Category: Concepts

Welchome are a Chelsea based, Italian furniture retail outlet specialising in high quality home furnishings. They also offer a successful bespoke design service for business and residential interiors.

They approached me to update their website in late 2015. Their previous design was nearly six years old and was visually dated and cramped. The existing site was only partially responsive and the content management system was extremely limited.

The brief was to create a site that presented the visual quality of their products in a far more appealing fashion. They also required a comprehensive, yet simple Content Management System as they were continually updating their online catalogue with new products.

The design of the site, which had previously been cramped and visually chaotic, was pared down with white backgrounds and minimal design. The previous typeface was replaced with Raleway, a light elegant geometric web font. The colour scheme was mostly comprised of neutral greys designed to place greater emphasis on the excellent product photography.

On the home page, the layout is dominated by a full-with carousel which allows the sheer quality of Welchome's product range to shine through.

The site was built around WordPress with the basic Content Management System expanded to allow for control of products, interior design, news and catalogues.

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.

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.