Culture Connect Wales

Being co-located at a coworking and incubator space can bring amazing opportunities for connection and growth that would not otherwise take place. This is how we started engaging  with the team of Culture Connect Wales, a cultural consultancy arm of Watch Africa dedicated to supporting diverse talent in the Film and TV industry in Wales.  

Recently, they’d commissioned apiece of research into the impact their activities over the two years of work in the film and TV industries in Wales has hand on access, resources, and opportunities for Black and ethnically diverse people in Wales. The report, researched and written by Dr Sarah Younan, is full of amazing data and information about this wonderful organisation’s work and its impact. The issue, however, is that it is a block of text. Hard to parse out, hard to engage with at length and deeply.

That is where we come in. We were asked “What can you do to make it more visually appealing?”, which is always the first question. But not the only question.

The visuals serve the true goal: increase engagement, multiply impact.

You have one chance to ensure your audience engages with information. Getting their attention back is harder a second time around. As such, whatever we create must be eye-catching and communicate at a glance what the report is about in general before we get to the specifics.

A report like this stands out in that it acts mostly as a compendium of stories from research participants. This kind of qualitative data has to be reflected and elevated. Considering that the stories were about the film industry, it was an obvious decision to reflect the most impactful stories and metaphors as if they were film storyboards.‍

While our team decided which stories would be elevated, the client had full input in the tone and direction these stories would take. The process resulted in some of our designs being dropped, while other specific stories to be included that we had not considered.

Alongside these stories, our team developed unique Spot Illustrations on the theme of the film and tv industry, to give the report a stronger visual identity based on the existing CCW branding.

As part of the project, the Client receives all these unique assets to use in any future project of their choice.

We transformed a powerful piece of research into a document that elevates participants voices, matches client branding guidelines, reflects the creativity and diversity of the industry they work, and will, hands down, increase engagement with the text.

We will follow up with this client in several months’ time to investigate what impact our work has had. But at this stage, the work speaks for itself.