First – a propositional workshop
After winning the competitive tender we began work at the iconic British Library itself, running a ‘Choose your own adventure’-themed proposition workshop designed to harvest as much insight as possible from a project team of curators, event designers, in-house marketers, events and merchandising specialists.  

This helped us get a strong sense of our audience segmentation, as well as first sight of the immersive, atmospheric exhibition design concepts, and an understanding of the curatorial focus (‘Yes’ to world building, landscapes and culturally diverse depictions of fantasy; ‘No’ to fantasy-as-escapism and narrow, traditional male-dominated depictions of the genre.)

Range-finding propositional territories
From this workshop and our wider discovery work, we crafted three propositional territories, a range-finding exercise designed to draw out the views and preferences of the many stakeholders. And from their feedback we crafted our final proposition:  

Naming and framing the exhibition…
This was the springboard for the next phase of creative development covering the exhibition name, a positioning line, and our narrative on a page – all debated at length by a project team deeply invested in the subject matter.   

…before bringing it to glorious life
With this agreed, we were able to progress the visual exploration, which we developed at pace and presented a range of visual ideas. 

The chosen concept was an ‘impossible world’, an illustrated landscape populated by creatures, characters, and scenes from the curators’ wish list of exhibition artefacts. 

This triggered a search for illustrators whose style could capture our singular vision for the event. We chose Sveta Dorosheva, a Ukrainian-born illustrator working in Israel, whose work is influenced by fairytales, mythology and medieval scripts – a perfect fit for our visual execution. 

An exquisitely imagined, impossible world
With Sveta on board, the adventure really began: the process of translating our concept into a staggeringly detailed, exquisite hand drawn and inked illustration featuring a menagerie of no less than 65 fantasy characters and scenes, an Easter egg hunter’s dream. We planned the illustration to represent the four ‘chapters’ of the exhibition itself, and you can see the subtle shifts between landscapes within the illustration. We also included a representation of the British Library’s iconic gateway, as libraries are such a common motif in fantasy it seemed too good an opportunity to miss.

The style and complexity of the illustration represents the depth and gravitas of the genre, something that was central to the curators’ ambition for the event. And something that caught the eye of the judges at the prestigious International Communication Arts Awards, where Sveta won the Institutional category for this project.

"I’ve illustrated fairy tales and fantasy stories throughout my career, but here the challenge was to weave all the elements together to form a coherent composition. I wanted the world-building to have an inner logic, which begins with the cosmic myths. I started with the legendary world elephant and worked clockwise, eventually bringing in the Discworld turtle and ending with a mouse escaping the snake out of the labyrinth."
Sveta Dorosheva

You can find out more about Sveta and her work in an interview with the British Library.

With the core assets completed, we collaborated with the British Library’s in-house design team to help them develop the final campaign executions. Our team over-indexes on fantasy lovers and seeing work we’re so proud of out there in the public domain is amazing. We hope we’ve done justice to the much loved, multi-layered and ever evolving genre of fantasy.

Dream results
The campaign results were like something out of a fairytale too, with 56,000 tickets sold for the exhibition – 24% above target. Making it the British Library’s most successful exhibition since the Covid-19 pandemic. And that was in the face of a major cyber-attack that meant no tickets could be sold at key times of the event’s run.