Duurzaam Hilvarenbeek — brand and identity for the 2025–2030 sustainability programme
Duurzaam Hilvarenbeek — a multi-year brand for a municipal mission.
"Samen Duurzaam Vooruit."
— Duurzaam Hilvarenbeek identity
Hilvarenbeek Council wanted one recognisable brand to carry its 2025–2030 sustainability programme. Four content themes — the energy transition, climate-conscious living, circularity, and waste & resources — had to become one inviting story together: not for policymakers, but for residents.
We designed the Samen Duurzaam Vooruit identity, gave the programme a face with Freek van Hilvarenbeek, and built a visual system that feels consistent from a poster to an environmental programme to a website still to come — and that lasts far longer than a single campaign.
From policy document to community-centre language.
For a council, sustainability is easy to phrase in CO² targets, programmes and framework decisions. But to the resident insulating their home, de-paving their garden or weighing up a heat pump, that sounds like noise. We needed a brand that bridges the distance.
What it was
- Energy transition, climate-conscious living, circularity, waste — all named separately in policy papers
- Communication per campaign, with no overarching brand to carry it
- Residents recognise the council, not the sustainability ambition
- Policy language — distant, technical, tiring
- No face, no tagline, no consistent colour
What it became
- "Samen Duurzaam Vooruit" as the umbrella over all four themes
- One visual system that works from poster to website
- Freek van Hilvarenbeek as a recognisable face for the message
- "Samen Duurzaam Vooruit" — an umbrella over all four themes, recognisable at a glance
- Concrete questions on the homepage instead of abstract themes
First coherence, then form.
We didn't start with the logo. We started with the question: how do you make an official programme come alive in the village? Only once the strategic logic was in place did we translate it into imagery, language and character.
Pulling the programme apart
We dissected the 2025–2030 Environmental Programme, made its ambitions concrete, and looked at where residents are already taking part in practice.
One umbrella, four themes
"Samen Duurzaam Vooruit" as the core idea. Not the council talking, but the village moving forward together.
Freek takes shape
A recognisable neighbour as a guide: down-to-earth, decisive, never preachy. The voice that takes the programme out of the council chamber.
Identity + building blocks
A speech bubble with a kraft texture, four colour quadrants, geometric building blocks and a confetti tile-strip that ties it all together.
One story, four tracks.
Under "Samen Duurzaam Vooruit" run four content tracks, each with its own colour and iconography, yet together forming one wheel. A resident chooses where to start — and is carried onwards automatically.
Energy transition
Energy-neutral by 2050. From insulation and heat pumps to solar panels, wind power and the collective heat network.
Climate-conscious
More greenery, less heat stress, room to capture water. Every resident within 300 metres of a green space.
Circularity
Materials that circulate instead of disappear. Local stories, inspiring projects and concrete ways to act.
Waste & resources
Turn waste into something valuable. Recycling centre, gritting, education and litter — concrete, right on your street.
Samen Duurzaam Vooruit.
A speech bubble with a kraft texture, stencil typography that fits the village, and a leaf that points the way.
The shape references a speech bubble: the programme speaks, rather than imposing. The leaf grows out of the second letter of "Duurzaam" and is at the same time an arrow — forward.
The orange URL pill at the bottom draws attention to the call to action: go to the site and take part.
Duurzaam
Vooruit
Duurzaam
Vooruit
Duurzaam
Vooruit
A neighbour with a mission.
The voice that takes the programme out of the council chamber.
Freek isn't a councillor and isn't a climate activist. He's the neighbour who has just insulated his roof and tells you why that was a smarter move than he expected. Down-to-earth, decisive, never preachy.
On the future website, Freek becomes the guide who leads residents through four concrete questions: Making my home energy-efficient, A greener garden, Smart with water, and Which grants can I get?
That way, sustainability stops being a framework and becomes a conversation.
Five colours, four building blocks, one recognition strip.
Not a rigid style guide, but a set of building blocks that lets the council and its partners make their own design decisions — and always stay within the family.
Five colours, five roles.
Dark green carries the brand. Orange accents. Blue, purple and mid-green are the theme colours. Kraft beige gives the system warmth.
Four wedge shapes, endlessly combinable.
A second identity variant makes the leaf constructible: four colour quadrants, one wedge shape per theme, together one leaf.
The colour strip as a signature.
Along the bottom of every carrier runs a strip of colourful tiles — from flyer to poster to report cover. Always the same rhythm, a different length.
From programme book to poster to animation.
The brand had to work on more than a homepage. We carried it through to the policy document that holds the whole ambition, to the street presence of the poster, and to the animation that runs at information evenings.
Environmental Programme 2025–2030.
The cover and inside pages within the system: photo panels with a rounded corner, orange arrows that point the way, and the theme icons that recur inside.
The programme in motion.
A short animation that brings together the identity and the four themes — made for information evenings, social and the future website.
Meet Freek.
The introduction of the character, displayed in the town hall, the library and the recycling centre. The first public introduction.
duurzaamhilvarenbeek.nl
The brand comes together in one digital home base: four theme paths, Freek as the guide, and a modular system that grows with the programme's ambitions.
Bespoke in Umbraco, tested for accessibility.
Doing it well rather than doing it fast. We build the site to measure in Umbraco — no template, no black-box plugins — and bake accessibility in from the design onwards, not just at delivery.
A purpose-built back end for the programme.
Umbraco is a stable, scalable CMS in which we lock down the visual identity per content block. Administrators at the council will work with predefined Lego bricks: header, hero, RTE, FAQ, forms, calendar — all within the brand, without needing any technical knowledge.
- Modular content blocks — combinable like building blocks
- Templates for homepage, themes, news, stories, calendar and search
- Umbraco Forms for contact and sign-ups
- MailChimp integration for the newsletter
- Multilingual setup (NL as the starting point, EN prepared)
- Hosting + security patches via Creative Suspects
- GA4 + Google Tag Manager for measurability
A solid foundation, with a growth path to AA.
Full WCAG 2.1 level AA falls outside the build scope, but we design and build the templates so they're genuinely ready for it. We use the four WCAG principles as our compass and plan an audit roughly 6 months after launch.
Three words that carry the programme.
Role, year, what's next.
Client
Hilvarenbeek Council
Role
Strategy, brand identity, character design, applications
Year
2025–2026 — ongoing
Could the next one be your story?
We'd love to build the next brand with a client who's willing to explore alongside us.