| For the past two months we have been working on
a project commissioned by the Stoke Newington Business Association
and Hackney Council to design a visual identity for Stoke Newington.
This was partly to raise the profile of the shops and promote more
business in the area, and partly to create a spirit of local identity
and to get residents more involved in local issues and activities.
Both of us live in the area, with Henry resident in Stoke Newington
for six years and Toby on Green Lanes for four, so we came to this
project with our own ideas about what makes Stoke Newington special.
But what we really needed was to get out and talk to people, and
to get as wide a cross-section of feelings as possible before we
could begin the creative work. So we started talking to people in
the streets, in pubs and restaurants, on trains, in the park, the
library, business owners and shoppers, we’ve left messages
on internet chat-rooms… you get the idea?
Here are just a few of the more common responses locals made when
asked about Stoke Newington: tolerant, diverse, edgy, bohemian,
rough around the edges, friendly, sense of community, villagey,
creative, melting pot, alternative. A bit of a mixed bag? Definitely.
The one thing everyone had in common was that they felt passionately
about Stoke Newington – the good and the bad – and that
people live here because it is precisely this mixture which makes
Stoke Newington so different.
Armed with this insight and the rest of our research, we sat down
and began the creative process. What we really wanted to incorporate
into the identity was the duality of Stoke Newington. We wanted
to capture the two sides of everything that happens here: the rough
with the smooth, the urban and the village, Stokey and Stoke Newington;
to incorporate the fact that Stoke Newington is a melting pot of
cultures, one of the most ethnically diverse places in the UK. A
place where, at its centre, there is still a strong sense of community
spirit.
Have we achieved this? You’ll have to be the judge of that
but wherever you stand on this issue, we’re sure you’ll
feel strongly about it.
Toby and Henry run Type B Interactive advertising Agency (www.typeb.co.uk).
The website goes live the second week of June but you can sign-up
no for regular email updates of what’s going on in Stoke Newington
at www.stokey.info |
