Impact, a not-for-profit organisation that acts as a ‘centre of competence’ for the digitisation of historical texts, is a joint project between the British Library and the National Library of the Netherlands, funded by the European Commission. We felt that that the old brand didn’t really encompass the digital aspects – we wanted to create a much more dynamic aesthetic, so we used a diverse colour suite to freshen up the look and feel.
The site’s new incarnation sees it move from ‘celebrating the visual aesthetics of historical texts’, to becoming a ‘community hub and point of reference’ for the digitisation of text. It’s showing that Impact is modernising text and making it cleaner and more easily available. The new lower-case, black and white logo uses the dot of the ‘i’ to represent one of the technologies used in the scanning. We used a mainly blue colour palette for the site, with the other colours taken from those created when light is refracted from a prisms, referencing the scanners used to digitise the texts.
