It seems that every culture loves trees. Some even worship them. I wouldn't suggest going that far, but if you wanted to, there are few better places to do it in London than Springfield Park Cafe.
When the proprietors of the Springfield Park Cafe in East London asked me to update their booklet showcasing all of the trees in the surrounding park, I was happy to take the job.
Because not every job involved inspiring subject matter. I have created print and web design for some very unappealing items. One of the first jobs I ever had back in the late eighties involved creating a catalogue for a medical facility who specialised in incontinence. Trying to find the aesthetics in that project was a real challenge.
Because this was a redesign, the structure of the brochure was more or less set. There would be minimal editorial input so the job would be to reinterpret the material.
Unusually the first thing to do was just wait. The brief was given to me in the depths of winter and I needed a sunny day in Spring in order to wander around the park with my camera.
Once I had acquired the photography that I needed the next thing to do was come up with a concept. My main concern with the previous edition was that it had not been designed to fit the medium. The booklet is only A5 and as such the large amounts of text were rendered in a somewhat cramped fashion.
This was not a problem which would ever be completely overcome. However, by eliminating excess clutter on the pages and using the differences in type to set the boundaries between data entries, I managed to clean up the layout and giving the text on the catalogues some breathing space.
SEO driven content – design and copy for HD Storage Solutions
Creating a website for a Transport and Warehousing company based in the Midlands characterised by SEO driven content.
You have to admire someone who sets up a businesses during a global pandemic. This is exactly what HD Storage Solutions did in 2021, setting up a combined transport and warehousing facility near Coventry. This was one of the first projects where the need for SEO driven content was a requirement from the start.
This project began as a blank sheet. As assets go went there was a logo and that was it. No images, no copy and no real idea of how to balance the two parts of the business in marketing terms.
My biggest asset on the job was the client himself. He was open-minded and willing to listen. Moreover, he was happy for me to write the copy and to design the site with SEO as the primary driver.
Just my type
I have wanted to use Open Sans on a project for a while and this was the perfect opportunity.
Open Sans is a work of art. It can used with equal effect for headings, text, menus, buttons, and everything in-between. You can't say that about every typeface. It even works in all caps for the headlines, something that I am normally reluctant to do because it can appear to be somewhat aggressive.
Imagery came from a variety of sources. Transport by its very nature is a dynamic enterprise so the idea was to represent the idea of movement throughout.
I no longer use or encourage sliders for home page content. However, I did like the idea of rotating the underlying image at the top of the home page while keeping the copy static.
In accordance with Google's preference, I have completely moved away from the idea of single page sites. That said, a home page should contain some essential information from each section of the site. This lead to creating the horizontal content bands that run down the page with SEO driven content from each section presented in each one.
Social Media Templates for Gradient Racing – layers upon layers of design
Gradient Racing are a motor sports team with an all female driver roster. They currently compete in the IMSA WeatherTech Sports Car Championship. They came to me before the start of the current season, looking for an adaptable series of social media templates.
The client was looking for a number of different social media templates in different sizes Portrait (1080 x 1920 pixels), Square (2025x2025 pixels), and Landscape (1920 x 1080 pixels).
We used the size above to crate social media templates for Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
In addition, we produced the templates as layered files in Photoshop which covered:
Quotes
Race schedules
Qualifying results
Race results
I was initially inspired by the creative work for the car livery. The car was covered in a chaotic fractal pattern of various shades of green and black on a white background.
Inspired by the triangular shapes, I used a series of similar overlapping three sided shapes to mark out the separate areas of each template. Additionally, I used a similar diamond pattern of transparent white layers overlaid on images of the car for the text area.
In the end the multi layered look proved to be extremely effective. Moreover, it has become something of a signature look for the agency that commissioned me.
Branding reflects your values, but it cannot create them
If you have ever hired a business consultant, you may have heard the following. "You really should think about rebranding". If this happens early on in the first meeting you should show that consultant the door.
Rebranding in isolation is the least effective and most expensive way to build or improve your business. Even worse, it provides the appearance of radical change while leaving all of your problems and issues untouched. If branding reflects your values then you need to concentrate on the values themselves.
The rebranding process can be expensive and addictive. Most people don't get involved in the design process that often. When they do, they discover that it is fun, for want of a better word. Clients can spend hours obsessing over details. Eventually some convince themselves that the right colour, or typeface or graphic idea, will transform their business. It won‘t.
Consultants love to tell stories about Apple. They love to tout Steve Jobs as a transformative figure in industry. A man who reinvented branding. Perhaps he did. But if so it had no effect on his company's success. Apple ploughed a precarious path as a niche computer supplier for most of its existence, either with Jobs at the helm or without him.
