Was this a serious attempt to leverage the nomadic traits of the Romany people onto a holiday van or something far darker? I prefer to the former explanation which is far more convincing than the deep red, beige and rootless script.

A fantastic example of proud but aimless type. Real what? The cheap, machine rendered retina damaging ‘handwriting’ in red on yellow is a foul joy. Only let down by an overall coating of London filth. Well done van owner, I feel more real already.

A few weeks ago Greenpeace briefed us to come up with creative campaign ideas and designs which would help Greenpeace put pressure on Nestlé by deriding their famous KitKat brand. The objective of campaign was to encourage  Nestlé to stop using palm oil grown on Indonesian land which should be rainforest and should be home to Orangutans.

Responding to the brief we mirrored KitKat’s branding, twisting it so that the Orangutans became the ones asking for a break – a break from Nestlé’s indifference to their destruction. The thinking here was “who could resist a serious environmetal message coming from a pissed-off but rather likable orange human relative?” For added snap we methodically reworked the KitKat branding, including redrawning the KitKat logo to say ‘Killer’.

The campaign was launched, people dressed as Orangutans ran wild at the Nestlé UK HQ and Nestlé told YouTube to take down this video. They’re having a good long think about what to do next, taking a break from the harm they cause.

Find out more about the campaign on Greenpeace’s UK site and if you’d like to discuss creative things with Paul call him on 07812 038655 or email him.

A world of living things is what Greenpeace campaigns to protect so when their London office asked me to design a t-shirt to sell on to their members I designed this ‘Living Earth’ image.

The t-shirts are in production but only available to members of Greenpeace so if you want one of these t-shirts you’re going to need to get active with Greenpeace.

What! (you may wail), on a design agency website! Yup, very sorry about that. We’re working on it but in the meanwhile you can still read and see some of our work in the posts listed right.

If you’d like to see a selection of our work in high resolution please contact Paul on 07812 038655 or email.

Admirably strident drop shadows and a simple colour scheme mark out this VW van, it’s sure to stand-out in a busy campsite, if it makes it that far.

If you’re in the strange and slightly unlikely situation that you’ve been waiting for my next ThatSound session then sorry it’s taken so long to post. Not been waiting? Good. Here’s the session.

(There’s a ‘challenging’ bit o mixing about 2/3 of the way through. It’s not intentional, I’m experimenting with sound editing software right now).

This car was so vibey I’ve completely forgotten the make and manufacturer. Job done there then naming and graphics bods. Nice rippled metal effect helps.

If ever you wanted evidence of a graphic designer’s abuse of mind altering substances this is it. The surfing script ‘A’s allied with jaunty angled nearly geometric letterforms and jagged lines result in a design which redefines the term unique.

I know the second pic isn’t the best but I had to show this Caravan named ‘Marauder’. This edgy sounding traffic jam causing holiday home is the vehicle which got me started on this graphic journey. I will never know how a caravan was given such a name. Genius and/or madness, on wheels.

The Cake Sale

Here’s a taster of a brand we’re making for The Cake Sale, a recent start-up which is going to sell great cakes, cookies, muffins and brownies in the workplace. 25% of their profits will be going to the brilliant Kids Company.

The pics here show the mocked-up packaging we created for a meeting at the Kids Co. There’ll be more to show you very soon as we design a website and get the packaging printed and deliveries start to offices all over London.

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If you’re interested in having great cakes for a good cause in your office go to The Cake Sale’s homepage and send Michelle a message.

Need of some tasty branding yourself? Call Paul on 07812 038655 or email him.

Flow Interactive’s new identity

User Centred Design consultants Flow Interactive asked us to design a them fresh identity. They wanted a logo which showed them to be as innovative and creative as their media clients. It had to look a bit cool, not tight jeans cool, but enough to dispell ideas of usability experts being dull.

To find out what they really needed we moved in for a few days and holed up in one of their fantastic work rooms – with brilliant floor to ceiling white boards. In their Clerkenwell office we spent that time getting a feel for their culture, observing their working process, interviewing staff and discussing design ideas.

By focusing on expressing the spirit of it’s creative consultancy business we created an identity for Flow which was entirely theirs. The script logo was borne of both their name and the amount of drawing Flow staff do. Devised to appear hand-drawn yet planned, warm and professional, it was to be used in any one of six colours derived from Post-it note colours.

We hit on the idea that the Flow brand would be well represented by using images of the office and the human industry of the place. These photos were allied with the brand colours to make the business cards and compliments slips conversation starters as well as practical objects. The letterhead was clean, printed in four versions with different a coloured logo on each. These letterheads also bore the company’s new strapline which we also helped create.

