How do you go about creating a meaningful brand?
It’s the challenge we set ourselves on every project. Part of what it means to Push the Possible should always be about going beyond the obvious and looking for the opportunity to do something different, something special, and undoubtedly something meaningful. Doing the obvious is bland, safe, and a bit too easy.
Unsurprisingly, we are not interested in that safe space. We want brands to tell stories, to surface the history, the lore, and the personality that can shape a concept to connect with the people that use it the most. Emotional connections are built on more than just pretty visuals, and the need to create something that resonates with your audience has never been more important. Making something memorable is a good start, but drawing on aspects that give the solution more value, more relevance, and an inherent sense of history or place, is the difference between a totally unique solution or revisiting the same old tropes.
The Lemon Street Market rebrand was always going to challenge us to practice what we preach. I’ve lived in Truro my whole life, so I know the market well. I’ve seen it change and adapt considerably over the years, and what’s always set it apart is its ability to constantly adapt to the ever-changing retail landscape. Its success comes from seamlessly mixing service and retail in the same space, while somehow managing to retain its own identity. It’s no mean feat, and it’s a large part of why it’s still here today, after almost 50 years of trading in the city.
The new brand, the first one in a decade, represented a great opportunity for us to celebrate this by looking deeper into the market’s connection with the city, and an opportunity to celebrate Truro’s legacy as the centre of trade and commerce in Cornwall. It is a pretty magical little place, full of character and history. Once dubbed “The London of Cornwall ‘’ for its elegant Georgian and Victorian architecture, and cobbled streets., It’s got tons of personality, and we were determined to surface some of this as part of the rebrand.
Something that’s always stood out for me, is Truro’s original city street signs, some of which date as far back as the late 1800s. The individual letterforms have a unique and timeless character to them, often inconsistent and unrefined, but also perfectly imperfect in their execution. Being a lifelong “Truronian”, and a self-confessed lover of type, it’s a historical piece of wayfinding that I’ve always admired, and a great opportunity for us to leverage something that’s entirely unique to Truro to create a unique and meaningful brand solution.
Tracing the originals felt like a good place to start, and we did, but it also felt like the easy option. If we were going to realise our ambition, then this had to be more than just a wordmark or a display-type solution. We wanted to get closer to the originals, and study the texture, techniques and craftsmanship that’s created such a beautiful and timeless piece of wayfinding.
This was always about more than simply copying the existing signage and calling it a bespoke solution. It was about respecting the original work and finding a way to repurpose it for a new brand, paying homage to the craft and skill of the sign makers, and drawing inspiration from something that is intrinsically connected to Truro as a city.
Big ideas require an in-depth process, and it was obvious from the outset that finding all the references we needed was far from straightforward. The signs are everywhere, the ones near the centre of the city are easily accessible, but the rest are pretty hidden. Scattered throughout the cobbled streets, and buried deep in residential areas, we had to cover a lot of ground to collect what we needed just to get started.
The main challenge was finding enough examples of the lettering to complete the full set. A few of them, the obvious ones such as x and z just don’t exist in the local street names, so there was always going to be a small amount of artistic license we’d have to take in creating the full character set. Digitally tracing letters from photographic reference is also not always straightforward, and we did a lot of work building a consistent fixed character width so we could be sure the final solution would work as a fully functional typeface.
Never keen to make life easy for ourselves, we decided pretty early on that if we were creating a fully functional font, then it would be good to have a lowercase option as well. This was a much harder task as we didn’t have any direct references to draw upon, and required time to adapt the character and personality of each individual letter to match its uppercase counterpart.
Bringing the brand to life was all about keeping things simple. We really wanted the type to take centre stage, so we developed a solution that incorporates the brand without adding too many rules around the execution. The fully functional font gives the client the tools to implement the brand themselves, whilst also being able to keep pushing the boundaries of the application.
It’s accompanied by a punchy colour palette, designed with the individual retail space and retailers in mind. It builds on the market’s goal of creating a dedicated shopping space with a more upbeat and sophisticated vibe, tapping into the thoroughfare nature of the building and giving the market more of an upmarket lifestyle feel.
This brand for us was always about going further, We were fortunate enough to have something so unique and beautiful to work with, and throughout the process, we always wanted to keep the spirit of the original signage alive. Standing on the shoulders of giants isn’t easy, but the new brand is deeply embedded in history and has an inherent sense of place that connects it to the city.
By creating our own variation of the type, and bringing it to life as a usable font, the legacy of the original work lives on in a modern and unique way. Creating a new and permanent brand for one of the most important and historical retail spaces in the city.
Author
Written by Sam Thomas, Creative Director at Multivitamin Studio
