Brand Toolkit

Overview

With a suite of charities under its wing, The Royal Foundation’s Marcomms team asked to find a way to help them manage a growing number of brand identities over multiple organisations.

The team was stretched and currently brand management was dispersed across the organisation, with smaller charities having little experience of brand management.

We saw an opportunity to revolutionise the way they worked with their brands, saving them time, streamlining workflow and centralising control – The Brand Toolkit.

The Brand Toolkit

A set of tools designed to centralise storage and control of all brand assets, guides and materials, giving Marcomms complete gatekeeping ability, at the same time as raising brand literacy across all charities.

The Toolkit consisted of two parts.

The Brand Tookit Book – We put together a universal guide, applicable across all brands to raise brand literacy and introduce robust guides, templates, best-practices and workflows that placed Marcomms at the heart of it all decision-making processes. 

A Digital Assets Manager – Introducing a new and centralised way of storing and monitoring all brand assets from a single centralised place, giving them complete control of who can access what. Using the DAM not gave complete control to the central Marcomms team, it streamlined approvals, and was a distribution hub for the Brand Toolkit Book itself.

Website re-design

Overview

Tiata Fahodzi is a theatre company championing stories that illuminate the mixed, multiple-experience of what it is to be of African heritage in Britain today.

Seeking a new direction, the company approached us to transform their website from a tool for selling tickets into a cultural hub that drives conversation. But after checking under the hood of their existing site, we saw an opportunity to not just redesign the front, but restructure their publishing workflow.

Our Solution

After reviewing Tiata’s brand guides, we discovered fresh materials to use that would easily breathe new life into the site, increase appeal to younger visitors as well as mark a new chapter in Tiata’s journey without stepping away from the brand.

Tiata’s site was not small, it had been running for many years and as such had a legacy of blog posts, archives of project and production pages, as well as databases of staff, cast and crew members over the years which all needed preserving or transferring.

But once we familiarising ourselves with the existing site, front and back, we were confident we could reinvent the functionality of the site from ground up to deliver a streamlined, self-explanatory management experience to make the team’s lives significantly easier and workload lighter.

Original homepage (left) with re-designed site (right) using new combinations of brand colours and patterns to breathe new life into the site

Frontend Design

  • A complete redesign of the site from top to toe 
  • Consolidated blog into fewer categories for readers to understand
  • Truly responsive pages and functionality across multiple devices
  • Better navigation including new ability to search archives

Backend functionality

  • Faster loading, more stable hosting, automatic back ups
  • Streamlined, simplified publishing workflows making everything quicker and easier to do
  • Relabelled and structured backend making everything easier to find and manage
  • Clear labelling of all new admin features with clear tooltips and descriptions
Live training session with all staff on how to operate new site 

In a Different Light

In a Different Light was an ambitious archive acquisitions project a year in the making. Generating hours of content, it became an educational resource for future generations of artists, archivists and researchers, preserving culturally and historically significant works in perpetuity and comprehensively documenting the process from every angle along the way.


Overview

An established gallery based in Shoreditch, London, Autograph’s mission is to explore identity, representation, human rights and social justice through photography and film. In a Different Light sought to acquire culturally significant works that captured an era crucial to the development of Black communities across London.

We were instrumental in executing key parts of this complicated endeavour, producing a vast bank of interviews and tutorials for future generations of artists and archivists to learn about the artists, the era, and crucially, the process of accessing and contributing to archives themselves.

Working with the artists and industry experts and professionals from bodies such as Magnum and The Photographers’ Gallery we planned, shot and edited a comprehensive body of educational resources detailing the various aspects of the acquisitions process with specialist insight from professionals across the whole industry gamut.

In supporting Autograph across the whole project from start to finish, we produced:

  • 53 finished individual videos
  • 20+ hours of raw footage reviewed
  • 17 interviews captured
  • 7 artists included
  • Over 5 hours of finished footage, taking
  • 1 year start to finish to shoot and edit