Acooroo: A Playful Brand Identity for Children's Balance Bike Riding

Introducing Mascots and a Story to Engage Children

The Acooroo brand focuses on providing fun balance bike riding services for preschool children in China. To connect with their young audience and portray the brand's playfulness, the identity design introduces four mascots as children's friends and training buddies for balance bike riding. These mascots are based on 'The Four Divine Beasts' and are adapted to represent the different balance bike riding skills. The shapes and colors used in the design are inspired by the movements of these skills, creating a visual language that is both dynamic and engaging.

The design process for Acooroo's brand identity involved simplifying the look of each 'Divine Beast' to create a stylized form that symbolizes their characteristics. The designer, Siran Liu, experimented with numerous sketches and compositing tests to explore how the shape language of each mascot could be applied in the logo and other visual elements such as environmental graphics and patterns.

The Acooroo brand identity includes a logo, primary and secondary color systems, and four mascots designed for 3D products like toys. The design also provides guidelines for fonts, patterns, and composing illustrations using the visual system. Additionally, the design application includes action poses for the mascots, business cards, environmental graphics, event tickets, apparel, and more.

The mascots in Acooroo's visual identity are designed to connect with children by delivering information from the brand in an engaging way. They can also be integrated into balance bikes and other children's products like toys and apparel. The simple shapes and vibrant colors used in the design create a visual language system that can be used to construct additional textures and environmental graphics for children to interact with.

The Acooroo visual identity project started in June 2017 and was completed in December 2017. Throughout the design process, the team conducted extensive research on how children between the ages of 3-6 perceive and interact with the world. The use of bright, pure colors and simple shapes was based on their still-emerging skills in processing visual information. Feedback from customers was also taken into account, with details like rounded corners in shapes added to create a sense of safety.

The main challenge in developing the Acooroo brand identity was creating a simple visual language that could be easily recognized by preschool children while remaining flexible enough to construct all the graphical elements the brand might use.

Acooroo's brand identity has been recognized for its creativity and ingenuity, winning the Bronze A' Design Award in 2018 in the Graphics, Illustration, and Visual Communication Design category. This award recognizes designs that exhibit strong technical and creative skills, contributing to improvements in quality of life.