Narture
Brand Identity / Web Design
A social enterprise and creative hub driven by the belief that everyone is an artist. From its sourdough bakery to open-studio spaces and events, Narture nurtures creativity, wellbeing, sustainability and community in Ayr and beyond.
Founded in June 2020 by artist father-and-daughter team Robert and Saskia Singer, Narture CIC began by reclaiming empty town-centre units and transforming them into vibrant spaces for culture, food and connection. It has since grown into a network of six creative, community-focused spaces across Ayr, grounded in the belief that everyone is an artist.
Brief
Narture came to us with a branding challenge. Through its expansion, it had grown to six spaces, each requiring a unified brand system that retained the essence of its established identity while being flexible enough to work across every strand of the organisation.
Narture wanted to raise brand awareness in the area, with the hope of reaching a more culturally aligned audience who would access its services and feel at home in the spaces it had created. Ultimately, this would lead to increased bread sales, café use, uptake of co-working spaces and greater engagement from the public. The style was to be organic, with the instruction “No straight lines” given to the design team.
The Challenges
With so many strands to the organisation, the narrative of what Narture is and why it exists could easily become lost. We needed to carefully balance the products it sells (particularly its bread) with the reason it produces them: to help fund arts projects.
The key to this came from the co-founder’s vision for the organisation: “The people’s art school.” Narture’s spaces are places to create and collaborate that are genuinely open to the wider community, welcoming people of all skills and experience levels.
The Solution
With such a strong emphasis on a hands-on approach to everything Narture does, from baking and risograph printing to darkroom photography and making, we felt the brand needed to reflect this ethos. We created a system inspired by co-founder Saskia’s flowing art style, turning to tactile mark-making with inks to create typography and motifs for each of Narture’s spaces. The system was then applied across its multiple locations, with bespoke design solutions for menus, uniforms and its website.
Impact
Narture walked away with a new, unique brand system that can grow with the organisation as it continues to expand.
Paired with a custom website for ordering bread and booking spaces, the new identity has helped Narture continue to make a cultural and economic impact on Ayr’s thriving arts community.
