Discovery Passage Aquarium
Team Members: Krista McAllister, Sam Patterson
In 2016, my teacher approached me asking if I wanted to join two other students in a rebrand project with Discovery Aquarium. We worked together to provide the aquarium with a full rebrand, including their promotional material with the new brand.
Who is Discovery Passage Aquarium?
They are an nonprofit aquarium based out of Campbell River that focuses educating people about the diverse marine life and habitats in Discovery Passage and the surrounding islands.
They really highlight their ability to educate people by using on hands-on experience for people of all ages. They are normally open starting in the spring, and continuing into the fall each year, and all of their specimens collected for the season are returned to their habitat safely at the end of the season.
Before the Rebrand
When they came to us, their main goal was to have some collateral for their existing branding, which included: A stylesheet, templates for posters, ads, PowerPoint slides, and brochures. These templates needed to be super easy to edit because their organization is run mainly by volunteers, who might not know how to use the tools that designers, like myself, take for granted sometimes.
Upon receiving this we decided that their aquarium logo needed a bit of tweaking to fix that contrast issue. The main issue that they were facing is that their past aquarium logo is that it did not translate well into a black and white format, as you can see in the gallery below. They also needed of some branding guidelines as a few of their ads were off-brand.
The New Logo
After taking look at their logo, we immediately went to work on making the crab more realistic, and increasing the contrast in-between the different elements. In the end we added eyes, the lines in the shell, and the gap to create space so it didn’t disappear into a black shape when it was in a smaller format. We decided that it would be best to tweak this logo to match the explorer lab logo as the colours in that logo had more contrast,
The Style Sheet
Based on this original stylesheet, the new one outlines colours, fonts, template usage, and the two logos. Looking back on this project, we should have implemented a branding book, this way we could have included everything they needed to create a cohesive brand identity.
As you can see the two logos are very similar, they have the same colours and interaction with the text, but they each have their own identity.
Branding Collateral
With the new cohesive branding identity we made a letter head, and some business cards using a moldboard as inspiration. The business cards would be used the more involved volunteers and people working for the non-profit. Their letterhead would be used mostly in-house, but would be used at a template to write on while applying for grants, so it had to look very professional and couldn’t take up much space or distract from the content.
Posters and Poster Template
These are the two posters we made for the aquarium along with a poster template. The template is a great way for them to create any kind of poster they need but it ensures that they stay on brand.
PowerPoint Slide Templates
We decided to go with a very similar feel to the poster template, so they would remain cohesive. We made two different sets of sliders because the Aquarium and the Explorer lab are different programs, and they have different needs presentations-wise. The Aquarium slides are mainly used for presentations in meetings and applications, whereas the Explorer Lab presentations will be used to education kids during summer camps, seminars, and tours.