Yarrila Arts and Museum
Destination branding | Focus groups and workshops | Logo design | Placenaming
BOOM! by Peggy Zephyr, Winner of People's Choice award, Still, 2021
Yarrila Arts and Museum (YAM) is the much anticipated gallery and museum in Coffs Harbour's new cultural space, Yarrila Place.
We were commissioned by City of Coffs Harbour to deliver a new logo and branding ideas, and the gallery and museum's official name.
Brand considerations
Yarrila Place and its constituent elements — primarily YAM and the new library — is a major investment for the City of Coffs Harbour and a significant upgrade and expansion of Coffs' cultural facilities. It is part of the city's vision to provide a platform where creativity, community and commerce can intersect and thrive. YAM, in particular, provides a new opportunity for Coffs to more equitably compete with other regional towns for exhibitions, performances and shows.
As such the branding of YAM is critical. It must be an identifiable, memorable and saleable brand in its own right and provide multiple opportunities for pitches, tenders, merchandise and co-branding.
It must reflect its connection to Yarrila Place but not compete with it.
It must connect with locals to ensure community support and patronage.
And it must support the city's ongoing commitment to exhibiting the best of local and national art, entertainment and education.
Name that space!
An integral part of the branding process for YAM was finding the right name. We'd already done a number of workshops on the way to establishing the name for Yarrila Place so, for the sake of economy and efficiency (and for the fact we were in the middle of the COVID pandemic), we recommended building on that research rather than starting from scratch.
Further focus groups via Zoom, follow-up questionnaires, and one-to-one interviews with key stakeholders gave us plenty of data. Alongside we analysed recent trends in placenaming in general and in cultural spaces in particular.
We were seeking to answer questions such as: Is [the proposed name] distinctive? Memorable? Unique? Does it speak to the gallery and muesum's functions? Is it easy to say? Easy to spell? Will a visitor or tourist recall it easily? Does it speak to Coffs Harbour? Does it drop easily or naturally into converstation ("I'll see you at ...")?
There was a too-close-to-call final five names which required further discussion and polling with stakeholders and artists: does the word "art" mean something fundamentally different to "arts"? Is an "art museum" different to an art gallery and museum? Was its name to be subordinate to Yarrila Place, or did the name need to be separate and distinct from Yarrila?
"YAM" fits its role and presents many great branding and marketing decisions for the future.
YAM is due to open 16 September, 2023.