Informing, inspiring, and engaging society with EMBL’s research, services and training
I have lost count of the number of times that I have heard the question, Why is CERN so well known, while EMBL, which also supports amazing science, is not? I worked in the CERN communications team for seven years and I’ve now been at EMBL for close to two years, so I have some […]
The second corporate design sprint (CDsprint2), led by Tabea, started to look at the thorny issue of sub brands: Does EMBL need sub brands, and if so, how should they be treated? First, let me take a minute to outline what we’re doing here generally. The idea of these corporate design sprints…
Here we are hanging out our dirty laundry. As “fail forward” is one of our drivers in the agile work method, learning from what we could have done better in the sprints is as crucial as the achievements of our goals. So here are some useful lessons we have drawn from this last sprint.
How a controlled and structured vocabulary frees us from focusing where online content lives. Now we can focus on what it’s about. One of the main goals of the EMBL Corporate Design Sprint 2 is to enable better user journeys on a future pan-EMBL web architecture. One key aspect is content…
Here is an update to the article formats that we work to. Note that we have trimmed down some of the word lengths, along with titles and straps, which should now be a maximum of 50 and 100 characters respectively.
We are beginning to look at the thorny issue of EMBL’s sub-brands. Do we need them, and if so, how should we accommodate them in our design system? A sub-brand is an entity in the brand map that refers to the umbrella brand but carries its own name and strategic positioning. It is distinct…
In this post I share an outline of what I have learned about EMBL’s followers on social media. This is based on my observations and research, as well as third-party data about social media users in general. Social media users are generally young, well educated and well off, even compared to…
Since its first edition in 2005, the 132 pages of Research at a Glance have given a detailed description of the scientific focus of all EMBL research groups and teams. This publication is important to many stakeholders and audiences, and is used for a wide variety of purposes. After more than 10…
Whenever I introduce myself as EMBL’s Core Content Manager, I inevitably have to explain what core content is. The short answer is that it’s long-lasting content, that we can use in many ways, including to support the more news-y stories we tell. But what does that mean, exactly?
While working on EMBL’s brand strategy we realised that there is a need for a more systematic way to guide and leverage our collective efforts to build EMBL’s corporate design. So we chose to create a design language system that works across everything we produce, whether in print or digital,…