Our Past, Our Future

Reframing Scotland’s historic environment

Historic Environment Scotland (HES) commissioned us to design and produce a sector-wide document for a new five-year strategy for all government bodies and agencies who work with Scotland’s historic environment. Our Past, Our Future would need to get across refreshed priorities, goals and case studies in an engaging, yet accessible way. As this project represented multiple bodies, we’d be working outside of HES’s branding guidelines for its design.

We designed three separate concepts for HES, before agreeing on an amalgamation of two integrated concepts with a bold, colourful palette that would differentiate the strategy publication from other HES documents. To reflect how the new strategy represented all areas of Scotland, we took extreme close-ups of a vector map of Scotland to create vibrant patterns. These patterns were used throughout the document, sometimes housing photography to ‘frame’ Scotland’s historic environment in a different light. We created infographics, icons and diagrams to help visualise HES’s key statistics, principles and case studies of their success stories.

The document was designed with accessibility in mind, including use of icons to aid understanding and high-contrast colour schemes for infographics. The document was then rigorously tested for accessibility, ensuring that it met regulations and HES’s standards.

We published Our Past, Our Future in both English and Gaelic editions as well as a summary leaflet. You can take a look at the full publication in both languages here.