Design is about culture. In the same way that the state of our education or healthcare system tells us a lot about who we are as society, design is also capable of reflecting back to us who we are and what we care about, and the value of things, good and bad.

I have generally regarded the idea of branding or “the brand” with ambivalence. I guess because branding, in my mind, can be closely associated with some of the worst aspects of high capitalism. So, over the last few days, as I’ve been thinking about Tasmania’s current branding, a great deal of my time has been spent thinking about what a brand actually is. What is it that a brand communicates? Should it just sell something? How do brands actually work? No doubt these are fairly obvious considerations for a designer but for the layperson brands tend to be meaningless, in the most insidious possible way. By this I mean that they have a dangerous self-evidence about them and most of us either overlook or choose to ignore them and yet we are persuaded by and interact with them at almost every point in our modern, urban lives.

Branding, and the closely related logo, at its best operates like a visual lexicon, forming part of the whole visual weave of our social world; small symbols that give it colour and shape and, at some level, meaning. For me, the best brands are those that are visually simple and yet work like symbolic gestures: the Supreme coffee brand, or Melbourne’s new big M (not without controversy, but I believe the kind of brand that will be readily incorporated into the visual weave of the city).

And so I come to Tasmania’s current brand and its use of the tragically symbolic Tasmanian tiger. A brand that, as some have already noted, is firmly rooted in the past (unless of course you are convinced, like my dad, that the Tasmanian Tiger still exists). I think a brand should incorporate a certain optimism, a way forward into the future. It is important that Tasmania’s brand go some way in reflecting its dynamic creative culture, its exquisite environment as well as its present indigenous culture. I also think it is important that any future Tasmania rebrand incorporate some notion of Tasmania’s urban centres. I do not think that branding should ever play into the hands of visual cliché (two of the most obvious symbols used to represent Tasmania being the tiger and its triangular shape). These are fairly broad and grand hopes but Tasmania’s future branding should capture in a single, brief, visual moment a certain clarity, uniqueness and optimism.

Born and bred on Flinders Island in Bass Strait, Brita Frost is a Melbourne based design writer and critic with a background in anthropology. She writes and edits a blog, Suite 7 for the Australian Graphic Design Association.