A brand that’s more than meets the eye.

The challenge

Despite being one of the UK’s most well-connected and well-designed cities, Milton Keynes consistently faced the same obstacle: low expectations at the door. Visitors, families and businesses often arrived with assumptions that the city quietly dismantled — but the brand wasn’t yet harnessing that moment. Destination Milton Keynes needed a new identity and campaign platform that could close the gap between perception and reality, and do it in a way local partners could own and sustain over time.

The Solution

The strategic foundation centred on a simple insight: Milton Keynes exceeds expectations not by trying to impress, but by being better than imagined. From that, the campaign platform Everything, but expected. was developed — a line that acknowledges preconception, then quietly overturns it.

The visual identity extended the existing MK city brand through a Polaroid framing device, capturing real human moments over polished showcasing. Paired with a bold palette of Corn, Tangerine, Lime and Mauve, the system scaled across social, digital and email — built to flex across leisure, family and business audiences while giving partners a simple, consistent framework to tell their own part of the city’s story.

The build

A brand built around joined-up thinking needed a platform to match. Beneath the campaign sits a bespoke site, built from the admin panel out — designed around how Destination Milton Keynes and its partners actually work day-to-day.

The admin dashboard is fully branded and customised throughout, with notifications surfacing exactly what needs attention, where. Members manage their own listings through a frontend portal, adding offers, posting events, submitting updates, with every change running through a custom moderation system that shows admins a clear diff between live details and pending edits before anything goes through.

Advertising sits in its own purpose-built module, with per-advert stats packages so commercial partners get the feedback they need without anyone having to pull the numbers by hand.

The trickiest piece was structural. A lot of members aren’t one thing; an attraction is often also an event venue; a venue might also be somewhere to eat. Each type needs its own content and its own URL, but it’s still the same business behind the scenes. So we built a parent-child listing system: a single parent record holds the standardised data, with linked child records carrying the type-specific content and distinct URLs. The result is one source of truth sitting behind multiple front-end faces, with related content cross-linked automatically between them.

Then there’s the editing setup, and this is the first site we’ve built that lets admins choose between ACF / Classic editing and Gutenberg, page by page. Normally, that’s a fork-in-the-road decision at kick-off: lock things down for design integrity, or open them up for flexibility and accept the learning curve. On DMK, both live side by side. New landing page? Go full builder. Standard blog post? Classic editor. Rigid template with fixed elements? ACF. Why pick one when you can have all three?