The search is on for a graphic designer to create a new visual image for a former Dundee print works in line for a £17.5 million makeover.
Ambitious plans to turn West Ward Works, owned by DC Thomson, into a cultural centre and comics museum were announced last year.
West Ward Works Ltd, the company set up to oversee the transformation of the building, is seeking a graphic designer to prepare “a visual identity and website design for the building and organisation.”
Applicants must develop a logo for West Ward Works that can be used on official correspondence and a “visual treatment” for its official website.
The brief states West Ward Works will contain a mid-scale music venue, a cafe or bar, the UK’s only dedicated comics museum and space for studios, offices and workshops.
It will also have 3,500 sq m of space for exhibitions, fairs, festivals, conferencing and other events and 1,200 sqm double height space for large scale monumental sculpture.
The brief adds: “We will want to appeal first and foremost to the design and creative communities in the city of Dundee, the rest of the UK and internationally, offering a home for their practice, attuned to their needs and to their ethos.
“We will also want to reach the general public, particularly from Dundee and the Tayside area and ensure that they understand that the building is ‘for them’.With the Comic Centre, global-standard exhibiting spaces and ‘landmark’ sculpture on display, West Ward will also attract a worldwide audience.
“We will want to reflect the building’s industrial feel, its huge scale and the variety of its spaces and its offer. The building has an ‘honesty’; it presents its heritage as a place of work and a place of manufacture straightforwardly and doesn’t pretend to be something it is not.”
It concludes: “It is very much part of the fabric of the city of Dundee and its redevelopment is another signal of the city’s renaissance as a global creative and cultural centre.
“Our visual identity needs to reflect this complex mix of audiences and attributes, and should be ‘cool’ without being stand-offish, and express an understanding of design language (as befits a Unesco City of Design) but without shouting about its own cleverness.”
