message repeatedly, it will help to drive the message home: the Global Food Crisis is a serious problem and that entomophagy should not be feared as one of the solutions.
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Sécosa brand guidelines
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Postcards Our postcards act as a series of mini-infographics. Each postcard contains an interesting fact about the Global Food Crisis. Using simple illustration and carefully selected copy, they act as a learning aid for Western consumers in their understanding of the Global Food Crisis. Each fact was carefully researched and cross referenced before inclusion in the series. When educating Western consumers about the negative impacts of the Global Food Crisis, it is important to provide impartial and honest information in a non-condescending way. Food is a very personal area for people. The design of the postcards features a warm colour palette, hand lettering, a short piece of copy, and a large amount of white space to allow Western consumers to become comfortably informed and engaged in entomophagy.
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SĂŠcosa brand guidelines
secosa_food.com
Today the gap between rich and poor is growing. People go hungry because the food available is not shared equally between nations.
SĂŠcosa brand guidelines
secosafood.com
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Photography As we are trying to make our food as accessible and as ‘normal’ as possible, the photography of our food has a snapshot aesthetic, as though any of our consumers could have taken the shot themselves. Our food photographs are used throughout the Sécosa brand, but are not used on our food packaging. We believe that food speaks for itself and so do not want to overwhelm consumers with photographs on our packaging. Simplicity is key!
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Sécosa brand guidelines
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Social Media Today, one of the primary ways of accessing information about food is through social media. Sécosa wants to educated Western consumers about the implications their food choices have on the world around them and using social media can instantly share information with consumers in the West, and all over the world. Social media allows Sécosa to communicate with other entomophagy chefs, culinary and sustainable start-ups, and foodies, as well as showcasing Sécosa’s edible insect food.
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Social Media - Instagram We eat with our eyes. Instagram allows us to communicate directly with consumers through imagery of the food we produce. It is a powerful marketing tool and enables us to start conversations directly with Western consumers about the power of entomophagy. The SĂŠcosa Instagram profile contains photographs of the variety of food we produce and the culinary experiments we carry out in the kitchen. Through sharing the photos of our experimentation in the kitchen, we hope to inspire consumers to try insects and give those interested in entomophagy ideas as to what they can do to incorporate edible insects into their diets.
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SĂŠcosa brand guidelines
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Social Media - Twitter Twitter is an excellent platform to start discussions and connect with people. SĂŠcosa uses Twitter as a platform to share and spread the facts and figures linked to entomophagy. As entomophagy is a relatively new idea in the West, spreading the information and benefits in relation to edible insects is vital. Twitter allows us to connect with thousands of people instantly. It allows us to broaden our target audience and inform a great deal more people about the global food crisis and the issues related to excessive meat-eating.
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SĂŠcosa brand guidelines
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Website The Sécosa website combines every element of Sécosa’s branding: hand lettering, infographics, colour, food photography, social media, typography etc. The User’s Experience (UX) of the website is very important. As Sécosa is attempting to persuade the West to taste the unknown, a simple and concise, but easily navigable website was needed in order to successfully communicate the Sécosa message effectively. A simple navigation bar, typographic hierarchy, imagery, illustration, and carefully selected copy are used in unison to give users an educational and enjoyable experience.
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Sécosa brand guidelines
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@secosafood secosa_food © Sécosa The Gourmet Insecterie All rights reserved. 2015
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secosafood@gmail.com
Sécosa brand guidelines