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.