For decades, day trips to museums have been a cherished part of school life, offering hands-on, creative experiences that take children out of the classroom and into new, and often inspiring environments.
But tighter budgets and higher costs mean that these trips have decreased across the UK. Research in 2023 showed that only 1 in 3 children visited a museum, with those living in poorer rural areas especially vulnerable.
Art Explora and the British Museum approached us to help name, brand and communicate a new joint venture aimed at tackling this. With Art Explora covering the costs of the museum visit and the transport costs, and both parties collaborating to produce tablets loaded with gamified AR technology, the idea is to harness the power of play and let 7-11 year olds really engage with local museums’ content in a completely new way.
Our first task was to find a name that could sum up the time-travelling quest that students would go on, both physically and virtually. After creating and checking dozens of alternatives, then testing in schools, ‘Time Odyssey’ was chosen as the best way to encapsulate this unique ‘journey’.
Next we had to find a way to create a brand identity for the project that would be compatible with museum objects and stories from different eras and subjects, and successfully interface with the tablet-based AR technology that was being developed.
Our visual answer was a ‘time compass’ – a visual mash-up of mazes, maps, compasses and alethiometers that subtly hints at the collecting, solving, measuring and searching that each time trip entails.
The compass is drawn in a style that lends itself to animation, and extends out across illustration, icons, text containers, edges and boxes.
The restricted palette of dark purple, violet, white and green creates an intentionally retro-gaming vibe, one that carries over into museum objects and portraits of students.
Here are some examples of the scheme in action.
The scheme piloted across five UK regions and museums in 2024 – the aim is to roll-out across many more in 2025.
The team
- Strategy, naming, narrative, design and animation: Johnson Banks
- Game design and AR: Arcade XR