IVAGO is the intercommunal waste-collection and recycling service of Ghent, a body owned by the city, accountable to residents, and woven into the daily rhythm of every household through the bins on the kerb and the calendar on the fridge. Public-service utilities of this kind tend to communicate in the flat, apologetic language of obligation. The brief here ran the other way: build an identity bold enough to make sorting waste feel like belonging to something, and rigorous enough to survive on a 240-litre bin, a roll of bags, a construction hoarding, and a phone screen without losing its nerve.
The system is built on a single, unmistakable gesture: a heavy condensed display face cut on a hard diagonal, leaning forward as if everything is already in motion toward collection. The logotype renders the opening letter as a slash, so the mark reads as much as a forward stroke as a name. That slant becomes the brand's grammar: fraction labels (REST, GFT, PMD), recruitment posts (VACATURE), and even a shipping container reading VOL MET BROL, Ghent dialect for full of junk, all carry the same kinetic tilt. The voice is local and direct, switching into the city's own vernacular rather than the sanitised register of municipal signage.
Colour does the heavy lifting of a sorting system that has to be legible at a glance. Each waste stream owns a saturated, unapologetic field: hot magenta for residual waste, acid yellow, electric teal for plastics and metals, lavender for the household-facing tier, applied across wheeled bins, bag rolls, and app screens so that the colour itself becomes the instruction. We saw the language stress-tested across the full range of physical objects: a magenta REST bin, a teal PMD bin and matching bag, container graphics, embroidered apparel, and a bucket hat, the identity behaving consistently whether it is moulded into plastic or printed on cotton.
Out in the streetscape the work turns the city's own infrastructure into media. Construction hoardings carry a wall of acid yellow reading RECYCLEER VOOR ELKAAR, recycle for each other, set against blurred passers-by and portraits of ordinary residents, framing waste not as a chore but as a civic act citizens perform for one another. An ivy-swallowed billboard reading RECYCLEER UWEN BROL pushes the dialect further still. The campaign register is confident and human, the opposite of the bureaucratic tone the category usually settles for.
The identity extends cleanly into the digital surfaces a resident actually uses: an app icon on the home screen, a colour-coded pickup calendar that turns the weekly schedule into a stack of bright Restafval, GFT, and PMD cards, a website news hub, and an Instagram presence running recruitment and sorting education. Anchoring the system is a suite of fourteen motion pieces: the logotype and its applications animated in loops, building toward an Infinite Recycling concept staged as an immersive projection wall where the wordmark cycles at architectural scale. The result is a public utility that looks less like a municipal department and more like a brand a city can be proud to put its name on.
