Rebranding Truthfal - The Mouth is born

CREATING THE MOUTH: A behind-the-scenes screenshot of the initial logo mock-up being drafted in Photoshop by Danielle Hutchinson.

TRUTHFAL TWITTER: An example of the existing branding and logo.

Truthfal had been running for a number of years as the Falmouth Journalism students' website, but this term we were set the task of launching a new site to showcase our work.

Part of this involved creating a new logo and name for our site. Having rebranded a student newspaper 'The Helstonian' at sixth-form, I was keen to lead on this. I used 'Truthfal' as a starting point for a spin-off name 'Fal-Mouth', which became 'The Mouth'.

The colours of the Truthfal site were yellow and black to reflect Cornish colours, but I felt that they were too corporate and reminded me of Cornwall Council's website rather than a student newspaper. Blue was suggested as an alternative, with connotations of the seaside as well as being a colour associated with news publications.

Equally, we didn't want to choose a blue that was too similar to Cornwall Live or the Falmouth Packet, as we needed to differentiate our brand. Using an online colour palette generator, I experimented with a variety of colours and then presented these to the class at the end of the workshop to gather their feedback. The two darker colours were intended as the primary background and logo colours, whilst the lighter shades were suggested as accent colours for text banners. This colour palette felt younger and brighter to reflect the student demographic of our site.

COLOUR-FAL: A new look begins to take shape for our student publication.

After gaining support from the group, I then mocked-up a logo on Canva and later made a more polished version in Photoshop. It was important that the font was sans-serif and more welcoming than a formal serif logo used by The Times and other newspapers aimed at more traditional older audiences. I also wanted to visualise the idea of a mouth to anchor the name, but had to try and find a balance between an image that was playful and engaging without evoking the feel of a children's cartoon.

My initial draft was then sent to Andy Chatfield, who was overseeing the site development, to evaluate its suitability for the web and finalise a design. We discussed the legibility of my initial design and agreed that the dark blue and black lettering didn't have enough contrast to be read clearly on screen.

LOGO DEVELOPMENT: My first draft of the logo mocked-up in Photoshop (left) alongside the finalised designs from Andy Chatfield (right).

In hindsight, we could have asked illustration students to design a logo, or even had a competition where designs could be voted for by students in the Fox Cafe and online. This could have encouraged traffic to our site and social media, as the illustration students would be keen to share their work and campaign for votes.

Once the design of the site was finalised, our group also had to decide what sort of content we wanted to produce. This meant re-evaluating the categories of Truthfal, which myself and others in the class thought were too abstract. Personally, I found that, whilst the word-play was admirable, the titles 'Insightfal' and 'Scoopfal' didn't tell me what I could expect to read in that category.

I researched the categories used by The Guardian's website as an example of clear signposting for audiences. After establishing this as a starting point, I then wanted to give a stronger sense of The Mouth being a Cornish publication, suggesting 'Wasson' instead of a conventional 'What's On' page.

We also looked around campus and other groups ventured into town to identify potential stories which helped to establish the categories we may need. However, it could have been useful to also research potential stories online for events further afield that we could cover remotely, rather than limiting ourselves to our immediate surroundings. For example, we could have pitched an international politics piece about the US election, perhaps explored through the opinions of students on campus.

SCOUTING FOR STORIES: Danielle Hutchinson, Aimee Bentley, and Victoria Fox taking photographs around Falmouth University Woodlane Campus.

Although we'd settled on a logo, colours, and categories, we couldn't get a true sense of the site until we started to populate it with stories. Below is an image of The Mouth after one of our early newsdays when the site began to come to life.

AND WE'RE LIVE: Screenshot of our live website once we had populated it with our first stories.