The Challenge

Ravensbourne was looking for a creative team to collaborate with predominantly television students to put on their annual undergraduate end of year show.

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The Process

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Research & Ideation

While researching for our proposal we spoke to both industry visitors and exhibitors from previous years about the show, a common trend quickly became apparent - visitors found the Ravensbourne building on the Greenwich Peninsula difficult to navigate and missed large swathes of the previous years' exhibits. Ravensbourne is an eminent arts college with a rich pedigree in design, despite this industry and exhibitors alike felt that the end of year show had stopped being an exhibition and become a more of a television programme-less about the work of students and more a portfolio project for the television students.

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We understood their concerns, Ravensbourne's split level, open plan design is confusing to staff and students who use the building daily, we quickly chose to focus on wayfinding. In previous years individual courses had been left to create the signage to get people to their exhibit and some courses invested more time and money than others creating a disparity between courses that lead to some courses with smaller budgets becoming disengaged.

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Development

We sought to highly decorate the public spaces to give the show a consistent, creative feel and introduce them to a visual language which will help them navigate the show. Early on we pushed the production team to figure out where each course would be exhibiting and colour code each sub-faculty by the floor they were exhibiting on. This gave us the idea of how many colours we'd need to incorporate into the colour pallet.

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Now we knew where each course was going to be we figured out where would be best to place signage, some courses were in smaller rooms, out of the way and in previous years were regularly missed by attendees. We realigned some of our budget to allow us to incorporate additional signs for these courses that we place in thoroughfares to make attendees aware there was more work to be seen.

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The centrepiece of our wayfinding was our entryway set and main atrium signage which quickly presented visitors with all the information they'd need to find the exhibits they're most interested in. Ravensbourne found it so useful they continued to use it for subsequent exhibitions in the summer of 2017.

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The Solution

For this project we delivered, Branding, Custom Fonts, a responsive website which included booking and streaming journeys, Large Format & Print Collateral, Signage, Entrance & Television sets all of which helped to make the show incredibly successful with a record-breaking 7,000 people attending. This was an enjoyable brief and it gave me the opportunity to lead a team, manage a budget and use my digital experience design skills to create a physical experience which was well received.