Love Stoke 100

To celebrate Stoke-on-Trent’s 100th birthday in 2025, the Love Stoke 100 initiative has been set up to encourage residents of Stoke-on-Trent to produce short films showcasing their love for the city and its rich heritage. Made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund, the idea was born by the teams at local non-profit digital community project, Framescape, and leading local video production company, Inspired Film & Video.

Once the idea was in place, the Love Stoke 100 brand needed bringing to life. So, the team at Framescape approached us to create a visual identity and accompanying website for Love Stoke 100. It needed to engage and inspire the primary audience of young people aged 14 – 19 years, as well as families, local business owners and community members to create short films about why they love the city.

Stoke-on-Trent is a melting pot of culture, history and creativity. And we felt the logos for the Love Stoke 100 brand needed to reflect that. Researching colours, typefaces and symbols that represent the local area, we crafted three very different logo ideas. We explored ideas of the area’s vibrant past, our unique habits and heritage styling inspired by pottery factory signage.

The chosen concept featured a brand mascot, Oatie, based on our Stokie love of an oatcake. A mascot is great for increasing engagement and adding personality to a brand. We knew Oatie was a character that the local audience would fall in love with, and it could be utilised as a tool for creativity on the website too. A retro style of illustration, bold typography and vibrant colours appeal to the younger audience while emanating nostalgia for other audiences.

When translating the visual identity onto a digital platform, we heavily leaned into the new brand. We took a playful yet sophisticated approach by utilising the vibrant colours, a bright, graphic background and introducing elements of fun with Oatie on the website. We wanted to create moments of joy where the audience genuinely enjoyed the user experience.

One of the key components of the website build was developing a workflow for handling video submissions, along with a tool that would help the client to track the process. So, we chose to use Sanity.io and AWS S3 buckets (Amazon web services) to deliver an infinitely customisable platform that was intuitive and useful.

To accentuate the sense of play that was well-embedded into the design and help the user along the journey, we incorporated micro-animations and cues around the website. The animations are quite bouncy and springy to give a relaxed and playful feel to encourage the audience to get involved in the project regardless of skill or experience.