It was the only the emergence of the iPhone and the entire smartphone industry in 2007, that turned Apple into the corporate and cultural behemoth that it is today. The success of the iPhone and iPad had a knock-on effect whereby purchasing an Apple laptop became a similar cultural statement. It was the product line that drove the transformation, not the branding.
For all Apples marketing speak about thinking differently, they are still just a technology company, faced with the same research and logistics challenges as all of their competitors. For all their talk of brand values they are driven by profit and loss, just like every other corporation.
What is the opposite of an apple?
Rebranding is totally unnecessary if your products are good enough. The oldest unchanged logo in the world belongs to Twinings. Now Twinings are something of an expert on building things to last. After all they have been operating a tea room on the strand for over 300 years.
They created their logo in 1787 and it remains the same to this day. It remains the same, even in this era of planned obsolescence, where things are thrown out and replaced not because they are no longer useful, but they are no longer fashionable.
If you tried to sell a similar design to a client in 2020, they would laugh at you. It's typography includes an old fashioned serif typeface set on a shallow arc and presented in monochrome. This is most untrendy and has been for a long time. Despite this, it has never prevented a single teabag from being sold.
Twinings have no pressure to rebrand. Their product is good enough and well established enough for them to resist market pressures to change their logo.
They are not the only ones. BMW and Coca Cola have maintained their branding more or less unchanged for a century. Now you might throw your hands up in horror at the idea that Coca Cola is a quality product. However, the reality is that if you are looking for something fizzy and sugary with little or no nutritional value, then it's hard to think of anything better than Coke.
In fact, it's Coca Cola's biggest competitor, Pepsi, who have struggled with the whole notion of branding over the years. They have twisted and turned and spent billions and have not gained any ground on their bigger rival as a result.
The lesson to learn from this is that branding is only ever representational of what you are delivering. No amount of typographical tweaking will improve your goods and services, and a bad graphic will not harm your sales as long as you delivering what your clients need.
Pubs in need of a website – Part 1: The Ship in Highley
I was approached by a friend of a client who had been let down by their web designer. She had two pubs along the Severn river, both of which needed websites.
The first of these pubs in need of a website was the Ship Inn in Highley. The Ship is both a pub and a hotel with several single, double and family sized rooms. Despite being a very old pub, the ship has a modern open feel to it so I wanted the design to reflect that.
A good website will not make a bad pub better. On the other hand, a good pub should not be let down by it's website. The Ship is a modern Inn with very traditional values. Good food, good service, and a warm and friendly ambience. That's not my opinion. The Ship's customers are very clear on the matter.
The signage for the pub used the typeface Copperplate Gothic, which I thought was an excellent point to start from, being a very distinctive font. However, Copperplate didn't really work online, with it's delicate vertical serifs. So I went looking for an established web font with a complimentary look. I choose Monserrat due to it's character with and open readable nature.
I was only going to use the typeface for headlines until I realised that it worked really well for body copy as well. The only exception to Montserrat was the quotes at the head of each page which needed a more organic look. I settled on Water Brush which balances readability with a beautifully handwritten feel.
The Ship has an excellent reputation online, so I used various testimonials as page headers.
Once the Ship had been completed, I moved on to the second of the of the two pubs in need of a website - The Harbour Inn in Arley.
Redesigning a website – Welchome Furniture in Chelsea
Redesigning a website for a high quality Italian furniture retailer.
Welchome are a Chelsea based, Italian furniture outlet specialising in ultra-high quality home furnishings. They also offer a successful bespoke design service for business and residential interiors. There are many reasons for redesigning a website. In Welchome's case it was simply that the nature of websites had changed drastically since their previous design.
When I audited their website I found a number of issues. The existing site had been designed six years previously 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 would present 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.
We highlighted the need to remove the cramped and visually chaotic elements. I stripped back the design and recreated the layouts as white backgrounds with minimal design. Myself and the client agreed that the site required a new font and installed 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, I installed a full width carousel which uses the highest resolution images possible. The sheer quality of Welchome's product range shined through as a result.
We started with WordPress as a basic Content Management System. I added a number of additional fields and tables to allow for control of products, interior design, news and catalogues.
INHOUS Letting – an example of third stage corporate design
What is third stage corporate design? In corporate design stage one normally refers to establishing the brand elements such as logo, colours, and typefaces.
