Praline designs new culture platform The Wick

The site, which uses the strapline 'Connecting the Culturally Curious', celebrates creativity with a focus on the visual arts through content that showcases "life through the lens of art and culture," says Praline.

Praline was approached by KTW when its founder Katy Wickremesinghe was in the initial stages of developing the platform – one it wanted to use to "communicate a range of content and subject matter coherently, whilst giving an ownable voice to the various themes that sit within," says the studio. The Praline team then set about creating a brand toolkit and guidelines and visual systems that mean KTW can implement the designs in future as they create content.

A key aspect of Praline's brief was to create a "living brand language" to express and articulate The Wick's vision and personality. The site design is based on a modular system that means the curatorial team can create pages that respond to the content of each article by defining background colours, image layouts and content blocks.  

"The identity is driven by three core elements; colour, typography and imagery," explains Praline creative director David Tanguy. The palette is flexible yet distinctive, based around bold colours which work alongside more corporate colours to give the editorial team the flexibility to make content relevant to its theme and purpose, as well as dynamic.

Praline also updated the brand's typographic language, "pairing typefaces which bring together classic and contemporary details," the studio explains, to further enhance the expressiveness of the content without overshadowing it. Praline adds that the type "needed to have presence and elegance, whilst remaining highly legible."

One of The Wick's key goals is to make individuals and businesses more engaged with the arts and to make responsible decisions by demonstrating the arts' capacity to enable human connection, business, and education through the arts.

The main website is augmented by its Instagram account, @thewickculture, and cultural programming, strategic partnerships and development programmes.

"We always wanted to create something unique and vibrant," says Wickremesinghe. "The dynamic design, fonts and colour palettes feel unusual and fresh to celebrate a space where life, art and dynamic narrative and expression can come together in a virtual space."

Wickremesinghe adds, "The arts and cultural arena is a complex and layered space, and I hope through The Wick we can not only educate and bring together the culturally curious but also create a dynamic and expressive space which combines leading voices of culture alongside diverse artistic and creative talents. We want to recognise the vital role of culture in stitching together our lives, business and economy."