The Sunshine Coast, Qld, Australia. In recent years legions of southerners from New South Wales down to Victoria have migrated towards a better climate, lifestyle, and a more affordable home for their children on the Sunshine Coast. With air conditioning units rapidly replacing good design a solution was required to ensure working with the environment was kept at the heart of our regions development projects. Saturate was engaged by the Sunshine Coast Council's Place Making Team to creatively direct and design the solution. To encourage good design across the urban, developmental and architectural landscape the Place Making Team created a manual of design principles which also articulated what the people of our region value.

Our brief was to create a design bible to inspire architects, builders and developers on the Sunshine Coast of Australia. To cohesively connect this demographic towards a common goal of design excellence on the Sunshine Coast. The Place Making team identified through community engagement 4 core coastal values and 10 design principles developed to define good design practices.
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"The Sunshine Coast Design Strategy establishes a simple set of design principles to guide a new era of place-based decision making in a fast-growing region. Far from being a dry technical guide or a ubiquitous "vision", this work puts place and landscape at the centre of the dialogue concerning how the Sunshine Coast will grow well. The communication methods and advocacy built into this project signal an exciting new direction for landscape architects as advocates for place-led design within our communities, Australia wide." - Landscape Architecture Awards Jury Citation

The creative direction was led by a desire from the Sunshine Coast Council to have a 'Yellow Book'. Given this was a strong desire we chose Pantone Yellow. Being a bold statement visually and not a corporate approach. To design for everyone we chose Helvetica Now Display as the type face. To appeal to designers, developers and architects we chose Neubau Architekt Standard to elevate the wrap around the book.

Inside the wrap the principles can be found. The wrap can be used as a tool alongside the book while perusing to refer to the design principles and our coastal values. An analogous mathematically harmonic colour strategy was employed to visually separate the design principles. These colours also represent our ocean, hinterland and coastline from blue through green to earthy browns, reds and oranges. They are segmented throughout the principles section of the manual.

The book has gone on to reach hundreds of thousands of people on the Sunshine Coast. It has been featured nationally in over 20 publications including Architecture AU, Habitus and Monocle. A dedicated website has been setup for the book and it's available to everyone as a digital version online.  A series of videos explaining the design principles have also been created and shared across media to illustrate and further highlight the strategy. The book has also been launched and promoted at several keynote events around the region. Including the MET Design Series, PIA Virtual Conference, AILA 2020 Land-E-Scape Reset and the IPWEAQ20 Conference. Sunshine Coast Design has also gone on to win an AILA Award for Research, Policy & Communications and a National Good Design Gold Award.

We worked with the team at Cornerstone Press to deliver this incredible strategy manual. 1000 copies delivered to all key architects and developers in the region. With unlimited digital distribution via digital channels. Digital Version of the book is available here: link If you'd like to purchase a copy of this limited release it's available from Folio Books & Annie's Books in Peregian if you're on the Sunshine Coast.