Reinvent your business with branding. Even a town did.

Even a town uses branding to reinvent itself for tourist.

Shrewsbury, a British town, doesn’t have one single, overriding thing it’s known for--like a music festival, or a market, for example. And that’s made it difficult to market the bustling, historic British village to potential homeowners and tourists. So the town council hired a design firm for their branding. In response, the design team devised an unusual visual identity that goes beyond the typical boilerplate logo-and-color-scheme branding package. The lame and overly used PowerPoint presentation would be useless. It needed good ideas and practical things that everyone in the town could use.

They came up with the concept of a customizable logo that every local business, from bike mechanics to bread bakers, could use. After slinging around ideas, they chose a slogan (“A Shrewsbury One-Off Since ______") that focuses on authenticity--something Shrewsbury has in excess. The logo, printed on rubber stamps and stickers, gives shop owners the latitude to personalize the slogan to fit their wares. ”Since 5:15am” for a pastry chef,” or “Since 1552,” for the town’s castle visitor center.

The rest of the identity fell into place fairly easily. The timber patterns on the town’s Tudor-style buildings were made into typographic elements that mix with the Dalton Maag typeface Efra. In print ads, the bespoke typeface is overlaid on images of centuries-old vandalism on the town gates (“Graffiti”) or a shot of a bike shop (“Chainstore”).

The point? London it ain’t, and that’s the way they like it. The key thing is not to try to compete with other cities. It’s a beautiful old place, but it’s also got a busy theatre, an art gallery and museum opening in an old music hall next year and great little shops. This is a place where people live and work, so the pattern had to be confident and modern too.