Back in my days of running a marketing agency the design department was behind a locked and chained door. You occasionally threw a haunch of raw meat through the bars and waited for the snarls to die down. When all was quiet it was relatively safe to go in and collect today's design output. Faced with working hours directives and fire regulations I was forced to return them to the wild.
Unfortunately some of them came back. That's family for you.
My son Adam was one of the escapees. He's embarrassingly good. You can see examples of his work throughout this site (He'd like me to point out that I designed the site itself - he was busy).
There's a lot more to design though than being able to crayon inside the lines. A corporate identity has to work as well as it impresses. That means it needs to hold its integrity at all scales - even as a tiny icon. It has to be able to sit on a variety of backgrounds. It's got to fit into a variety of awkward situations.
An advert's no good if all it does is win awards; it has to sell. A Website's pointless if no one can find or use it - however pretty it looks.
So you've every right to expect design creativity. But it's a means to an end, not the end itself, so you'll also get a healthy dose of practicality to back it up.
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Consistency Across All Media Working with a pro-active company like Listers means that we work in just about every communication medium on the list. They're a long-established, well-recognised company, so when we came to freshen up their image we needed to take care that we didn't depart too far from the familiar identity. Adding Elitis as a consumer sub-brand has added flexibility to the approach, but it also keeps us on our toes... |
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Bringing a brand to life When I was approached by the Staffordshire Rural Economic Forum to build a Website, my first impression was that typing a paragraph into the address bar might be just a little too much for most Web visitors. So I suggested we came up with something a little more concise. GetRural was the result. It's a consortium of Business Link Staffordshire, the Countryside Agency, and Staffordshire County Council, set up to give advice and business support to rural communities. We created a brand that shows no sign of red tape, and that's clearly there for the people it serves. |
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Moving the Market Our work with Gresham has been centred around re-educating the market. Gresham (Now SML Gresham - that's part of the success story) prints tickets for the retail fashion industry. But their unique selling point lies in the way their barcodes control and optimise the supply chain. Our design work has covered everything from press advertising to Websites, leaflets and interface design for their unique ticket management system. |
