For over 227 years, Ordnance Survey has helped people explore Great Britain, by creating maps, content and tools to make it easier for everyone to have an active outdoor lifestyle. Their overarching mission is to help us live longer, to stay younger and enjoy life more.
Every day, they’re developing new innovative navigation features, which includes 3D mapping, AR guides and GPS devices. They are also the proud curators of the nation wide initiative, GetOutside which Brandwave helped to bring to life back in 2016 by developing a full supporting brand strategy.
The Challenge
With the strategic foundations in place, it was now time to work alongside the OS team to give GetOutside an identity, a creative thread and a full set of campaign guidelines.
From the initial briefing, it was clear we needed to create a look and feel that inspired people to find new places, create lasting memories and discover the Great British outdoors. The identity needed to stand out in and amongst the traditional green hues, grey tones and sky blues seen across the outdoor industry.
Strategically, the ID needed to work in conjunction with the existing OS branding and complement future, and existing partners already onboard with the initiative such as Salomon Running and the Outdoor Industries Association.
With such a tough line up in this category, we’re incredibly proud to have been part of this award-winning campaign. It’s projects like this that remind us why we work in this sector. It’s brilliant to see this campaign unifying the whole outdoor industry, who are now working together to enforce positive behavioural change.
”A full-set of brand guidelines were created for the GetOutside identity. The guidelines were heavily stress tested to ensure that the design formula would work throughout the identity and across multiple touch points and deliverables, ranging from digital artwork through to large format print.
Matt AnkersLead Project Designer
”The Fuse Frame was designed to embrace the imperfection of nature. The frame offers protection to body copy and call to actions. We see the Fuse Frame as the future of GetOutside – progressive, modern and fluid in development.
Matt AnkersLead Project Designer
The Result
To create the initial ID concepts, our design team began by living the brief and getting outside to put pencil to paper. Having developed a number of creative directions, a word mark style logo ID was chosen as the preferred creative route due to it’s complimentary attributes when working alongside other branding. The logo was built around a protective frame that opened up at the top. We wanted to design an identity that embraced the ethos of the GetOutside initiative and the ethos of re-discovering the outdoors.
A revised colour palette re-introduced the iconic OS Explorer Orange which is infamous with the original OS paper maps, helping to inject a pop of colour. A new font family was also introduced and helped inspire the final creative campaign thread due to its outdoor-like imperfections.
Following this, supporting visual ID guidelines were created and heavily stress tested to ensure our design formula worked across all deliverables from small web banners through to large scale out of home artwork.
Finally a full suite of artwork was created to be used at Countryfile Live, leading up to and during National GetOutside Day which will be taking place on 30th September.
