Without attempting to sound like a host from Family Fortunes, “If you were to ask 100 people from South Yorkshire what made them proud of their region?” I’d happily guess that a majority of them would have an answer based around a strong, industrial heritage (either that or The Full Monty!).

Being a Sheffield based company therefore, we at D4 are no different in sharing this viewpoint and consider it a great opportunity to work on a re-branding project with Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust, who specialise in preserving and promoting this traditional culture.

When considering how to move forward with the brand strategy, we wanted the Trust and museum gems to be more accurately presented online and to make the website a more enjoyable experience to help convey the importance of giving museum’s an overhaul. The starting point for this project though was to give the Trust a whole new ‘brand architecture’ that could be rolled out across all future marketing and promotional material. As the Trust currently manages three industrial museums (Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet; Shepherd Wheel Workshop; Kelham Island Museum), it was important to have a design that was recognisable not only across each sub-sector, but also represented the group as a whole.

With the brand imagery decided upon, the next step was to update and modernise the Trusts website. The main principle of the new website would be to act as a more effective marketing tool attracting new visitors to the museums which we did through colourful image led graphics all powered by impressive backend functionality of a database driven website. Allowing the site to be database driven means the sites content can be managed in-house, allowing for any instant updates on events and collections as and when they happen. With the foundations of the website in place, we also brought it bang up-to-date with social media feeds, a blog and a newsletter link, all great ways to keep young viewers updated.

We didn’t just stop with logo designs and a new web design, we also helped roll out the new brand across a range of promotional literature for various events and an educational campaign to schools in the region.

Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust are very good at modernising history without removing the sense of education and traditional values attached to it….. now they have a website and brand to match…

WEBSITE BEFORE:

WEBSITE AFTER:

BRANDING:

EDUCATION LITERATURE:

Tags: Brand Strategy, Graphic Design, Posted by Marianne, Web Design, Web Development

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 17:38 and is filed under Our Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.