As part of our ongoing relationship with Edinburgh World Heritage, we designed and developed a brand new microsite to showcase their latest exhibition, ‘Heritage for People’. The website shows how five of Europe’s World Heritage Cities are tackling common challenges including population growth, seasonal tourism and ageing civil infrastructure.
Edinburgh World Heritage tasked us to design and build a website to communicate the learnings taken from years of urban management and conservation in Bordeaux, Edinburgh, Florence, Porto and Santiago de Compostela. Central to our approach was to find a way to humanise the issues shared by each World Heritage City — to do this; we collected data from Atlas World Heritage to identify the critical obstacles before consulting with experts to see how each location had responded. In doing this, we identified five crucial areas of overlap; urban fabric, agriculture and forestry, economic activity, leisure spaces and flow spaces. These learnings were then visually compared and contrasted to determine areas of growth and development, revealing potential solutions that towns and cities can adopt elsewhere.
As part of the creative process, we agreed that the website should be visually engaging, using location imagery and infographics to shed light on each locations main problems. Every City page feels unique and uses people-centred visuals to show their extraordinary growth and progression with five key areas to explore.
While designing the visual identity of the Heritage for People campaign, we agreed that the brand system needed to unite the various cities under one banner. After some creative exploration, we arrived at a restrained colour palette and placed people-led imagery front and centre to celebrate cultural differences. A simple map device was used as a navigation tool, promoting users to explore each city and learn about their fantastic initiatives.
As part of the visual system, we made use of fantastic local photographers to capture and showcase the things that make their city unique. Some of this photographic work include Filipo Brito capturing the Porto Cidade; X at the Firenze Patrimonio Mondiale, Florence; Jeremy Buchholtz at the Fernand Lafargue Square, Bordeaux and local Edinburgh craftspeople by Kevin McLean.
We continue to support Heritage for People’s online presence as part of our ongoing partnership with Edinburgh World Heritage, continuously monitoring activity and optimising search engine performance. Throughout 2021, the website has experienced sustained usage from users across the UK and Europe — we achieved this consistency by fine-tuning each page and responding to press reports and several local campaigns run by Atlas and their partners. These campaigns were then tied back to the central Heritage for People content hub, linking all World Heritage articles to our exhibition portal.
As a result of several feedback sessions with local and international partners organised by Edinburgh World Heritage, we have received fantastic feedback — we then combined this feedback with our own usage data to evaluate and learn from our joint success.
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