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THE IMPORTANCE OF STYLE GUIDES
Style savvy Left and inset: Mock-ups from Skew Studio’s National Trust style guide show how its nature-inspired designs translate to finished products.
Style guides are a valuable resource in any licensor’s toolkit, but for museums and heritage institutions, which often hold thousands of assets spanning decades of history, they can offer licensees an easy ‘way in’ to their collections.
“G
iving a licensee access to our full library of available images available could be overwhelming,” admits Cathy Snow, licensing manager at the RHS. “We developed our style guides because we wanted to give licensees ideas and themes, and a steer to make their lives easier. In particular, our ready-to-use patterns and artwork cut-outs save licensees time.” For the RHS, the first step in creating a new style guide involves the licensing department and library teams sifting through the full collection to identify trends and genres. “It might be a particular artist’s style or story that catches our eye,” says Cathy, pointing to the example of artwork by Christian Gottlieb Geissler, a renowned 18th-century engraver specialising in natural history, which was adapted by home fragrance company Freckleface for its new Heritage range. While some Right: WildBrain CPLG’s heritage creative team drew on heritage illustrations like sports mascot institutions Handsome Dan for its Yale University style guide. have strict
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LICENSING MUSEUM & HERITAGE BOOK 2024
guidelines, RHS licensees are “free to use the artwork on RHS licensed products as they please,” says Cathy. “Their designers have free rein to be as creative as possible. That’s integral to our licensing programme and differentiates us from many other programmes. And we don’t rest on our laurels. We've worked with two different design companies in the past and will be working with someone new in 2024 on exciting new ways of using our images.” From a creative perspective, there are several challenges involved in distilling vast historical collections into easy-to-navigate style guides. “Quite a lot of museums have collections of things that are common to other institutions,’’ says Oliver Dyer, founder of brand extension agency Skew Studio. “A museum might be known for its ancient Egyptian artefacts, for example, but that doesn’t mean it has a monopoly on Egyptian culture. So, it’s a question of how you make something not only contemporary, but also ownable for the museum that you're working for.”