Hub Opening Poster

Creating a poster for a charity to celebrate moving into a permanent home when they moved into their permanent home

The Big Local project has provided 1 million pounds each to over 150 communities in the UK. The money goes towards grass roots projects driven by the residents themselves. The Worlds End community in West London were limited in their ambitions by the lack of a permanent base.

Moving to a new, permanent home was the point at which the project really became embedded in the local community.

To advertise and celebrate the opening I designed and produced a poster based on the idea of putting down roots.

I amended the illustration to be single colour so that I could draw a contrast visually between the top and the bottom. The top has a white background which allows me to use the highly coloured Charity Logo.

this meant that at the bottom of the poster, I can use monochrome logos for the various companies associated with the project.

Business Cards

Following on from my creation of a logo for BD I was asked to create a business card for the partners.

I wanted to work with a purely typographic image that would be immediately recognisable while saving the rear of the card for information.

My preferred solution was to do something that you rarely see on a business card, a photograph. Failing that I wanted to reduce the typographical elements until they became a purely graphic entity.

So I ended up with cropped overlaid text from the company's logo.

The graphic flourish on the back of the card came about as a happy accident. I initially wanted to have those bleeding off the corners of the card. However the client didn't really like the visual and which I was trying to delete from the artwork I needed up reducing them by accident.

This resulted in the basis of the final image with the two corners framing the text.

Packaging Design & Artwork

Creating a packing template for a personal alarm.

Alitrac is a branding vehicle for BD Networking. Their first product was a rebranded personal alarm, combing an ultra high sound with a flashing LED. The device would be perfect for vulnerable people travelling in potential hazardous areas or situations.

Packaging comes with a unique set of challenges. Packing projects are visually dense, with a huge number of elements needing to be incorporated into a relatively small space. This makes the potential for getting the visuals and the messages lost in the sheer overload of information compressed in such a small space,

Balancing these elements while maintaining visual impact is the needle that you have to thread.

I created the packaging using colours that were sympathetic with those of the main retailer, Lloyds Pharmacy. I received some assets from the product supplier, such as the product images and a few sales shots. They also helpfully supplied an accurate dieline for the artwork

In the end I used a graphic silhouette of the egg shaped alarm to create areas of light and dark on the front and top of the package. I also drew the small icons used for the product's technical specifications.

Power Supply Product and Packaging artwork

A brief combining a brand identity and packaging for an emergency power supply for mobile phones.

Power Strike was a product in need of a brand when my client approached me with it. Even the name didn't exist.

What was there was a decent concept. A solution for when the modern world lets you down. It was a small single use battery with a couple of hours power for a mobile phone or tablet. The batteries came with connectors for either android or apple devices. The devices weighed a couple of programmes and were only a couple of inches across, it was the perfect solution of for anyone whose batteries run out when you were far from any any source of power.

I came up with the idea of PowerStrike to highlight its single use capability and the fact that it could be used in situations where every other battery option was exhausted.

I wanted to use a stark, angular, and aggressive typeface due to the nature of the product and Futura fitted the bill perfectly.

The marketing strategy was to co-brand the item for sales in football superstores across Europe so the various packaging demos included samples from Barcelona and Chelsea.

Corporate Identity

A new corporate Identity for import and supply consultancy.

Brand identity jobs are few and far between for me these days which makes them all the more enjoyable.

I cut my teeth in Brand Identity with Wolff Olins in the early 90s, working on projects for BT, Allied Irish Bank and Vauxhall Motors. But it was at Pentagram that I learned the value of honing a single idea within a logo.

This approach has multiple benefits for both the client and the designer, not least being it focusses the mind on the project at hand.

BD were looking to import white label goods from the Pacific Rim, rebrand them and sell them on to UK retailers. Essentially they would sitting at the centre of both a delivery process and a network of suppliers, designers, transport companies and retail outlets.

This idea of being at the centre of an ever expanding network gave me a place to start visually.