Waterfront Market is Dubai's purpose built home for fresh food, and this is the identity built for it. It replaced the old Deira Fish Market, established in 1958, and moved that trade onto the new Deira Corniche. The brief was to carry the heritage across without dressing a new building as an old one: a traditional Emirati souq and the multicultural city around it, held in one mark.
The identity is a circular monogram, locked up bilingually as Waterfront Market and in Arabic, so that neither language reads as a translation of the other.
The system runs on a stamp. A ring reading Value, Convenience, Experiences, Variety wraps a 100% Real centre, which is the only promise a fresh market really has to make. It works as a seal on packaging, a repeat pattern across wrapping paper, an embossed mark on enamel, and a watermark over photography.
The palette is three colours. Dark blue, light blue and dark grey. Sea and sky, kept cold on purpose so the produce stays the warmest thing in every frame.
Applications cover signage and wayfinding, packaging, uniforms and merchandise, photography direction, and a website built around how people actually shop the hall: fruit and vegetables, daily caught fish, meat and poultry, dry goods, spice honey and dates, and kiosks.
