We researched the events leading up to D-Day and learned that by 1944, Germany had dominated Europe and were constantly sending coded messages to retain their stronghold. But the brilliant minds at Bletchley Park had created Colossus, a machine which could intercept and decode the messages. This provided the most valuable intelligence of the entire war and allowed the code-breakers to create fake messages, so convincing, the Germans moved troops away from Normandy to defend Calais and enabled the Allies to land on the beaches of Normandy on 6 June 1944.
With this in mind, our inspiration came from the coded messages themselves, which were printed on ticker tape and fed into Colossus for decryption. We took the 3 key stages featured in the exhibition – Interception, Intelligence, Invasion – and had each word printed out on the ticker tape. We then folded the tape to form the letter ‘D’ (inspired by the typography from the WWII landing craft), symbolising Bletchley Park’s role in D-Day.
Continuing the dots theme and to tie-in the identity with the exhibition, we also created halftone images of stills taken from D-Day footage and used these and the ticker tape motif across all marketing campaign materials and merchandise. We also created a permanent 2.5m memorial made from powder-coated steel, sited outside the newly restored Teleprinter Building (which houses the D-Day exhibition experience), to acknowledge the vital contribution to D-Day resulting from the brilliant work done at Bletchley Park.
