The Peace Club was founded in 2019 in Dunedin by Best Apisit Uthakhamkong, POV’s founder and creative director, who serves as its president. The organisation is a registered charitable trust that promotes inner peace, mindfulness, compassion, and diversity through a programme of community events, meditation and mindfulness sessions, social justice advocacy, art projects, and music initiatives. It operates primarily within and around the University of Otago, with connections extending into the wider Dunedin community.

As an organisation built on creative practice and visual communication, The Peace Club needed a brand identity that could carry its values without simplifying them. The brief was for something modern and playful, grounded in genuine conviction rather than graphic convention, and capable of representing the organisation credibly across the range of contexts in which it operates: university campuses, community events, social media, media communications, and formal charitable contexts.

The logo concept POV developed for The Peace Club draws from two visual sources simultaneously. The peace sign is one of the most universally recognised symbols in human visual culture, carrying decades of accumulated meaning from the anti-war and peace movements that gave it currency. The capital letter P is the initial letter of the organisation’s name and the most direct visual connection to its identity. The creative challenge was to combine these two visual ideas into a single mark that read as both simultaneously, without requiring the viewer to perform the combination consciously.

The resulting logo achieves this through careful geometric resolution: the peace sign’s circular form and downward-branching lines provide the structural basis, and the P is integrated into the mark in a way that is immediately legible while being genuinely unified with the peace sign geometry.

The visual character of the mark is modern and slightly playful without sacrificing the sense of genuine intention that the organisation’s purpose requires. It communicates youth energy and creative openness while remaining appropriate for formal and institutional contexts. It is a mark that a student at a meditation session and a city council officer reading a charitable trust application will both find credible, which is exactly the range the organisation needs to operate across.

The colour palette was developed to reflect the emotional quality of the environments The Peace Club creates and inhabits. The deep teal family, anchored at #1c3e43 and moving through #457479 to the lighter #71999b, provides the visual depth and seriousness that a genuine commitment to peace requires. These are not the cheerful, accessible teals of generic non-profit branding. They carry weight and intention, communicating that the work of The Peace Club is substantive rather than superficial.

Warm grey (#d2d2d2) and a sandy, skin-warm tone (#cea68b) balance the deep teals with human warmth, preventing the palette from becoming cool or institutional and reinforcing the welcoming, community-oriented character of the organisation. Together the five palette colours create a visual environment that is distinctive within the community organisation landscape and entirely coherent with the values the organisation represents.

The website POV designed and built for The Peace Club at thepeace.co.nz was developed around a clear understanding of the organisation’s multiple audience groups. First-time visitors discovering the organisation through a search or social media link need to understand quickly what The Peace Club is and whether it is for them. Regular community members need efficient access to event information and news. Partners and potential funders need confidence in the organisation’s credibility and activity. The information architecture serves all three groups without creating confusion or forcing any of them through a path designed for someone else.

The visual design of the site maintains the brand palette throughout, using the deep teal tones to create a sense of depth and the warmer tones to provide human warmth at every interaction point. Photography from the organisation’s events and activities is given prominent placement, letting the community life of The Peace Club be visible rather than merely described. The site was built on WordPress for ease of management by the organisation’s volunteer team, with a fully responsive layout and a CMS training handover at completion.