Flow agreed to printing their stationery set on a gorgeous sustainable paper, GF Smith’s FSC approved Zen Pure White.

Designing an identity for design consultants was a sometimes awkward situation to be in, constantly challenging but fascinating and fun. We think the work shows that.

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If you’re in need of an identity or simply like (or dislike) what we did for Flow please do comment, call 07812 038655 and speak to Paul or email him.

Cattle, beef and leather products and factories may seem an obscure subject for a set of drawings. It is. They were made whilst I researched the recent project, the Slaughtering the Amazon report.

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The Greenpeace UK Brand Identity and Communications Strategy

I visited the London offices of Greenpeace a few days ago and saw that the Brand Identity I created for them a few years ago is still very much in use. Our site wouldn’t be complete without a post on this project so here is the story of that project. What follows is an account of the project, interspersed with examples of designs created during and since. For the sake of brevity I’ve omitted much of the exploratory work which went into the making the identity. If you’d like to see some of that too then let me know.

The project came out of a request to design a new set of stationery for Greenpeace UK. So I asked what seemed a natural question, “what am I to base my designs on?” The answer was interesting, there were no design guidelines. I proposed a project to resolve this lack of guidance and the Greenpeace UK Publications team agreed. Because of the way Greenpeace comms. were organised at the time I was to focus on creating an offline brand identity, making reference to what could be done online but not actually designing for it.

The project kicked off with interviews of key stakeholders within Greenpeace to establish a holistic view of the organisation’s visual communications. I asked after how they felt about Greenpeace, the organisation’s personality, it’s methods and it’s existing branded communications. I also probed for  understandings of the organisation’s creative processes and work-flows.

These interviews, along with an audit of existing designs and independent research into the history, culture and future of campaigning, informed all the creative decisions which were to come.

Myself, John Sauven and the then Greenpeace Publications manager Stokely Webster identified the kind of ideas, guidance and assets the organisation required to become an effective, branded communicator.

The project was to deliver; a new Communication Strategy, Brand Statements to express organisational and campaign goals, guidance on Logo usage, a Colour Palette and some Typographic rules. All this was to be brought together in a Style Guide, to be created in-house by the Publications team.

I’ve had many opportunities to create Branded Communications for Greenpeace since this project and have included a few of these at the bottom of this post.

A Communication Strategy

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The new brand had to be borne of a shared vision of who Greenpeace’s audiences actually were. We recognised that the key constituencies of Greenpeace are;

The Powerful; politicians and industry leaders
Supporters; the people who give time money and expertise to Greenpeace
Allies; organisations, groups and individuals with whom Greenpeace share goals.

I helped Greenpeace to establish an easy-to-relate Positioning statement to guide us through the project and to frame their future communications, it is:

Intervene > Engage > Transform.

Thereafter every single campaign action and piece of communication was to speak to at least one of those three descriptors.

The new Communication Strategy grew from being part of the brand project into it’s own fully fledged piece of work, becoming a guide to the strategy which sat alongside the brand identity guidance.

Brand Statements

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Publishing organisational mission statements is normally a cue to induce sleep but for Greenpeace it was apparent that by being an environmental protagonist they should make their motivations clear at all times. Prior to this project Greenpeace had assumed that readers would know, by deed and image why they were involved in an issue. These new statements did away with that assumption and stated in absolute terms, ‘this is why we act’.

The organisational statement Positive change through action came out of long consideration of what Greenpeace really exists to do and how it operates. There were three versions of the statement, the first being that one-liner, the second and third versions were progressively longer and more fully describe the organisation.

We decided that each campaign should have it’s own statement – a paragraph making the campaign goals clear whilst relating that issue back Greenpeace’s organisation-wide values.

These campaign statements appear on printed campaign materials. They have become part of Greenpeace’s process for clarifying the aims and objectives of each campaign. Each campaign had to be summed up in a few sentences, and if it can’t then it’s not ready to go public.

Using the Logo

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The Greenpeace logo is incredibly we recognised, after all they’ve been parading it on ships and at well publicised direct actions since the early 1908′s  when it was drawn by Patrick Garaude. It was decided very early on that the purpose of this project was not to redesign it, but we needed to make it’s use consistent as individual designers and campaigners were recolouring it as they saw fit – with no logic to make sense of the variation.

We established Pantone 363U (and CMYK and RGB equivalents) as Greenpeace green. We chose this green for two reasons. It has a natural and healthy feel, avoiding the hippy, fluorescent connotations of acidic bright greens and the artificial plasticity of minty greens. It’s hue is also quite dense so it could be used to print text when using just one colour.

When Greenpeace wanted to show the logo in other colours these were to be limited to black and white. Both are practical with black oft used in printing and white reversing well out of colours and images.

