Identity & branding
Mulligans Flat Visitor Centre Branding
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During the final semester of my Bachelor of Design degree, third year students participated in group projects with real world clients. My group included Jia Miin Tan, Zac Kotzur and Benjamin Foster. Our client was Mulligans Flat Woodland Sanctuary, a reserve located in the north of Canberra that focuses on restoring nature, transforming thinking and inspiring action for conservation. Mulligans Flat were planning the construction of a new visitor centre and with that came a large opportunity for us design students to get involved. Below is the project brief and our outcome. (2019)
Project brief
Project summary
Mulligans Flat Woodland Sanctuary is a wildlife reserve dedicated to the preservation of endangered native Australian species. With the construction of the new visitor centre, there is potential to expand in multiple creative areas, such as:
New app stories (heritage trail)
Camera traps onto website
Wayfinding - tram stop to visitor centre
Signs for gates
Projection stories
Jerrabomberra Wetlands signs
Tour promotion
Films
Branding concepts visitor centre
Rather than trying to create an outcome for each of these possible areas, we will expand on the current branding for Mulligans Flat to enable it to be applied more broadly.
Key objective
Our key objective is to explore the creative possibilities in expanding the identity of Mulligans Flat with the addition of the new visitor centre. The aim of the project is to create five hero animal characters that showcase some of the various animals that you might see in Mulligans Flat. The hero animals will tie in with the experiences available at the Mulligans Flat visitor centre building, the attached learning garden and the walking tracks. This will help visitors be actively engaged while at the centre and enhance the overall customer experience.
Target audience
The target audience is families and children. We think it is important to reach out to this audience, especially children, to help nurture the next generation of environmental conservationists. The hero animals that will be present in the new learning garden, walking tracks and visitor centre will engage both adults and children. They will help to create empathy towards the animals found at Mulligans Flat and the environment they live in.
We chose to develop our design solution in such a way that it showed immediate and tangible outcomes for our client whilst being easily adaptable to include more animals, be applied in different outputs and be used in other wildlife sanctuaries such as Jerrabomberra Wetlands.
Research & Design
Application
We decided to make use of the hero animals in three ways that all connect to each other:
Worksheets: Aimed at educating and entertaining children whilst at the visitors centre.
Animation: A looping background animation to be used in conjunction with the worksheets.
Laser cut animals: Placed in the learning garden for children to interact with when following the scavenger hunt on the worksheets.
Worksheets
The worksheets were created to be an engaging task for children to complete based on what they learnt during their visit.
We designed five different worksheets relating to each of the five hero animals. Each worksheet includes three different sections:
On the first page after the cover, there is an introduction to the animal, a section to draw them, two short answer questions, a multiple choice question about their conservation status and a map to show where they can be naturally found.
The second page includes a dot-to-dot drawing or a colour me in section.
On the final page of each worksheet we included a map of the learning garden, this is designed to link the children’s new found knowledge directly to the learning garden. When the children take their maps outside, they can follow each animal’s distinct footprints to the animal itself (laser cut character).
Animation
We first showed our client this animatic to outline our plan to present the hero animals to the audience through a projection on an outside wall of the visitor centre. Our client told us they would prefer any projections to display a timeline of animal populations in the area, to show the impact of humans on different species and how the conservation effort is helping. The design of this animatic was approved, however the context of the animation was changed from an outside projection to a looping video in the café as entertainment and education for patrons.
Below is the final animation that we created to be used in conjunction with the accompanying worksheets. It does not currently include sound as we did not have access to accurate recordings of the animals. We believe recordings of the animals to be the only appropriate sounds for the video based on its placement and use. When the café is quiet, the animal sounds would add further meaning to the content, but if the café gets busy, the sounds would not become overwhelming distracting.
Laser cut animals
The laser cuts of the animals and their footprints are to be used within the learning garden and along the walking tracks. Within the learning garden, we want to create a scavenger hunt where visitors can follow the laser-cut footprints to find the animals hidden within the trees and bushes. The laser cut animals also play a part in the walking tracks; they help to engage both adults and children as there is no guarantee that visitors will spot all of the real life animals in Mulligans Flat when walking through. This will help reduce visitors possible disappointment in the walking track experience.
Materials suggested:
Hard wood
Treated metal
The laser cuts will be outdoors and so the material they will be cut out of needs to be weatherproof / weather-durable.
Step-by-Step Process:
Sourcing images of animal tracks and creating vectors of them
Altering digital animal and track vectors to translate into laser cutter
Cardboard prototyping
Final life-size plywood prototypes created
Our client was very pleased with our design and looked forward to implementing it. Unfortunately, COVID-19 delayed progress on the visitor centre and so we are unable to see yet if our work will be included.