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TOKYU Garden CityVisual identity, Website

Rich content presents the attractions of a continually growing city

TOKYU Garden City is an urban development project in Binh Duong New City, Vietnam. FOURDIGIT’s Japan-Vietnam collaboration team took on the renewal of the project’s visual identity (VI) and website in 2022, the 10th anniversary of the development. We incorporated a large amount of content conveying Binh Duong New City’s appeals and used images flooded with light as well as minimalist elements to give expression to this ever-expanding city.

Solution / Output

ResearchInformation ArchitectureContents DesignUI DesignArt DirectionVisual DesignFrontend DevelopmentCMS DevelopmentProject Management

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Design for an ever-expanding city

Binh Duong New City is situated north of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. This large-scale development aims to create a city of the future that produces new industries, on a large parcel of land measuring 1,000 hectares. Within that lies TOKYU Garden City, a block being developed by Becamex Tokyu. The project leverages Japan’s know-how in real estate development to deliver advanced, high-quality urban development including housing, commercial facilities, offices, and educational facilities.

2022 marks 10 years since work on the development commenced. We created a new visual identity, including the logo, and renewed the brand’s website to communicate the appeals of the city to a wider audience.

Minimalist elements representing growth

When we were preparing the design, we explored the future direction for the brand by not only experiencing the city in person, but also studying the diverse people involved with Binh Duong New City. The renewal revolved around the city’s key concept, Always NEW! The website visually conveys the image of a city that is continually growing, that changes, and is always giving birth to the new.

For the motif, we selected 2 lines of different weights. The thin line represents birth, while the thick line represents growth. We also used attractive typography and differing font weights to represent the city concept. We chose 4 secondary colors with black and white as the main feature of the color palette. The 4 colors each symbolize the components of TOKYU Garden City: Sora Gardens, Hikari, Midori Park, Kaze Shuttle, the public bus service that connects those areas. We combined the 2-line motif with fresh colors and used them widely in the brand logo, symbols, and website design.

Content design creating 3 “Re-” elements

We designed the website to be a place that creates 3 “Re-” elements: Relevance, Relationships, and Reputation. The website presents not only basic information about the city, but also a wealth of content conveying its appeals, such as the Discover page highlighting various residents, and the Lifestyle page, which features stories about the lifestyles of families who have moved to TOKYU Garden City from Ho Chi Minh. Its contemporary illustrations and light-filled images convey excitement, fun, and freshness.

Visual elements also appear on TOKYU Garden City’s streets. Enclosing the work area was a gigantic temporary fence measuring more than 300 m, which provided a canvas for powerful visual representations of the excitement and fun of the new city. The designs on the fence were intended to attract people there to take photos of, for example, a hand popping out of the fence, a gigantic 3D photo of the motif, as well as frames and speech bubbles. We aimed to create a space that would spark Relationships with people who visit TOKYU Garden City.

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Front-end technology delivering a pleasant user experience

We used Headless CMS to enable the website manager to easily update pages, because of the need to display the content pages in 3 languages, Vietnamese, English, and Japanese. The site simultaneously achieves beautiful design and simple updating by separating front-end and back-end and by also separating support for access and loading.

We used the fast and lightweight GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP) to implement the interactive elements and animations highlighting the fun and freshness of TOKYU Garden City. And we used React to construct the component base of the website itself to deliver comfortable, stress-free image rendering.