“Ireland,” my wife said. “We are going to go to Ireland.”
Background
To be honest, Ireland was not in my top places to visit list. For some reason, I always thought of Ireland as being kind of dull, as an in-between place to visit while you are backpacking in Europe.
I was completely wrong.
The moment we arrived at Kinsale, it was like love at first sight.
My goal with this project was to showcase the things I fell in love with through visual branding and a landing page.
Kinsale — the little port town
Kinsale at its core, is a port town. Their whole economy revolves around fishing, yet, it doesn't feel like a typical fishing town.
The town feels like it still clinging to an ‘Irish’ feel while trying to set itself apart from neighbouring towns. One of the things that make Kinsale great is their connectedness to the sea and what revolves around it (strong winds, rain, water etc.)
One of the things that I was really drawn into were Kinsale’s colourful streets.
Having visited a couple of neighbouring towns I found that Kinsale had a very distinct colour palette that really set it apart. This gave Kinsale a sense of quirkiness and uniqueness. I found that this made Kinsale a bold town that is willing to take risks to set themselves aside.
Visual Study
I really wanted to keep that nostalgic feel while retaining the colours that Kinsale has. Giving all the branding assets an aura of calmness, wetness, and boldness that only a port like Kinsale can have.
One of the first things that I wanted to explore was that connectedness to water the town has.
This led me to do a couple of tests with water colours and mixing them with photographs to create that wet yet cozy look that I wanted to achieve.
Typography
The combination between these families signifies the contrast between classic and new. It keeps the sentiment of an old Irish town but with a new sense of braveness.
The logo
Once the type families were finalized it was time to create the logo. With the first iterations of the logo I wanted to play with the sea iconography (waves, knots, etc.)
Unfortunately, these first ideas led nowhere. I believe that the problem was that this study was straying from the original intention, which was to retain everything classic but with just little new characteristics.
Then, I decided to just keep it simple. Using the type I had already chosen and adding some touches to bring that concept to life.
I added some leaf-like assets to the tittle of the i to signify Kinsale’s strong winds and tilted the e just a little bit in order to accommodate the quirkiness that sets Kinsale aside from other Irish towns.
The Landing Page
The purpose of the landing page is to incite people to visit Kinsale while maintaining the same strong branding purpose.
Landing Page Sketches
The immediate focus was on making the storytelling within the site more cohesive and making the whole Kinsale brand to be visually appealing and intuitive.
Final Version
I sketched up a stronger experience in presenting and exploring the town, which centralized the overall feel of Kinsale and made the site more engaging and simpler to navigate.
One thing that I thought was of utmost importance was to use colourful and meaningful pictures that really encapsulated the colourful and magical scenery that Kinsale possesses.
You can see the polished designed of the landing page at my behance portfolio.
