Our city Our pride

Cumberland City Council

Our city our pride, together let’s Clean Cumberland.

Handle Branding partnered with Cumberland City Council to deliver “Clean Cumberland”, a large-scale community campaign designed to instil pride, encourage shared responsibility, and support cleaner streets and public spaces across the local government area.

The campaign was developed to positively influence everyday behaviours around litter, waste disposal, and r-euse. Reminding the community about binning their rubbish, reinforcing the idea that everyone who lives, works, or moves through Cumberland plays a role in caring for the city can pitch in.

Our role focused on campaign design, illustration, translation coordination, and delivery across a wide range of physical and digital touchpoints. Working with Council-supplied messaging and service information, we developed a bold, accessible visual system that could operate consistently across high-visibility environments while remaining flexible enough to accommodate multiple languages and formats.

A key challenge was creating a campaign that was highly legible at scale, immediately recognisable in public settings, and inclusive of Cumberland’s culturally diverse communities.

To address this, we developed a strong graphic language anchored by custom illustrations, clear iconography, and confident typography. Messaging was intentionally simple and direct, allowing key behaviours such as binning litter, re-use, and responsible disposal to be understood at a glance.

The campaign system was designed for rollout across multiple touchpoints, including waste collection vehicles, bus shelters, street posters, shopfront displays, print collateral, and digital assets. Each format was carefully considered to ensure clarity, consistency, and impact regardless of context or viewing distance.

Translations formed a significant part of the delivery. We coordinated the integration of translated content across campaign outputs, ensuring messaging remained clear, culturally sensitive, and visually consistent once adapted into multiple languages. This required careful management of layout, hierarchy, and spacing to preserve intent and readability across all versions.

We delivered a considered visual system and illustration suite that supported Council messaging and helped position cleanliness as a shared community value rather than a compliance issue.

The final Clean Cumberland campaign stands as a cohesive and adaptable communications system that supports the Council’s environmental objectives while strengthening civic pride. Through clear visual storytelling and thoughtful implementation, the campaign contributes to cleaner behaviours, greater awareness, and a stronger sense of ownership across Cumberland’s spaces.