Recently my group (consisting of myself, Abby Edwards, and Lindsay Boland) was given a chance at rebranding and creating a marketing campaign for the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum.

The museum eventually selected these as their official logo and marketing campaign.

The Team

Process

For research, we visited the museum itself and evaluated its strengths and weaknesses with the local and tourist market. We observed the museum had a relatively small footing in the tourist market and that much of its attendance comes from field trips from local elementary and middle schools. The tourist market in Savannah is fairly competitive, with plenty of offerings in the way of museums. 

As a result of our observations, we wanted to brand the museum as a sophisticated and less "touristy" spot for visitors. The logos we saw the previous designers created were based on African symbols and steeped in mysticism. We saw this as the wrong approach for a Civil Rights museum and set out with one most important idea in mind.

Creating a logo with direct relevance to the Civil Rights Movement was of paramount importance.

We chose to emphasize the protest sign as the emblem of the Civil Rights Movement as it happened in Savannah (Savannah had its own struggles in the movement, but violence rarely broke out). We chose to render the protest sign with a brush by hand, as that would 'humanize' what would otherwise be a very modern and sterile design. The protest sign was chosen not only for its relevance to the movement, but also for its potential in marketing campaigns.

Colorwise, we would come to embrace an orange-red shade (PMS 7599C) that was inspired by the color on the signage used in the March on Washington. Some type finessing and critiquing later, we came upon our the main iteration of our logo.

Marketing Campaign

Our next step was to take the logo and create a marketing Campaign based on it. We started with a plethora of marketing ideas but eventually narrowed it down to a single campaign.

"See Yourself"

Images from the Civil Rights Movement with onlookers in the images highlighted by the logo and underlined. The tagline is "See Yourself In History."