Just the trick for the Francis Crick

We’ve been putting our experience of producing hoardings to good use this month, producing core messaging, concepts and graphics for the perimeter hoardings around the Francis Crick Institute as construction on the site gathers pace.

Due to open in 2015, The Francis Crick Institute is an interdisciplinary medical research facility, comprising a unique partnership of six of the world’s leading scientific and academic organisations. The £650m institute’s aim is to attract and train the world’s best researchers in the pursuit of greater understanding of what makes us ill and keeps us well.

And this is where we came in. We needed to come up with a theme for the hoardings that would both address the short and long term needs of the institute: engage with visitors using public transport during the Olympics, who, when queuing, will be essentially a captive audience as well as promote the institute and what it represents to a wide audience whilst it is under construction.

When coming up with the concepts for the hoardings there were a number of things to consider. We needed to communicate what the institute will deliver in a visually stimulating, accessible manner, help make science fun and relevant to everyday life and ensure the designs would work across giveaways given to the queuing crowds.

In addition, during the Olympics period, the institute is commissioning street entertainers to engage with the crowds/queues to promote the field of science and the institute itself. As such, our designs and messaging would also need to work across the t-shirts and hats that the performers would be wearing so that the audience is immediately aware that there is a direct link between the two.

We developed the core messaging of ‘Ideas that change lives’ to communicate the purpose of the institute, and using shapes taken from its existing brand identity, created a set of colourful, modern and dynamic graphics, including lungs to represent cancer research and DNA helixes to reflect the collaboration between the different fields to achieve a common goal.

We also designed t-shirts, hats and bags for the street performers using the same graphic treatment and created a fortune teller ‘science snapper’, along with instructions on how to make it for the performers to interact with younger audiences and as a giveaway.

The hoardings are now up and well worth a visit for those passing by.