Member Article

Manchester City Council’s Europe-wide SmartImpact Project Now Live

Flow Creative - an award-winning design and video production agency - has completed a raft of creative work for the now live Europe-wide SmartImpact project that Manchester City Council is leading.

The initiative, which sees Manchester head up a collaboration between ten European cities including Dublin, Stockholm, Zagreb and Porto to develop and share best practice in implementing smart city objectives, was soft launched at an event late last month and is now live.

The pioneering project aims to help cities to become cleaner, greener, more efficiently run with better integration of data and technology, and ultimately to help to make them better places to live, work and play.

Flow was responsible for branding the project, as well as creating a range of content including case study films, animation, print material and a website to showcase the content and explain the purpose of the project.

Flow’s creative director, Karl Doran, commented: “Creating the branding and a huge amount of content for such a complex and wide-reaching project was a really interesting challenge for Flow. We worked closely with MCC to develop a branding concept that would work well in a variety of formats, including website, video, print and event signage. It needed to convey SmartImpact’s aims of educating the audience - comprised of the European Commission, national governments, European financial institutions, market sector organisations - to encourage project up take.

The toolkit Flow produced is now being used by all ten partner cities to communicate SmartImpact within their own territories.

On the approach, Karl said: “The bold, contemporary brand style uses a ‘building block’ system to hint at the collaboration of the cities and to convey the idea of working together to build a better future. We used a separate colour and a simple geometric pattern to identify each of the five themes of the project. This allows the audience to easily navigate the site - and some of the theme-specific content - and is being featured across printed material and video content to offer consistency. With a complex subject like this, it was imperative that the content was presented in such a way that helps to make it as accessible as possible if we’re to encourage the wide uptake desired.”

SmartImpact is being rolled out internationally until 2022.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by lucy yates .