Your Creative’s respectful rebrand of Pentridge Prison Tours honours the site’s complex past

How do we balance preserving and learning from difficult histories while ensuring we don’t trivialise or sensationalise human suffering? Melbourne-based creative agency Your Creative, tasked with updating Pentridge Prison Tours’ identity, was invited to consider this question.

“Until recently, Pentridge was known to the public as one of Melbourne’s most notorious prisons,” Co-founder & Creative Director James Lim tells us. Following an extensive process of “restoration, renewal, and place activation,” the site now adopts a more community-centred approach, providing visitors with a retail space, a public piazza, hospitality venues, an art gallery and studios, and Pentridge Prison Tours. “As part of the place renewal, Pentridge Prison Tours invites patrons to engage with the stories and history of the prison’s dark past, offering a contemporary and immersive experience spanning a century of inmate history, justice models, and notorious tales,” Lim continues. This immersive experience, with “sound bites, narrated stories, and augmented soundscapes,” showcases the history of the prison, educating visitors and preserving history.

Your Creative’s goal was to devise an identity system that complements the state-of-the-art immersion technology while establishing a clear link to the existing Pentridge Precinct identity. The design also aims to highlight a strong connection to the National Trust brand, ensuring that both identities work together.

There are ethical considerations about turning a former prison – a place of punishment, isolation, and human suffering – into a tourist destination. “Navigating the complexity of what Pentridge Prison Tours needed to represent was a nuanced and challenging process,” Lim acknowledges. “From developing a strategy and language framework that was inspiring yet sensitive, to curating appropriate archival imagery, we had to not only immerse ourselves in stories of profound suffering but also develop an approach that was deeply empathetic toward the client, the audience, and the participants’ needs.”

To tackle the complexity of the subject matter, the design elements needed to accommodate a broad range of emotions, make minimal assumptions, and, above all, show respect – prioritising storytelling and reflection.

“Conceptually, we wanted to establish a link between Pentridge’s past and its future,” says Lim. From delving through hundreds of archival documents to reading accounts from inmates, guards, family members, and the wider community, the concept of “living memory” became a prominent anchor for the development of the identity. “Three strategic pillars guided the creative approach,” he continues. “Authenticity – committing to truth-telling and always paying respect to the past; Curiosity – inviting our audiences to engage with compelling history; Education and Information – providing factual information that is easy to find and answers questions.”

At the centre of the new visual language, the panopticon is a foundation for reflection, memory, and history. By stripping it down to its vector forms, Your Creative created a concept and motif that can be applied across various applications. “The symbol became the basis for crafting directional signage, user interface elements, and adapting it into a primary grid system across different collaterals.”

The identity uses two typefaces – Blaze Type’s Inferi and Surt, inspired by the team’s discoveries during the research phase, where they encountered an abundance of old-style serif typography. “We studied the classic, upright, traditional, and authoritative print serifs that dominated official prison documentation, hand-painted signage with ornamental 20th-century serif flourishes, and bricks pressed with similarly elegant yet warm Roman serifs,” Lim notes. “It was surprising to see such typography in a prison context, where the cold, harsh blue stone walls contrasted with type that exuded a hand-drawn warmth.” Selected for its squared edges and printed letterform qualities that balance historical authority with approachability, Inferi references old-style serif typography while maintaining modern usability across digital and print applications. For contrast and versatility, Surt, a contemporary geometric sans serif, boasts strong, stable characteristics that echo Brutalist architecture.

“Each time we decided a new visual element, we returned to our initial concept of ‘living memory’ and the strategic pillars of creation mentioned above,” Lim explains, noting that the colour palette draws inspiration from Pentridge and its surroundings, with the iconic bluestone forming the base. Earthy colours incorporate darker, sombre tones that nod to history. “We focused on incorporating a contemporary, layered, and authentic visual aesthetic – referencing the fabric of time, the decay of paint, paper, and artefacts while embracing the richness of the stories held in the preserved archival imagery and the memories of those still alive,” he concludes.