Magazine focus on Shrewsbury rebranding campaign

The new £25,000 campaign to rebrand Shrewsbury and attract more visitors to the town has featured in a national magazine.

Creative Review has taken a closer look at the branding, which has a Tudor theme designed to reflect the town's rich history.

An article published on the magazine's website said that the aim was to help put Shrewsbury more clearly on the tourism map and compete with rival towns such as Ludlow.

The extra exposure is a boost to tourism chiefs in Shrewsbury who are looking to get people across Britain and beyond aware of what the county town has to offer.

Rob Mitchell, from We All Need Words, one of the London agencies commissioned for the campaign alongside & Smith, said: "We wanted to come up with a shorthand for Shrewsbury.

"If Hay-on-Wye is books, what is Shrewsbury? The more time we spent there, the more we realised that Shrewsbury has lots of things to talk about. We had to come up with a way to sum that up that was memorable and could be used in lots of ways by different people."

The article by Creative Review writer Gavin Lucas said the aim of the new branding is to promote Shrewsbury 'as a prime location to live, work, visit and invest in'.

"Graphically, the Shrewsbury branding is based on a large original black and white pattern which nods towards the many wood-beamed Tudor buildings in the town," he said.

"The pattern has been applied to business cards and some of the graphic elements appear in a specially adapted version of Dalton Maag typeface Efra which acts as the official brand typeface for headlines."

By Chris Burn