Message in a bottle campaign

As part of The Company of Biologists’ 100th birthday celebrations, they asked their audience to share stories about how the organisation impacted their careers.

Project type: Design
Project year: 2024
Role: Web design

The brief

To celebrate their 100th anniversary, The Company of Biologists launched the Message in a Bottle campaign — an initiative inviting the global scientific community to share personal stories of how the organisation impacted their research and careers.

We were tasked with designing a bespoke, highly accessible campaign landing page and identity that honoured their centenary milestone while seamlessly integrating into their existing digital ecosystem.

The client

The Company of Biologists is a not-for-profit publisher dedicated to supporting and inspiring the biological community. Run by distinguished practicing scientists, they exist to profit science, not shareholders, and to inspire new thinking across the field.

Partner

We delivered this project in partnership with JLS IT Consultants

The challenge

The campaign required an open-ended submission feed capable of displaying community-submitted stories. The primary design challenge was accommodating widely varying content lengths:

Entries ranged from short, single-paragraph notes to multi-paragraph essays.
Some stories were purely text-based, while others featured custom imagery.
The page had to sit inside standard header and footer structures without feeling restricted or repetitive.

The solution

We delivered a visually rich, narrative-driven landing page that balances whimsical storytelling with rigid accessibility standards:

Interactive storytelling: To capture the Message in a Bottle theme, we introduced subtle, accessible visual animations — including a fishing boat gently traversing the screen and ambient shooting stars.
Flexible card layouts: Designed a modular content system that gracefully formats varying text lengths and image formats without breaking layout harmony.
Bespoke campaign logo: Crafted a playful typography-led logo that incorporates a subtle bottle silhouette directly into the brand mark while remaining aligned with The Company of Biologists' parent identity.
Behind the scenes: During early ideation, we explored incorporating ambient wave audio. To ensure maximum accessibility and user comfort, we pivoted toward purely visual atmospheric cues.

Impact

The resulting design gave The Company of Biologists an engaging centrepiece for their 100th-anniversary celebrations, allowing scientists worldwide to contribute and read stories effortlessly across all desktop and mobile viewports.