The John Templeton Prize is one of the most highly regarded honors in the world, awarded to the individuals brave enough to tackle life’s Big Questions. Over time, this honor had begun to fray at the edges due to an inconsistent award schedule, outdated marketing, and no clear answers to the what and why of the Prize. Our longtime partners at the John Templeton Foundation turned to us to help them restore the Templeton Prize to its former glory, reintroducing it to the world with a new brand identity and web design to better represent this prestigious award.
View Site: templetonprize.org
To know where to take the Templeton Prize brand, we needed to understand exactly where it stood.
The resulting strategy became the foundation for a successful identity redesign.
A new web design brought the reimagined John Templeton Prize brand to life.
We embarked on a comprehensive discovery process to uncover what this brand truly wanted to be. According to our survey, over 50% of respondents said they were “not at all familiar” with the Templeton Prize, while an additional 24% selected “not very familiar.”
The Prize’s brand has a long, distinguished history, yet has been losing equity and prestige over time, which is an indication of a larger public perception problem. To quote one Prize stakeholder: “The Prize is lacking a certain amount of excitement and energy needed to capture attention.”
The final mark’s interwoven geometric layers symbolize the physical and metaphysical dimensions implicit in The Prize’s vision. Hexagons are classically revered for their strength, symmetry, and balance across scientific and spiritual disciplines, making it the ideal shape to define this brand’s bold and interdisciplinary mission.
A few basic rules for choosing typography and color are one, make it readable, two, make it visually appealing, and three, make sure both are inline with the overall brand aesthetic. On top of checking these boxes, we also needed to consider the strategic directive to build on the existing brand equity of the John Templeton Foundation, while simultaneously making the Prize’s visual identity unique.
Freight Big Pro is an elegant, modern serif that imbues headlines and other principal messaging with striking prestige.
We chose a bolder face in the Freight family for quotes and testimonials, helping to create a satisfying contrast with surrounding content.
Freight Sans Pro serves as an ideal counterpart to its serif siblings, providing optimal legibility and consistency across the brand.
To give users the best experience, we had to understand them first. Who are the Prize’s users? Why do they come to the website? These and other foundational questions framed our approach to creating a strategic, user-centric web design that effectively communicates the Prize’s mission and vision.
Effective sitemaps are necessary elements for every website, and the Prize was no exception. We used this step of the process to think outside the box, challenge assumptions, and ultimately position the building blocks of the site to create the most efficient and effective user experience possible.
As we uncovered in our research, the distinguished laureates of the Prize carried an enormous amount of weight for the brand. To convey their importance, we designed bold pages to highlight each individual laureate to effectively highlight their notable achievements.
