Significance of the Robben Island Museum's logo

A visit to Robben Island is a deeply felt experience for South Africans and foreigners alike. Its identity is linked to the heroic lives of the people who struggled with the consequences of unjust incarceration.

Views from the Maximum Security Prison are barred. As former prisoners show tourists around they mention this curiosity: all the windows looking out to the mountain or the sky are barricaded. There are other things, too, that rend the heart on Robben Island, but it was this strange and powerful image of the barred and inaccessible windows that moved the graphic designer who designed the corporate identity of South Africa's most famous icon of human transcendence.

The Robben Island imagery comprises bars that turn into a human figure, arms aloft, celebrating freedom. Behind them is the patch of blue that kept hope alive. The typography is naive, without a slick, finished look.

The Island itself is barren and windswept and has no pretensions.

For logo animation (Flash)
click here