Responses by How&How.

Backgrounds: In the face of dwindling ticket sales, an aging audience and increased scrutiny over the region’s cultural integrity, the purpose of the Bristol Dockyards rebrand was to restore the museum ship SS Great Britain into a thriving cultural destination at the heart of Bristol’s harbor, a place where a much broader range of visitors—from young families and schools to curious weekenders and older advocates—could connect with stories and ideas that changed the world.

Design core: First and foremost, we needed to connect everything back to Bristol. The city, like the SS Great Britain and the man who imagined it, are all built different, and we wanted the overall experience to live up to that billing. For us, that meant expanding the thinking beyond just the ship and developing a broader architecture around all the museums, programming and events that go into a day at the dock.

Repositioning the SS Great Britain at the heart of the Bristol Dockyards not only made the experience feel bigger, it dropped a postcode-size pin on the map and could attract people who weren’t just in town for a history lesson, albeit a very immersive one.

Challenges: The most challenging aspect was ultimately the most rewarding. We spoke with hundreds of volunteers, board members, local authorities and proud Bristolians who didn’t necessarily see the need for change. They were people who felt a deep responsibility towards the ship and wanted to protect its history, who perhaps couldn’t understand why a family of four wouldn’t walk 20 minutes down the quayside to experience it. Getting them on board involved a lot of understanding, listening and respect, and it was worth every second.

Favorite details: Any link to the city. How&How itself was established in Bristol, and we wanted the identity to feel ingrained in a place we love. Whether it was the pink stolen from the terraces of Totterdown, the archival imagery that runs through the collage system or the tone that channels its energy, we wanted to make sure the brand could only live here and would be impossible to move anywhere else.

For a really macro detail, we also spent a lot of time crafting the wordmark. Particularly perching the T on top of the A, and seamlessly connecting the K and Y. Using Baste’s B felt strong from the off, but refining it made it feel part of the Dockyards.

New lessons: We learned a lot of new, and we learned an awful lot of old. The main thing was how we bridged those two timelines together.

Bristol, and particularly its dockyards, comes with a lot of unsavory connotations, but the locals certainly don’t shy away from the history; in facing it head on, the city has arguably become Britain’s most progressive. Learning how to channel that 200-year-plus tension into our work was not something you usually come up against in a branding agency, but it certainly helped us think more thoughtfully about what we were showing and what we were talking about. We believe the balance is exciting, not only making the Dockyards an authority on migration, globalization, wealth, community, employment and environment but making it the perfect place to form new ideas that can positively impact the world.

Visual influences: We undertook a massive audit at the start of the project, looking at all manner of museums, theaters, cultural institutions and city-wide initiatives to really understand how a brand can get to the heart of a city. A lot of that was in Britain, such as Bradford’s 2025 City of Culture identity or Manchester’s Aviva Studios, but a lot came from around the world, including the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Peer Gynt Festival in Norway.

But we also did several immersions in Bristol, plotting the paths people would take to the ship, what they would pass or where they would stop for lunch. The combination of learning what others had done to tap into culture and then understanding Bristol’s culture firsthand got us to a pretty apt sweet spot.

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