Neon won a competitive pitch to define The Goldsmiths’ Company brand message, to clearly communicate their offer and help them engage with their multiple audiences. The task also included bringing structure and clarity to their brand architecture — along with reinstating a sense of craft, clarity and elegance to The Goldsmiths’ Company brand identity.

Brand idea.

The Touchstone held by the demi-maiden in the Company’s coat of arms is an essential tool of the trade, used for testing alloys. Based on this original use, Touchstone has come to mean ‘a benchmark by which others are judged’. So there was our brand idea: Touchstone; a single word that encapsulates The Goldsmiths’ Company’s role within their industry, their unique 360° influence (as guardian and facilitator), and their commitment to delivering the highest standards of usefulness and quality across their entire range of activities – of keeping the craft alive, developing new skills and technologies, bursaries and support, promotion and education activities..

Brand identity.

After our initial concepts pushing the possibilities as to what the new brand identity might be including options moving away from the Coat if Arms and including the odd bit of sans serif, The Goldsmiths’ Company’s preferred direction was a brand ID informed by its extraordinary history while also reflecting its present and future role as a champion of quality for the goldsmith’s craft and craftspeople.

We then had to find that delicate balance of refreshing the Coat of Arms in a way true to its heritage, while clearly being seen as a major step forward, and working as a practical future-facing logo/icon.

And when details matter, you have to go all in and geek out on them…

We did our research; and we picked apart the existing brand mark which – was in a very sorry state. All the elements of the Coat of Arms lacked craft, and there was no sense of coherence or consistency between them. Some of the elements had become ugly and distorted, over time.

For example, the crest looked male, while supposedly depicting a ‘demi-maiden’. The ‘cloud proper’ below the demi-maiden looked like flames. The ‘scroll’ in the hand of the demi-maiden was meant to be a ‘Touchstone’.

We lovingly crafted a more harmonious unit, changing the configuration of the cup and buckles (which also saved space within the shields fields). And we reshaped the shield to accommodate the legs of the unicorns.

We also created different variants from the standard mark: an even more detailed one for super-sized applications and a simplified one with tweaked line work and spacing, for small use, or for challenging reproduction techniques like foiling.

We then set about redesigning a more elegant logotype, with a more size-practical stacked unit.

The result, we hope you agree, was a harmonious whole, with real craft and gravitas – and powerful enough to work as an icon. All within the same space footprint of the existing Coat of Arms.

If you would like to find out more about Neon or have up and coming project you’d like a chat about then for sure DM us.

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PAUL DYSON
Director Promotions
The Goldsmiths’ Company

“Neon were brought on board at the Goldsmiths’ Company to refresh and consolidate the company’s reputation and message through its visual identity, which had never been reviewed before. Branding as a concept, was completely new to us, and Neon were brilliant at taking us through every step of the process, as well as managing stakeholder views and expectations. The way in which Neon work is great, everything is founded on logic, which makes their processes really easy to understand, this is combined with creative thinking both graphically and how they use words and text. They were subsequently commissioned to work on our £18M project Goldsmiths’ Centre because of the work they had completed with the company, and were extremely easy and flexible to work with, they became part of the team. I would have no hesitation in recommending Dana and his team.”

REBECCA VAN ROOIJEN
Project Manager
The Goldsmiths’ Company
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