The brief

Galway County Council needed a logo for its Broadband Connection Points: free public wifi locations across the county, including Community Broadband Access Points and sites connecting rural Galway.

The practical problem they raised first was a naming one. “Broadband Connection Points” does not tell anybody what the thing is. People needed to look at a sign and understand they could get online there.

The first direction was wrong, and they were right to say so

The initial concepts drew on the council’s visual language, which seemed the safe choice for a council programme.

The feedback was immediate and correct: it resembled the Galway County Council logo too closely. A public facing service that looks like the corporate identity of the authority running it confuses both. Somebody seeing it on a sign should understand they are being offered wifi, not reading council branding.

So we started again rather than adjusting. The replacement took a completely fresh direction built on the idea of connecting communities through digital access, and it landed.

Variants, because one logo was never going to cover it

The programme covers several kinds of site, so the mark needed to carry different wording underneath while staying recognisably the same thing: Broadband Connection Points, Community Broadband Access Points, and Connecting Rural Galway.

It also needed an Irish language version. That is not a translation dropped into the same artwork. Irish runs longer, so the lockup gets rebalanced rather than stretched, and the fada set properly rather than dropped.

There was also a spelling correction to catch in proof, which is the sort of thing that is cheap to fix before signage is printed and expensive afterwards.

Working through council procurement

The job ran through the full process: supplier ID set up before anything started, a purchase order issued, management approval on the design, then the invoice referred to accounts.

We were clear up front that our terms run from when the first designs are supplied rather than from final approval, which matters on public sector work where sign off can sit with a manager for weeks through no fault of anybody involved. Saying that at the start avoids an awkward conversation later.

Why it is here

This is what a lot of local authority design work actually looks like. The design problem was real, the client caught something we had got wrong, and the administration around it was as much a part of delivering on time as the drawing was.