The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, commonly known as The Inner Temple, is one of the four Inns of Court (professional associations for barristers and judges) in London.
To be called to the Bar and practise as a barrister in England and Wales, an individual must belong to one of these Inns.
It is located in the wider Temple area of the capital, near the Royal Courts of Justice, and within the world famous City of London.
The Inner Temple is a professional membership body that provides legal training and regulation for members
The Inner Temple takes its name from the Knights Templar, who originally leased the land to the Temple’s inhabitants (Templars) until their abolition in 1312. The Inner Temple was a distinct society from at least 1388.
Today the The Inner Temple is a flourishing and active Inn of Court, with over 8,000 members.
The organisation is famous within the sector for being the most progressive of the four inns of court. Being the first Inn to welcome women and boasting members such as Mahatma Gandhi.
It was this progressive approach that drove SomeOne to develop a new strategic direction for the way the organisation talks to existing, new and potential audiences.
This is a significant time of change for The Inner Temple, with radical steps being taken to push the organisation into a new realm of more connected and digitally intelligent communications.
What is a barrister?
Well, they are not to be confused with those involved in crafting coffee, A barrister (also known as barrister-at-law or bar-at-law) is a type of lawyer in common law jurisdictions.
Their tasks include taking cases in superior courts and tribunals, drafting legal pleadings, researching the philosophy, hypothesis and history of law, and giving expert legal opinions. Barristers mostly specialise in courtroom advocacy and litigation.
It is mainly barristers who are appointed as judges, and they are rarely hired by clients directly. Barristers are distinguished from solicitors, who have more direct access to clients, and may do transactional-type legal work.
The rebrand involved talking to students, barristers and judges, from people contemplating a career in the sector to those at the top of their profession.
The Pegasus
While many branding companies tend to steam in and eradicate any trace of previous design themes, we prefer to undertake a considerate audit of all existing brand assets and assess what is valuable and what needs replacement.
With an organization like The Inner Temple, the branding had very much evolved, rather than benefitted from being designed as a whole. Colours fluctuated, strategies varied, stories changed… but there was one constant. The Pegasus.
Many brands love their logo, and we’ve said before that a logo is only a small part of a brand’s arsenal, but here, the mythical creature adorned almost every aspect of the Inn. From crockery to cufflinks to the very fabric of the buildings — there was no escaping the winged horse.
The Inner Temple, though not a corporation, uses an armorial device, Azure a pegasus salient argent. This ancient usage was confirmed in 1967 by the College of Arms.
As part of the creative exploration we looked at many different executions. A traditional crest, recut for a digital generation. A contemporary graphic language that enabled the pegasus to adopt an entirely new visual approach. But it was when we got the 3D printer out that things got really interesting…
What interested us most was when we created 3D printed models that we then photographed at many angles, zooming in on key parts of the pegasus.
The ability to fly around a physical depiction of the pegasus gave us a variety of crops and textures that could prove to be very useful in branding applications where a ‘theme’ is more appropriate than repetitive badge stamping.
Since the practice of Law, Justice & Order comes from truth & accuracy, we set out to create the most truthful and accurate depiction of a Pegasus ever attempted by the brand.
We started with filming horses in real life, analysing their skeletons, muscle, skin and hair. We looked at how a wing might connect to their shoulder, and built a highly accurate model of the winged horse.
Every detail down to the silky sheen of the coat to the imperfections found in feathers was carefully crafted to create an ultra high definition CGI model that can be photographed from any angle, resulting in an instant library of brand assets.
A new BrandWorld
Respecting history, ready for the future.
A new, visual and verbal way of communicating and representing The Inner Temple has been developed across a flexible brand operating system.
The Inn has many touch points with varied audiences. We tracked the way that people come into contact with the Inn and ensured that the proximity to the brand is reflected in the way it behaves.
Design trends are seeing a raft of simplistic symbols and dull flat executions arriving thick and fast for multiple sectors, from sport, to TV channels to national institutes. This approach would be a disservice to such a multi-dimensional, scholarly brand. It deserves a well researched and crafted way of representing itself. Which is precisely what we have created.
The level of craft in this work is second to none. We even researched the optimum levels of hydration for race horses and applied it to the model at a muscular level. Changing the hydration enabled muscles to show more prominently. It’s been immensely rewarding on both aesthetic and intellectual points of view.
We applied the new brand operating system to hundreds of primary branded surfaces as well as employed our custom Cloudlines system to seamlessly manage the brand with multiple suppliers and staff who need to work with the brand and branding daily.
As Cloudlines carry analytics, the brand team at Inner Temple can monitor who is using what, when and how much — enabling them to dynamically alter the flexible parts of the BrandWorld as challenges develop.
An exhaustive & progressive new digital platform
With the visual and verbal side of the brand working well, we then took to the internet and began a deep review of the digital side of the organisation.
The website receives more than 20,000 page views monthly from members, non-members, prospective members, the general public and students keen to know more about becoming a barrister and engaging with the society.
The visitors are incredibly varied and all want something different out of the website.
As well as being a respected and progressive society for legal education, the award winning gardens are a magnet to the horticulturally minded, the accommodation, dining hall and pristine grounds available for bookings are very popular and the unique and sought after legal library houses some of the rarest and most valuable legal texts in the legal landscape.
We undertook the development and delivery of an entirely new platform. The end result needed to support and enhance all the current content whilst also having the ability to take on new and compelling aspects of the organisation’s output. In the process, we also merged various fragmented back-end systems into one.
The new online presence had to deliver a new experience in a streamlined way for the visitors and the staff dealing with the design and maintenance of the website. It needed to better connect the brand to those practising inside, outside of London and also prospective members; especially students who rely on this website daily.
Incisive, intuitive, sensitive, SomeOne has transformed The Inner Temple’s identity from one dimensional branding into a rich panoply of departmental imagery and colour to reflect the breadth of our work, unified by one beautifully re-crafted Pegasus, fit for the digital age.
The new site is now designed to be responsive across all digital devices, from phones to tablets to desktops and far more user-friendly.
The site is many things to many people. A quicker resource for information, a way of interacting with the estate — visitors can book and pay for accommodation and events. It’s also a shop, an internal members only engagement system and a streaming feed for live news, events and video.
We provided The Inner Temple staff with more than 40 beautifully designed responsive backend modules ready for the mobile first generation of Barristers.
This flexibility allows heads of department to lay out their own part of the website as they wish whilst still keeping with the overall aesthetics of the website. Over a 1,000 pages of detailed information were taken into consideration whilst planning all of the modules we provided.
To be trusted with the future of such a fundamental part of English law has been an incredible opportunity and a responsibility we have taken very seriously. The branding was crying out for a crafted, rich and detailed approach that could somehow translate seamlessly from the digital realm to print and product. The outcome is a shining example of how our BrandWorld approach develops operating systems for brands enabling them to shine brighter than their competition. The branding is now ready to adapt and flex to accommodate any communications task, while remaining coherent throughout all channels.