Christ’s Hospital Association Case Study
Branding the CHA
When it was founded, the Christ’s Hospital Association stated that its aims are to promote, develop and support lasting ties between Christ’s Hospital, a boarding school founded in the 16th century, and its alumni, who are known as ‘Old Blues’ thanks to the historic blue coats that are still worn as part of the uniform.
We were briefed to create an identity that would appeal to an age range from 17 up to ninety year olds, needed to make reference to the CH Association’s predecessor, the CH Club, whilst also clearly looking to the future. Not an easy task, but one that we undertook with relish because this was very different to our past branding projects.
Preliminary sketches
We began the task with our usual preliminary sketches. These were of the most iconic buildings and statuary from the school – the main hall (known as “Big School”), designed by Aston Webb, with the statue of Edward VI and four of the school’s most famous Old Blues in front of it sprang to mind.
Although it made a nice watermark, this logo design’s fine line drawing-style would not have worked well at small sizes (page and screen) and would certainly be difficult to embroider on to clothing.
Back at the drawing board we also found ourselves considering the old CH Club logo:
We decided to modernise the belt (known colloquially in the school as a “broadie”), but keep the idea of Christ’s Hospital (signified by the school’s crest) being at the heart of the new CH Association with the interwoven rings symbolising the link between the school and the Old Blues.
There were other, more modern designs than these, but it ultimately it was the practicality of the second that won over the CH Association Advisory Board:
You’ve done a fantastic job, really professional... and a real sense of combining past, present and future.
Shortly afterwards the one of the CH Association Board members announced that the CHA would also be launching a website using a PHP template which relied on tables and inline formatting to display the site’s content.
Here at Frog Box Design, we don’t like to use tables to display anything other than tabular data and “tag soup” is like a red rag to a bull to us (or perhaps more correctly here, “croaking” jokes to a frog), so we designed the CHA website with PHP, XHTML and CSS.
This approach ensures good indexing by search engines and the forward-compatible coding will make it easy to update the content and expand the site as it grows. Plus, it’s ethical and legal because the content is accessible, meaning that it can be viewed just as easily by a refreshable Braille display as by someone using a dial-up connection.
Update
In May 2006 we launched the new CHA site. The site now incorporates all the content from another site that was started more than six years ago, so we stripped out all the code and reformatted it semantically. We spent a lot of the last few weeks swapping <br> for </p> <p> and putting things that were listed into... well, lists!
The site also takes advantage of the RSS revolution with RSS news feeds and it even has a mobile phone-friendly section!
Further update
Great news! The stats from the month after the re-launch show visits to the relaunched Christ’s Hospital Association site are up a MASSIVE 350% on the months prior to the addition of all that extra content and RSSification.
