King’s College London
Launching King’s Digital Lab to explore academic research in new ways
Partnering with an innovative new data-driven department of King’s College London to deliver a functional, flexible identity system and website.
What we did
- Workshops
- Brand identity
- Website templates
As part of our ongoing work with King’s College London, we were approached by the newly-founded Digital Lab to create their brand identity and website. It needed to appeal to a range of audiences, position them both as an internal department and independent agency and communicate their field of expertise – all while sitting within the established King’s College master brand.
Shortly after the department was formed we and the team at KDL were able to form a productive partnership and get a sense of their ambitions and goals for the Lab before it launched.
In addition to being invaluable in gaining brand insights, the relationship we built later became instrumental in developing usable brand materials and enabling an iterative approach to their in-house website development.
In order to answer the complexities of the project, its various audiences and brand limitations, we broke the process down into four sections: Discover, Define, Design and Develop.
Discover
We ran a series of workshops which looked to understand how King’s Digital Lab wanted to position itself and add values to its customers. We invited several audience and stakeholder groups from around King’s to participate and get a broader picture of how KDL might be perceived by a range of different target users.
After the initial workshops, armed with a clearer sense of their offering and intentions, we also supported the KDL team in testing their assumptions of their users through a series of surveys, interviews and questionnaires.
Define
Using all the information we collected in the discovery phase, we defined:
- The core personas
- How we wanted to make them feel and what they wanted to do
- User journeys for each persona
- A content map
- What each piece of content needed to consist of in order to meet the needs of each persona
- The most important aspects of the brand positioning
Design
Once the positioning and core user needs were established, we designed the overall look and feel for KDL’s new brand. Having clearly understood the audience we were speaking to and KDL’s business objectives, we were able to create an identity that positioned them as approachable, yet knowledgable in a variety of digital disciplines. In order to do this, we developed a clear and concise brand proposition: KDL enables research to be seen in new ways.
With our knowledge of the King’s parent brand, we were also able to ensure that they maintained a look and feel consistent with the organisation’s goals and objectives.
As a central brand team we were extremely pleased that William Joseph were able to give KDL the unique identity that it needed, whilst using the core elements of the master brand to ensure understanding of its position within King’s.
Christine Ayre, Head of Brand Design, King’s College London
Develop
Finally, we worked directly with the UX and development team at KDL to collaboratively build and test their digital presence. We used the Discovery and Delivery outputs to prioritise the templates which needed to be designed first. We also developed and delivered the designs using an atomic method, which meant that KDL could use them moving forward, in ways which hadn’t yet been identified.
William Joseph really led us through this process from start to finish. The creativity of their thinking has given us a brand that we’re truly proud of. Their collaborative approach throughout the project was a key driver of the success of the brand and digital presence.
James Smithies, Director, King’s Digital Lab