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The Highland Council - Am Baile
The Client
Am Baile was founded by a consortium led by The Highland Council, which is working with its partners, Taigh Chearsabhagh Trust and West Highland Animation, to create a bilingual, Gaelic and English, digital archive of the history and culture of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. The Am Baile Digital Project was established with initial funding from the New Opportunities Fund and has recently been assisted with a financial contribution from Highlands and Islands Enterprise, The Highland Council and is managed as part of Highland Libraries.
The Project
The design agency, StudioCinna is the author of the brand and design solutions, which provided the Highland Council with a distinctive brand image, identity, and brand mark, a set of brand, web and print guidelines and an award-winning Web site.
The Am Baile Digital Project Web site, which hosts the digital archive of the history and culture of the Scottish Highlands and Islands, is inclusive of photographs, rare books and documents from archives, libraries, museums, private collections, contemporary art, films, interactive games and comics. The bilingual collection of images and resources offers a unique learning opportunity for Gaelic language students as well as providing interesting content for fluent speakers of all age groups, abilities and backgrounds, which until the launch of the Web site had been difficult to access.
The Brand Solution
StudioCinna entered the project during the strategic phase while the New Opportunities Funding was being established. At that time, The Am Baile Digital Project was without a registered domain, having only a handful pages on users.globalnet.co.uk — featuring a village metaphor, similar to the one Apple used to promote their eWorld product in 1994 — there was no established brand image to project the project's value or identity mark to facilitate instant recognition and reinforce positioning, heightening the pubic perception toward The Highland Council led consortium and partners' digital archive of the history and culture of the Scottish Highlands and Islands.
As the author of the brand solution, StudioCinna designed and developed a distinctive brand image, identity, and brand mark and establishing the brand, web and print guidelines — which instruct how to utilize the brand standards and how to uphold the consistent appearance of the brand in all communications, a paramount factor to building a recognizable brand.
Drawing from nearly two decades of professional experience gained from working on global Fortune 500 accounts for the major advertising agencies in the USA and Europe and adapting these same valuable skills toward pitching and developing Web sites since the inception of the Web, StudioCinna was able to offer advice and deliver innovative solutions — that would aid the marketing and promotion of the complex concept that people throughout the Gaelic speaking world would associate with the project — to an Internet agency, which assumed the role of intermediary during the design phase of the project.
The Website Solution
As the author of the Web site design solution, StudioCinna created a series of iterative design trials, exploring concepts, solutions and design directions, which established the big picture and successfully communicated creative ideas back to the client. By creating the brand solution and a distinctive online brand appearance and personality (the 'look and feel' of the Web site), StudioCinna established a solid foundation and set the design language — which enables all the visual elements to work together harmoniously.
StudioCinna designed the major site elements and the navigational structure, and is responsible for the concept and design of the searchable 'visual information center', — which showcases the digital archive and information on every page — and the design and format of the forms and confirmation screens within the database systems. StudioCinna delivered on time and within budget a series of page templates for the entire Web site — adhering to the accessibility and usability W3C standards — which established the boilerplate formula for the site to be published through a content management system database and to easily accommodate future expansion.
Recognition
Entering the project in the early stages enabled StudioCinna to consciously create considered, contemporary and innovative concepts, brand and design solutions — which reflect the brand as a living entity, not a by-gone part of history, generating an ever increasing excitement about the project and its archive of images and bilingual collection of resources — through the design of the usable, functional content managed online solution, which targets a broad global audience, StudioCinna achieved the client’s aims while maximizing the site’s potential which contributes significantly to the ongoing publicity and recognition the Am Baile Digital Project Team and The Highland Council are receiving.
Client Feedback
"Thank you very much for the design trials for the branding of the Am Baile project. It made my day."
— Am Baile Digital Project Team, The Highland Council
"Congratulations — first class design. Just what I wanted something very chic and professional. I couldn't vision it myself, especially being surrounded here by clichéd images of the Highlands/Scotland (tartan and shortbread syndrome), but obviously my insistence against brown and Celtic knots has paid off. Feedback from members of the team that I have spoken to so far is very positive. I think the palette of colours is just right. Another feature I especially like is the watermark — I can see that it will work really well for leaflets and posters. The whole thing is impressive."
— Am Baile Digital Project Team, The Highland Council
External Alterations
The Am Baile Digital Project Web site is maintained externally by an agency, which independently implemented design alterations to the site — which include: a new home page template, home page navigation, search fields and a major alteration to the brand mark page headers, which were recently changed to a red and pink strip and are dissimilar to the original brand, colour palette and design language.
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Trademark & Copyright Notice: © 1995-2007 StudioCinna/Cinna Ltd. All rights reserved. StudioCinna asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the Am Baile brand and Web site design solutions. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a retrieval system of any nature, without the written permission of the author and copyright holder. Modification of the brand mark design and design solutions requires the written permission of the author and no part of the design solutions may be exposed to public view in any form or by any means, without identifying the author of the brand and Web site design solutions (StudioCinna) and displaying the author's URL (www.studiocinna.com). |