Stage two usually involves the creating the client's primary visual assets, business cards, documentation, letterhead, website, email signatures, etc.. The designer leverages the brand assets in a visually creative way but also maintains the integrity of those elements.
The third stage comes once all of those assets have already been established.
One one hand, this is less of a freely expressive exercise than stage 1 and 2. On the other hand it requires a different kind of creativity. You still have to come up with solutions that are visually arresting, communicate well, and remain faithful to the brand guidelines.
Inhous are a specialist property brokers operating in the UK and Ireland. They deal with highly valuable properties requiring specialised skills and knowledge alongside a great deal of discretion.
INHOUS decided to move into lettings alongside their existing sales service. As a result, they asked me to create layouts for letting out multiple properties.
There wouldn't be a lot of content given the expensive nature of the properties that they were offering.
I respected the established corporate identity (as every good designer should do) by keppeing to the existing website layout, colours and typography. Within those guidelines, I created an alternating layout that presented the properties in the best light. I was careful to remain consistent with the rest of the site while creating the new layouts.
Content updates – Rebel Rock Racing
Content updates are like a middle child, much loved but sometimes neglected. Content management systems are supposed to put content updates and creation in your client's hand. But simply having the tools is not enough if you don't the time or the basic skills required.
This is a point that is universally true. Having a scalpel won't make me a surgeon, and owning a saw won't make me a cabinet maker. Just giving a client the keys to WordPress will really help them with content updates. They will also need a lot of skills that I take for granted.
Copy-writing
Asset acquisition
Editing
Layout
Photo editing
Knowledge of wordpress
A basic IT skill-set
And most importantly, the one thing that requires a bullet list all to itself.
Time
Many of my clients don't have the time or even the inclination to learn this, so they end up by asking me to do it and I am always happy to oblige.
The Rebel Rock Racing website needs regular but infrequent updates. It involves putting in a news story, a little bit of formatting, and finally adding the story to the homepage carousel.
It's a 10 minute job for me but a much longer task for my client.
The point of all this is that there is value in knowledge. It speeds up processes and enables you to present a guarantee to clients. Every story I put online quickly and accurately just adds incrementally to the most important aspect any client agency relationship, which is trust.
Alitrac – Packaging
Creating a design from a packing template for a personal alarm.
Alitrac is a branding vehicle for BD Networking. Their first product was a rebranded personal alarm, combining an ultra high sound emitter with a flashing LED. The device would be perfect for vulnerable people travelling in potential hazardous areas or situations. Creating a design from a packing template was the main part of the brief but before I could do that I needed a logo.
Packaging comes with a unique set of challenges. Packaging 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 die-line for the artwork
In the end I used a graphic silhouette of the egg shaped product as a starting point.
Building a website and a brand at the same time – Mobile Wheel Clinic
Mobile Wheel Clinic is a collaboration between one of my existing clients and a diamond wheel cutting specialist in the midlands. Building a website and a brand at the same time is not ideal but it can be done.
They came to me asking for a website. However, they also needed a corporate Identity. They didn't even have a logo at that point. So the situation required building a website and a brand at the same time.
One lesson that has stayed me for years is that a good design embodies one idea and one idea only. After a couple of false starts I realised to me that the logo should be sharp and aggressive. The company's main service is repairing wheels using a diamond sharp cutting blade mounted on a lathe and the logo had to reflect that.
So the logo became a visual expression of sharpness, and needed to be forcefully presented.
Building a website and a brand
So I went with Jost, a typeface based on Futura. It's a geometric sans serif with very sharp lines and angles. This was perfect for the Logotype. The next idea was to take the company's initials and cut sections of the lettering off. Given that cutting was the core of the company's offer, this seemed appropriate.
Finally I continued with the aggressive approach and went with black and red for the corporate colours. The client was very happy with this as they had found the alternatives to be somewhat insipid.
Once the Logo had been approved, I was asked to help with the livery for the company's main vehicle. This van would be their base of operations and as such, would be useful for advertising and brand building.
I took the idea of sharp edges and created a design underpinned by a blade running the length of the van. The most difficult thing was making sure that every aspect of the design would fit in with the various parts of the vehicle. Eventually we balanced all of the elements and the livery was complete.
This was the first opportunity to employ the logo out in the wild, as it were. I was very happy with the results.
Once I had delivered the van artwork, I returned to working on the Website. The curved blade graphic that I had used for the van turned to be an ideal fit for the website as well.
This allowed me to use a lot of diamond cut wheel imagery as background images. The images give each page its own character.
As has become increasingly common, I ended up writing all of the copy for the site as well as designing and coding it.
