An identity for a work in progress…
How do you create a visual identity for a project that’s in its experimental stages? Well, twice, it turns out…
Heather MacRae is an extraordinary advocate for creativity as a tool for exploring academic subjects, as a skill for a wide array of working contexts and as an engine of social mobility.
At Hackney Education (through spotting my creative work for third sector organisation Workforce), then at creative education charity Ideas Foundation, Heather has brought me in for traditional design and creative direction, included me in multidisciplinary teams and spotted applications of my knowledge and skills I had no idea might be useful. I’ve found myself branding Space to Earth Challenge, creating resources for an Ideas Foundation x Canon project, providing behind-the-scenes thinking to help shape Ideas Foundation programmes, including Coronation Generation and developing the Ideas Foundation brand itself.
As founder of Venture Thinking, Heather is making educational use of her father’s enormous collection of coins. And it’s been no surprise to see ideas being developed by doing, in pilot workshops with schools.
Initial design took place during the very first pilot workshops – and six months later, the visual identity turned out not to have been used. There was a feeling that the brand needed “selling in”. That told me that the visual identity wasn’t doing its job – that it had more in common with the communications we had produced for big corporate and institutional partnership projects and that this was another species altogether. So I asked Heather if I could rethink the visual identity, from scratch.
I asked for examples of recent materials and read them. I produced a new, simpler, more versatile mark combining a coin and a search icon to make a C. I found fonts rooted in coins and in modern readability. I matched colours to actual coins.
We now have an identity in action, its applications being adapted and evolved with the project itself.
And that’s where professional, human experience and expertise make a difference: in the knowledge and care that go into understanding what design should be doing, in the trust built in a design partnership – and in the confidence to throw an idea in the bin.
