Lead 2 Learning

The house style used in this website was designed especially for the project by ICATT interactive media and presented to the Lead consortium during the kick off meeting January 2006.

Lead is a project involving cooperation between institutions across Europe that will spend considerable effort in research and development so we think a strong brand is important.

About the logo

While brainstorming about a logo, we started by deciding that we wanted to develop a logo that would represent the spirit and meaning of the project and not simply represent the word Lead.
So what is the project about in a nutshell? We decided to summarise it to “Learning by cooperation in the classroom”.

If you look carefully you’ll see four fish talking to each other in a little class room (oh is that what it is!) or perhaps you’ll see a little computer screen representing the technology in the project.
Our designer Roel Susan came up with the fish when he realised that a school of fish could be translated into several languages like Dutch (een school vissen) and Italian (scuola dei pesci). So the idea of communicating fish was born.

We did actually develop several other proposals but in a design process you always have to kill your darling.

Of course a logo isn’t the entire house style and much more is involved.
The idea of the motion in Lead to Learning (which became our domain as well) was important. The motion has found its way into the design in the form of waves. The colour green was used as a ‘counter argument’ to tone down the idea of fish, as the project isn’t really about fish.

An important part of our house style is that we try and show the actual setting: students using computers. We want you to quickly grasp the idea of the project. This is especially important for the non-scientific audience who are of great importance for the future dissemination of the results.

So what next?

Apart from the basic concepts, a house style is simply a lot of work. The website was developed, an extranet (very important for a project of this scale) and also paper products (reports, brochures etc).
And of course it wouldn’t be a truly great house style if we didn’t have a T-shirt.
If you want one, sign on to our newsletter – we might give some away soon!