With the wind in the stern and under full sail...
CLIENT: Foro Marítimo Vasco CATEGORY: BRANDING, ONLINE
The Basque Maritime Forum, the Basque Country Maritime Industry Cluster, had been suffering for years from a change in its corporate image and a review of its main public showcase, the website, to adapt the projected image to the real action they do.
This update of the Forum´s image goes beyond aesthetics and is strategic. The FMV is one of the most important clusters in the country, an international benchmark, and needs to showcase its internationalisation work, new projects and employment and industrial development.
It was necessary to evolve the brand, without losing its personality, towards a clear and modern image that adequately represents the sea sector, being aware that it started from an image with too many elements, baroque and very difficult to read.
Therefore, we have endeavoured to correct these problems, focusing on "the sea" as the leitmotiv for the symbol, maintaining the corporate colours (blue) and ensuring an adequate coexistence with the rest. Finally, a good typographic work ensures maximum legibility.
The symbol is reminiscent of the prow of a ship, but it can also be interpreted as several flags swaying in the wind, and we even looked for the undulating movement of the waves to reinforce its link to the sea.
The very clear and simple dry stick typography makes it easy to read and clearly identifies the client. We have distributed the brand in three levels in order to increase the font size and gain presence.
Logically, in the branding process we have worked on the name of the FMV in the different languages, how to work on the coexistence of languages, etc... All this development has been included in a corporate manual that will facilitate its subsequent implementation in any medium required.
And one of the first applications in which we have implemented the new brand is the Basque Maritime Forum´s own website.
The development of the website has been an important project of reflection on the part of the Forum and of synthesis and specification on the part of the agency.
We have spent a lot of time defining a content tree that explains in an easy and intuitive way who we are and what our mission is with a double objective:
- To make it as easy as possible for Forum members to find relevant information (news, fairs, events, etc.).
- To ensure a website that is fully manageable by the FMV, easy to update, enabled for possible future developments and technologically adapted to the latest programming, navigation and security standards.
We have opted for a very visual website, in which both the latest news and upcoming events stand out on the home page, with a top menu that provides easy access to the rest of the content.
In addition, among the many functions of the website we have implemented a news repository that allows us to easily create newsletters to reinforce the communication of the cluster and keep all members properly informed.
