As part of our ongoing work with Edinburgh World Heritage, we designed and developed a standalone microsite to showcase their latest conservation project in Turkey. The KORU Project (or The KORU Projesi) was a strategic partnership between EWH and KMKD, the organisation responsible for the Protection of Cultural Heritage across Anatolia. The project itself was established to adopt best-practice from Edinburgh conservation teams, learning from the extensive work carried out across Edinburgh’s Old Town and using them in cultural sites vulnerable to erosion and other environmental factors.
Working with both teams and other stakeholders across Europe, we gathered a broad list of insights, project milestones, relevant technology breakthroughs and a map of vulnerable sites before translating this into a story that an international audience could easily understand. As a result, the KORU Project website is split into five key sections showing conservation work progress. Each topic showcases a range of outcomes, from specific buildings and sites to innovative new technologies used to capture energy.
We created a dynamic visual system inspired by traditional Turkish architecture and civic design. These influences stretch from iconography to colour palette, bringing in a ‘carved’ illustrative style to help unite each topic. The four locations (Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya and Mardin) each have a unique place in Turkey’s history — with individual personalities and architectural quirks, the visual system needed to represent each area fairly.
The KORU Project website uses visually rich content to share the conversation story with an international audience. To keep things simple, we ensured that minimal text required translation. We achieved this by using a simple storytelling structure reinforced with powerful imagery that a non-English-speaking audience would understand. This approach meant that the website content only required Turkish and English translations—the two main audience groups.
