Godolphin - branding and designing Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum favourite pastime
My role
I was the lead designer / art director for the branding of Godolphin and designing the website. I worked with the Sheikhs personal photography and PR agency to create the future of Godolphin.
Highlights
- Retained the account for 3 years
- Presented to Sheikh Mohammed
The Challenge
Sheikh Mohammed is the royal and current ruler of Dubai, and serves as the vice president, prime minister, and minister of defence of the United Arab Emirates – he’s an incredible important and influential person and our agency was asked to brand his favourite pastime and create a website with his royal seal of approval.
Godolphin is the Maktoum family’s private thoroughbred horse racing stable and was named in honour of the Godolphin Arabian, who came from the desert to become one of the three founding stallions of the modern thoroughbred world.
The solution
Crafting the perfect brand messaging and prestigious visual appeal that would live along side the luxury top tiers of Chanel, Rolex and Aston Martin.
Working with the PR agency interviewing Godolphin employees, journalists from Racing Post and influential horse racing influencers, I built the brand messaging and big picture of how I wanted to represent the brand. Bringing together archetypes and visual mood boards I presented solutions to the PR team and started crafting the brand. We knew ‘Royal Blue’ was to be the main brand colour and finding the right striking tone was important, along with a silk effect finish of the finest cloth – this represents the jockeys racing silks.
From 17 western arabic style typefaces and multiple consumer validation sessions we nailed down a beautiful logo, web typefaces and brand colours that work in harmony with each other. Working with the photograph who was based at the Al Quoz Stables in Dubai, I set the art direction of shoot styles that I wanted to compliment the website and built a library of over 1000 images to work from – of course these all needed colour grading, cropping and some sort of editing.
The Website
I designed a slick responsive website that used parallax scrolling to build a prestigious intro experience. Using beautiful edited photography it immediately gave the impression of quality and heritage – nailing the brief.
Some nice features of the site were an interactive map (mapbox) of races/results past and present and a discovery timeline to introduce new fans to the brand. A lot of the original features of the website are the same today as it was 5 years ago, accept a lot of questionable in-house iterations have taken place….and now at godolphin.com looks messy.
I met Sheikh Mohammed at the training grounds and presented alongside the PR agency the new brand and website. He loved it with only positive feedback saying we captured what was in his heart and shook my hand.
When you come to the homepage and start scrolling, the bottom menu moves up and anchors at the top whilst the background image has a blue overlay and starts to blur into the distance. This slick intro welcomed the site visitor with a pleasurable user experience.
