Midsomer Norton Cultural Consortium – a collective of local charities, community groups, schools, artists and High Street businesses – commissioned jamjar to develop a place brand for the town.
The new brand needed to:
As this was a place branding project, we drilled into the essence of Midsomer Norton. We researched the town, its history and heritage; we looked at its architecture and landscape; we explored its high street make-up with many long-established independent businesses; and, we held focus groups with the cultural consortium members to find out what makes this medieval market town and cultural destination so unique.
For a small town, we discovered Midsomer Norton has a big cultural offering, particularly within the performing arts – major annual community-led events/festivals include Fayre, Carnival, Arts Festival, M-Fest and Pride. We also found a very distinctive Amphitheatre in the Town Park.
From this research, we started visually exploring the individual elements that make Midsomer Norton unique and different from any other English town. This led to the creation of a suite of graphical tiles, highlighting the town’s past and present offering, including its Amphitheatre, the River Somer, the Midsomer Norton Knight and its markets.
Four of these tiles were arranged into the shape of one of the town hall’s windows to form the logo identity. The window outline used within the logo allowed us to give a glimpse of what the town has to offer. The wider suite of tiles was then used as visual devices in the town’s identity and marketing material.
Reflecting the landscape, people and culture, we developed two distinctive colour ways for the brand – the summer palette used as its main, primary palette, with a winter palette able to be used on collateral promoting events during the autumn/winter seasons.
As well as developing brand guidelines to manage the application of the new identity, we created a suite of marketing assets and templates for the Cultural Consortium to use.
A new vibrant place brand for the town, Midsomer Norton, has been created, which celebrates its distinctive local character and heritage, and helps showcase the town’s cultural offering and events.
