Last year we had the privilege of developing a new website for the Danish Canadian National Museum. This year, they came back to us for some re-branding work. Normally, the first stage in any sort of design work is getting to a deep understanding of the client, their goals, their audiences, etc. Because we were already very familiar with the Museum, we were able to jump right in… sort of.
We quickly discovered a significant challenge in branding the Museum. They had two seemingly conflicting goals/audiences:
A major goal of the re-branding project was to broaden their marketing appeal to a larger audience of young families and people in general with no Danish background. How do you do that? By using the most universally appealing aspect of Danish culture, of course: Vikings!- At the same time, though, we had to make sure we didn’t alienate their traditional user group: mostly older people of Danish descent. We had to speak to their experience and culture in an authentic and historically accurate way.
The problem is, a lot of the imagery that dealt with #1 most clearly wasn’t true to #2. You know those Viking helmets with the horns? Yeah, they didn’t use those except for special ceremonies. The Danish helmets were plainer and thus not as strong as an icon. We ran into a similar problem with the Viking ships with the dragons on the front. So we had to dig a little deeper…
Eventually we saw what was sitting right in front of us the whole time: the Freydis Joanna, one of the highlights of the Museum (pictured). The Freydis Joanna is an accurate reconstruction of an 1100-year-old Viking ship, built by master shipwrights in Denmark and transported to Canada. It was perfect: it spoke to both the Viking connections and also the fact that most Danish immigrants to Canada arrived by ship. Most importantly, it was authentic, both historically and to what the Museum actually has to offer today.
The next step was deciding how to represent the ship visually. After exploring different aspects and angles of the Freydis, we landed on a front-on view of the prow. The resulting shape also communicates a sense of movement and – in a more abstract way – a graphical representation of immigration. Finally, it conveys a sense of progress and growth, which we’re confident is exactly what will happen with the Museum itself as they push their marketing efforts forward.
