When the British coalition government decided it was going to make cuts to the services of towns and cities across the country a library located in Woolton Village, Liverpool was one of the things marked to be closed. A devastating choice for a village that has a high level of elderly and families living in the locality who relied on the service.
But with Woolton, having such a fantastic community a few of the people living in the village got together to keep this much loved and much needed facility open to the public and is still open today with the help of volunteers and independent funding of the local community. Being born and raised in the village I felt a duty to help in any way I could so offered my logo services to the people of Woolton free of charge. Here is the meaning behind the WCRC Ticket to Read logo.
The new name of the library
With the ending of publicly funded library came an opportunity to rebrand and expand the services of the library. No longer would the library be simply for books but many activities would take place in the library, for this reason they rebranded themselves as a resource centre with a strapline “ticket to read” a play on the Beatles hit “Ticket to ride”.
As the Woolton community are quite a diverse society and the new resource centre would also be a hub of activity it was felt that it was important to make the logo as universal as possible without references of age, gender, sexuality, race or service.
Recording the library heritage in the design
As explained earlier the facility had always been a family library and the main purpose to store and borrow books for the local community. For this reason I wanted to represent that in the logo. The typeface used reflects the san-serif fonts that are usually found within printed reading books.
Communicating symbolism within the WCRC Logo
After observing the activities that take place at the WCRC it became evident that the WCRC allow its users to communicate in different ways. Community building, poetry reading, acting, art, group debates and even reading a book is a form of communication thus the use of speech marks was considered suitable for the design as it also removed gender/sex specific notions.
Strong community represented in logo shape
The Woolton Community are a strong people and this was something I wanted to represent in their design.
Considering shape the circle is considered an unbreakable shape. A shape that has no bends, no kinks, no corners and usually can represents ‘the whole’, in this case the whole community.
By selecting the circle to represent Woolton people it displays that nothing breaks the spirit of the community and they have a unity, friendship and helpfulness to each other that is difficult to find in general.
Colour of communication
Finally the colour that was selected was blue to represent the communication. Blue is the colour of the throat chakra within the human aura and it is believed that blue conveys the ability to communicate well.
Although a simple logo in design the concept and theory behind its appearance is not as simple, similar to the character of this village in Liverpool. Maybe simple in appearance to the onlooking visitor but underneath the surface there is a lot more than meets the eye.
It was a pleasure to work for my boyhood village. Woolton is a place that will always be dear to my heart, I had many fond memories reading books in the library and growing up in this neighbourhood.
It is a very pleasant place that is worth a visit should you ever be visiting the city. It was the home of John Lennon ( which can still be seen on menlove avenue), the place where the Beatles first performed at a school concert ( Bishop Martin School ), the location where the song Strawberry fields was inspired from.
Now the home of a few premiership footballers such as Brazilian Lucas Leiva and also to prehistoric standing stones that are older than those in Stone Henge!
Are you from Woolton or is your community feeling the effects of the government cuts? What do you think helps build a strong community? Please feel free to leave any comments below.