Bath Uni - A very useful visit

After a very quiet period on the science projects front, we contacted the Bath Uni people and arranged to pay them a visit. We were shown around the impressive facilities at their campus and took lots of photos of "science stuff" so we could get more of an idea of the particular visual language they use. Here are a few examples:



It's good to see that someone shares our own puerile sense of humour. Anyway, after they showed us around we all went into a meeting room to discuss our ideas. It was pretty heavy going and I didn't really get the impression that they were buying into our concept, which was only half-formed, truth be told. We needed a breakthrough.

So we wrapped up the meeting and headed for the SU bar to chat about how best to proceed. Amazingly, halfway through the first pint inspiration struck! I was trying to think of the stuff that people associate with science and chemistry in particular when I thought about the old Helix scientific stencils that we used to design experiments at school. From this came the idea of using a strong orange colour scheme, like the plastic of the stencils, along with a good stencil font (I remembered having seen a lovely stencil version of DIN). How about getting HUGE stencils made up in the plastics workshop at Sion Hill? Then the Bath Uni guys could use them to illustrate the points they want to make. Yes!

Then I started thinking about how they would dress. How about riffing on the smugness of the Apple Genius Bar? Those guys are essentially IT drones whereas the Bath Uni guys are ACTUAL GENIUSES (well, sort of - it's all relative). I proposed that we took the look and feel of the Genius Bar, making it orange rather than blue, and using the words "actual genius" or "scientist" instead, sat below a logo that could be a chemical symbol (perhaps for caffeine?). Maybe they could serve coffee at their Actual Genius Bar, out of branded conical flasks or test tubes...

Finally we had some real progress on this project and we were all very fired up. We couldn't wait to tell the Bath Uni guys what we had in mind.

Incidentally, we also found out that they really liked my poster ideas that I sent them before Christmas (the apple, gold phone and platinum map of Birmingham), they just didn't let me know so I assumed they thought they sucked!