It was vital to ensure that the logo was always displayed clearly, not pushed into spaces where it’s value would be diminished, so I recreated the logo with a simple frame surrounding it. Whenever a designer placed the logo on a page they would see it within this frame and know what space to give it.

The Colour Palette

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For Greenpeace colour is synonymous with The Rainbow which adorns their ships which traverse the planet so we wanted to create a palette which was varied. To form the Primary palette we took the colours used on the logo – green, black and white – and added blue and orange. The former representing water, the latter to be worn by activists involved in direct actions as well as to be used as accent colour online.

Secondary and Tertiary palettes were created to work in concert with the core colours. The former, bright signifying mainly specific campaigns, andthe latter mainly pale colours and greys provided as a backdrop for the primary and  colours.

Greenpeace green, orange and light grey are used to great effect on the Greenpeace UK website.

Typography

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As with the colour, the variety of type Greenpeace were using prior to this project was varied and inconsistent, my audit revealed some 11 fonts used on just 20 documents. Type selection had to be rationalised and so we selected a few and set down some principles.

We decided to steer clear of the trend for having just one font for all media thinking it to be too conventional for such an unconventional organisation and inadequate for it’s needs – we agreed that reports would look awful in Georgia, Times New Roman (yuk) or Arial.

Foundry Sterling was selected to be the primary font of the brand. A sans font with requisite elan and a full family of styles and weights made it useful for everything from printed banners right through to reports.

Helvetica was selected to be used on-screen as it’s the system font visually closest to Sterling.

We recognised the need for using other fonts from time-to-time and so we set out guidance which allowed for that, so long as there was a compelling reason to break with style. A good example of this is the ‘UK’s worst fish retailer’ campaign of 2006 in which I helped Greenpeace to mock the Morrisons brand.

Style Guide

The style guide brought together the guidance, principles and rules developed during the project in one simple to use ring-bound document. This document is widely used within Greenpeace in the UK and beyond.

Branded communications since

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Aside from the stationery which in part led to this project starting, Greenpeace often launches new campaigns which require new branded communications; briefings and reports, leaflets, banners, flags, stickers, t-shirts – I could fill the web with examples but above are just a select few of my designs which use the Brand Identity.

If your organisation, campaign or business is thinking about it’s branding I’d be happy to discuss your needs with you. Call Paul on +44 (0)20 8299 6523 or email me.

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If you would like to discuss commissioning Julia to photography your children please call 07966 332841 or email her.

The report we designed for our friends at Greenpeace is proving a real success. Today they announced the following.

“After working with us (Greenpeace) over the past few weeks, Clarks have today announced that they will ensure the suppliers that provide the leather for their shoes from stop sourcing it from deforested areas of the Amazon. This is a really positive move – they’re not only rejecting leather from illegally logged areas of the region, but from any cattle ranch that is being run on deforested land.

This means there’s a unified front from the shoe companies we challenged over Amazon leather in their supply chains. All have now committed to avoiding leather that is implicated in Amazon destruction. Clarks join Adidas, Nike, Timberland and Geox, who have all made similar commitments over the past few weeks.”

Well done Clarks! And all the other shoe companies too.

You can read the full story on the Greenpeace site

And if you want to see what the report looks like here’s the original story.

For a couple of months in early 2009 I worked with Punk Publishing, the people who create the Cool Camping books. Together we created Wild Swimming Coast.

It’s a wonderful guide to the best and often very well hidden beaches, pools and caves of Britain’s coastline. Featuring regional background and detailed maps, directions to the swims and hundreds of great photos – many by Daniel Start – the author.

Helping define the sequence of the book, designing the layout of all 256 pages as well as editing photos meant that this was an engrossing project. This was also the first book I’ve designed for retail so I’m very happy it’s been well received with the title currently being reprinted and having received reviews such as this on the Waterstones site, “this beautifully produced book is sure to inspire you to discover and enjoy all that’s great about our British coast”. I’m off to cool my ego down in the sea.

Buy the book, find out more about wild swimming or check out Punk Publishing’s other titles.

If you have a book you want designing please contact Paul.

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Julia offers school events photography for free, with print-ready photographs available for download, in the local area of East Dulwich. If you would like an event covered, please call Julia on 07966 332841 or email me.

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Sunshine, cakes, costumes, dancing and loads, loads more!

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These new logo designs for the Goodrich Community Primary School take the traditional format of a shield and furl and update it.

The busiest design has the crest packed with visual references to what goes on in my local school every day; questions, computers, friendship and multi-culturalism. The calmest design is a simple furl with a pencil. Here are all the permutations the design.

Maybe one of these designs will one day be the official Goodrich Community Primary School logo.

Until then they can be the unofficial school logos.

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