Posted by Citrus Frog at 10:39 am
The Birmingham Conservation Trust is a West Midlands based charity set up to “preserve and enhance Birmingham’s threatened architectural heritage”. Their projects secure the future of buildings at risk in and around the City Center, the sort of buildings that many other charities or developers would rather not tackle.
Birmingham Conservation Trust asked Citrus Frog to redesign their visual identity to bring it into the noughties so it would appeal to a new audience of the social networking age without alienating their current supporters.
The Birmingham Conservation Trust’s (BCT) previous logo did not allow for easy manipulation for use on social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Our job was to give the Birmingham Conservation Trust’s visual identity a complete overhaul and ensure that its new logo was simple to convert into many formats across the web, as well as being a strong instantly recognisable brand across their printed material.
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We started by looking at what the Birmingham Conservation Trust was really about, raising the funds to not only save historic buildings, but also to give them a new purpose, we settled on their iconic work with the Back to Backs in the City Center near the Hippodrome. These historic building are a real part of Birmingham’s past, and now serve as a living museum for the thousands of visitors that see them every year.
Taking the Back to Backs as our inspiration we set about illustrating our version of the iconic buildings. We had to ensure that this would be detailed enough to capture the full likeness of the original buildings whilst being uncomplicated enough to be instantly recognisable even as small as 24 pixels square on twitter!
The other key elements in the new Birmingham Conservation Trust’s logo were the typeface and colour palette. For the typeface we used a bold, uncomplicated and easy to read font with a little styling. The colour scheme used bright orange to represent their creative approach to their work, against a deep graphite and stark white. These high contrast colours give the Birmingham Conservation Trust a positive visual identity and also allows for strong icons to be used across the internet.
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The final two elements that were added toward the end of the design process where the “bct” on the side of the building and the crane that can be seen clearly behind the Back to Backs. The decision to add the “bct” was two-fold, firstly it would allow for the building to be used as a stand alone icon without the full “Birmingham Conservation Trust” text and secondly the very act of putting “BCT” on the side of the Back to Backs illustration would give a new sense of ownership to their flag ship project that had previously been seen mainly as a National Trust property (The National Trust run the Museum but were not responsible for the restoration project.
The crane represents the true nature of the Birmingham Conservation Trust’s work, and is a reminder of the scale of the restoration work that is undertaken for some of their projects. The juxtaposition between the finished Back to Backs and the crane represents both parts of the Trust’s work – to restore old buildings and give them a new lease of life.
Having designed the main visual identity for the BCT we then went about creating their new printed identity with letterheads, compliment slips and business cards (all on recycled or sustainable pulp of course) and also their online web presence in the form of icons and banners.
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To stay up to date with their great work, why not follow them on Twitter: www.twitter.com/BirminghamCT
We also worked along side Nick Booth from Podnosh on this project: www.podnosh.com | www.twitter.com/podnosh
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