What We Did
Location
Salt Lake City, Utah
Years
2016-2018
To better understand the current brand and opportunities to build messages around it, we reviewed materials, conducted an internal focus group with board and staff members, and held interviews with community leaders. We followed these with two focus groups to better understand the motivations of prospective parent visitors and existing planetarium members. From this research, our team developed a new brand platform for the Clark Planetarium.
Based around our new brand essence; “Igniting Cosmic Discovery,” we developed a brand platform that included tone, brand promise, positioning points, and messages. Visually, our team was tasked with refreshing, but not significantly altering, the logo and clarifying its use with Salt Lake County. Knowing the interior of the Clark Planetarium was being completely redesigned and rebuilt, we worked to mirror the typography and color palette usage together to create a cohesive brand experience both outside and inside the doors of this building and organization.
As we moved to visually expand the brand into a designed visual identity system, we focused on creating something that both conveyed the wonder and beauty of space while also exuding the fun and interactive nature of science.
To visually create an aura of playfulness in the brand, we developed a custom visual language called “The Rhythm of Space”. Built upon an angled grid, it utilized a series of dashed lines, stars, planets, and other space illustrations to create a vibrant and flexible system. This visual brand system gave the Planetarium’s in-house team the ability to customize the look and feel of different pieces, while still maintaining the rules necessary for a consistent brand. Once the illustration element was created, an angled gradient created a dynamic piece to be paired with the space photography.
Once the visual brand is paired with headlines consistent with the fun and playful brand platform, the complete brand begins to take shape.
We developed video content in the form of a 0:30 television commercial and edited the piece to be used in 0:15 and 0:07 spots. Our team worked from conception through filming and editing to highlight the Planetarium’s new exhibits, which are the centerpiece of the project.
We worked with the Clark Planetarium to develop the design for a new website that reflects the updated brand and is user friendly. The website aims to organize information for prospective visitors to learn about Clark Planetarium’s exhibits, to find show times and special events, purchase tickets to shows, and much more. We worked with the Salt Lake County’s web development team to build and launch the website.
We worked with Clark Planetarium to develop multiple pieces of external communication. Along the east and south sides of their building we redesigned the exterior graphics to include the new brand elements and promote the Planet Fun store. We also helped create a brochure and a business identity package to amplify the new branding.
