Modern and timeless: Corporate Design and Website for Historische Mitte Köln.
The Dom, Cologne Cathedral, is world-famous and renowned for its gothic architecture. The City of Cologne plans to redefine its surroundings during the coming years, building an ambitious complex known as “Historische Mitte Köln” (Historic Center of Cologne). The city’s largest project of this kind will be the starting point of Cologne’s Via Culturalis, an imaginary line that connects many important historic sites within bounds of the historic city centre. The future building will be home to three important cultural and ecclesiastical institutions: the Romano-Germanic Museum, the Museum of the City of Cologne and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cologne’s Kurienhaus (which includes the church’s archive and studyhall).
The City of Cologne and the Catholic Archdiocese of Cologne founded a joint Gesellschaft bürgerlichen Rechts (GbR) in 2020. Both transferred the responsibility of building the Historische Mitte Köln site within the next decade to this entity
Our task: develop a corporate design for this distinctive and important project and for our client ,the GbR Historische Mitte, – and a website to accompany its progress throughout the next decade.
Our inspiration: the colours of the Cathedral’s real façade and surroundings, captured by the newest tools in the Adobe Creative Cloud, creating a palette that ranges from Dom White to Dom Old Grey. Given the location’s proximity to another important Cologne landmark, the Rhine river, Rhine Blue is also included in the collection.
Since the Cathedral is such a mighty and elaborate building with a rich and plentiful history, we opted for a clean and minimal design language. We chose a stylish, modern and structured visual language for the screendesign, relying exclusively on the architectural renderings to comfort the eyes of the beholder. A highly flexible tile system enables a quick and easy exchange of content on the site. Finally, we selected a strong and robust font for headlines and a fine, chiseled font for copy. The latter reminisces the eternally ongoing process that is the construction and maintenance of Cologne Cathedral and its surrounding areas.
In the end, an accomplishment: a steadfast branding, both timeless and modern as well as a clearly structured website with all relevant information on the project in one place, built to expand with new content throughout the coming decade, as progress is made.
Of course, the new corporate design for Historische Mitte Köln was adapted to our clients stationary, including business cards, brochures and other media.