About the logo

The journey of our logo or how to stay simple and detailed at the same time

A logo should be recognizable, simple, clear and at best, people should be able to identify with it.

Our goal was to design a logo that shows our idea of combining society and hydrogeology. The former could be represented by people and the latter could be symbolized by a well, since most people would be able to recognize a well. And since we are an IAH network, we wanted to maintain the connection to IAH. So we decided to use the idea of the official IAH logo, but we changed the old form by opening it. The biggest challenge was the people. How to represent a diverse and inclusive group of people without using stereotypes and without getting too detailed? In the beginning we had two people, one with long hair and a normative female body shape and one with short hair and a normative male body shape. After discussions with different people we changed this, because it is a typical binary and normative gender image, which we do not believe in and do not want to support. That is why we have chosen three persons with different forms, although we are aware that we are not able to represent society as a whole with three persons, but it is a compromise between representing diversity by maintaining simplicity. Another point of discussion was the color of the three persons and the logo itself.

In the end, we can see three people who bridge the gap, for example between science, society and authorities, and protect the well (= groundwater) through close cooperation.