Visual Identity

The design story behind APICTA 2026

Twenty-five years of regional collaboration land in Jakarta this year — and the design that carries the Silver Jubilee tells the story in three layers: a Javanese batik called Sekar Jagad, an institutional palette, and two typefaces drawn in Indonesia. Read on.

01 · Motif

Sekar Jagad — the map of the world

Start with the cloth. Sekar Jagad is a Javanese batik that gathers distinct sub-motifs into one textile, joined by wavy "island" borders. No quadrant dominates; the composition itself is the meaning — harmony out of difference. For APICTA 2026 the four quadrants are tuned to the Silver Jubilee. Parang is the anchor — the other three rotate edition to edition.

TL · Kawung

25-year continuity

Four overlapping ellipses around a single seed — the eternal, the cyclical, lineage. The anchor of the Silver Jubilee: a quarter-century of unbroken regional collaboration since 2001.

TR · Parang

Strength & competition

Diagonal S-curves, traditionally reserved for Javanese royalty — strength, perseverance, the never-give-up spirit. For APICTA it carries the competitive heart of the awards: economies fielding their best.

BL · Truntum

Reawakening love

Scattered four-dot stars — created in the Yogyakarta sultanate to symbolise love that has bloomed again. The reunion of 14 economies in Jakarta after a long year apart; the rekindled spirit of the regional community.

BR · Ceplok

Unity in diversity

A grid of identical four-petal rosettes — many distinct units forming one ordered whole. 14 member economies, each different, each contributing to a single alliance. The world, into one.

02 · Colour

Two palettes, one site

Then the colour does the framing. The institutional anchor is APICTA's deep navy and blue — the alliance, steady, regional. Layered on top is the host's red-and-white — Indonesia, this edition, for primary calls to action and host-edition signalling.

APICTA · blue

Deep navy #0E1B3D

Institutional blue #1455C0

Wordmark ink #0E2F6F

Indonesia · red & white

APICTA red #9C0A23

White #FFFFFF

The red-and-white pairing is the Indonesian flag (Sang Saka Merah Putih) — used here for host signalling on the development bar and on primary CTAs across the site.

03 · Typography

Two Indonesian typefaces

And then the voice. Both typefaces on this site were drawn in Indonesia — one made for Jakarta itself, the other tracing the handwriting Indonesian schoolchildren are taught.

Plus Jakarta Sans

Drawn by Gumpita Rahayu at Tokotype, a Jakarta-based type foundry, and commissioned by the Jakarta city government in 2020 as part of the rebrand that finally gave the capital its own typographic voice — instead of borrowing one from Western foundries. Released free for anyone to use.

25 Tahun · Asia Pacific ICT Alliance

Celebrating the region's finest in ICT innovation.

The Asia Pacific ICT Alliance Awards bring together outstanding technology achievements across our member economies — and in 2026 we celebrate a quarter-century of innovators, startups, students and enterprises shaping the digital future.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 0123456789

fonts.google.com/specimen/Plus+Jakarta+Sans →

Playwrite ID

From the Playwrite project by TypeTogether — a global effort to capture, country by country, the handwriting children are actually taught in school. The "ID" variant traces the Indonesian classroom hand: the way primary-school teachers across Indonesia teach a young child to form their first cursive letters.

The letterforms are drawn from the official handwriting standard issued by the Directorate General of Primary and Secondary Education (Bentuk Tulisan Tangan Yang Baku, ministerial decisions of 1983 & 1988) and the widely-used teaching workbook Dasar-dasar Menulis Tegak Bersambung by B. Pribadi (7th ed., Edu Book For Kids series, Bhuana Ilmu Populer, 2015).

Celebrating 25 years.

The Asia Pacific ICT Alliance Awards bring together outstanding technology achievements across our member economies.

04 · The longer story

The "map of the world", in batik

Sekar Jagad emerged in the 18th-century courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta as a "world map" pattern — a single textile that visually catalogued the diversity of Javanese batik by stitching distinct motifs together along wavy "island" borders. Each island carries its own meaning; together they form a worldview of harmony in diversity.

The composition is deliberately additive rather than hierarchical: no single motif dominates, and the borders between them are soft, organic, river-like. That ethos is why we chose it as the basis for the APICTA 2026 visual — the alliance is the same idea, in technology. 14 economies, each distinct, brought together within one wavy border.

The four motifs we selected for the Silver Jubilee — Kawung, Parang, Truntum, Ceplok — are all from the Central Javanese batik repertoire. Other Sekar Jagad compositions may draw on Mega Mendung (the cloud-scallop motif of Cirebon, on Java's north coast), Sido Mukti (a diamond grid signifying achieved prosperity, often used in royal weddings), Lereng (diagonal stripe, kin to Parang), or Nitik (a refined dot-geometry associated with court craftsmanship).

Parang stays. Strength and perseverance are the constant of any APICTA edition — the awards are competitive, the alliance has held for 25 years. The other three quadrants may rotate with each host's theme. For Jakarta 2026 they read: continuity (Kawung), reawakening (Truntum), unity (Ceplok).

Identity in motion

Now see it work

Every page of APICTA 2026 leans on the same Sekar Jagad, the same red-and-blue, the same two Indonesian typefaces. Open the home page and the rest of the site reads as one continuous design.

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