Things are never simple, are they? The vast array of media now available means logos are now supplied in a bewildering number of formats, and for those who aren’t professional designers or in the industry, what to use for what application can be pretty confusing. High res, low res, eps, jpg, Pantone, RGB, it can all get a bit much.
Again, as for last month’s top tips on colour models, we’re aware a lot of you know all of this backwards, but we are firm believers in revisiting the basics as well as helping those who aren’t in the know.
As designers often vary in the kinds of logo formats they supply, understanding the different file formats can be crucial. Just knowing the basics means you can avoid unnecessary changes and painful exchanges back and forth with the designers/printers/other agencies etc and speed up the whole process.
We’ve worked with the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) on a number of its campaigns so we were the natural choice to create a concept for this year’s CIPR Excellence awards.
The annual CIPR Excellence Awards, now in their 27th year, are the most prestigious celebration of public relations, with this year’s black tie event in May to be compered by Olympic medalist Colin Jackson – reflecting the London 2012 Olympic theme.
The brief was to come up with a bold, fresh concept that celebrates this year’s Olympics and reflects many of the Olympic values that the CIPR also holds dear; namely competition, fair play, ethics and a winner's mindset.
The theme also needed to introduce the strapline ‘building on the past, looking to the future’, which we also created, as well as communicate the organisation's renewed drive and focus under the leadership of new CEO Jane Wilson. This strapline will be used on all future CIPR materials, highlighting the new direction the CIPR is taking whilst at the same time recognising the huge value associated with its past successes.
Given the plethora of Olympic themed branding and news out there at the moment we didn’t just want to jump on the bandwagon and produce a clichéd 'inspirational' image. So, our solution was a purely typographic approach based around the Olympic theme of gold, silver and bronze. The concept involved highlighting the successes of past Olympians such as Daley Thompson, Kelly Holmes, Steve Backley etc, with the type printed in the colour that corresponds to the medals that they had won in previous Olympic Games.
"We really wanted to produce something that reflected the new direction that the organisation is taking under the leadership of Jane, and in doing so, change any preconceptions that people may have had of the CIPR", said Kevin Cox, our Creative Director.
The concept will initially be applied to invites, programmes, guest lists and certificates that will be handed out to the cream of the PR profession at the awards ceremony held at the Hilton Hotel, Park Lane, London.
In a glittering ceremony at the Intercontinental Hotel in Warsaw, Poland on 17 April, we were crowned winners of the Construction and Investment Journal (CIJ) Residential Awards 2012 Best Residential Development Website award for the innovative and stylish website we created for Palazzo Dorottya, a restored historic building in Budapest.
The Construction and Investment Journal (CIJ) Residential Awards 2012 celebrated projects as well as companies that have excelled in performance. Projects submitted for The Best Residential Website are judged upon various criteria, including graphic design, innovation, commercial success, beauty, layout, integration and user friendliness.
The project
In May of 2011 Richardsons Capital LLP and Fingen, the joint developers and property owners of Palazzo Dorottya - a grand, historic 19th century building in the heart of Budapest – approached us to create a brand, website and marketing collateral for this six storey mixed use development, consisting of 87 luxury apartments with commercial and retail space.
Before work could start on the website we needed to create a brand for the development. We wanted to communicate that Palazzo Dorottya is a sophisticated destination for living, working and entertaining, whilst also reflecting the building’s juxtaposed classic and modern characteristics. So, we created the strapline ‘where the past meets the present’ and logo, giving it a typographic treatment through the use of two fonts to reinforce the old and new – a theme which was also reflected in the marketing materials as a whole.
The innovative website we created includes a homepage that features full screen images, a distinctive image gallery, along with a custom designed interactive map of the area that had links to luxury products and services. Individual floorplans are available as both zoomable images and downloadable PDFs. The site has also been optimised to work well on tablets such as the iPad and is easy for the sales team in Budapest to update.
Ben Jackson, Head of Digital Media at to the point said,
"The site has been purposefully designed to be as ‘flat’ as possible – meaning that most users will feel comfortable enough to view all of the main sections. Content has been pared down to a minimum so users get all the information they need. All additional information is then accessed via lightbox overlays – meaning navigation is kept very simple. User testing was carried out to ensure users were never swamped with too much information and felt that they had simple access to everything they needed to encourage them to get in contact and find out more about the building/apartments available.
We built the site using a customized version of the Wordpress open source CMS (.PHP) – with CSS hand coded to be clean and simple. The site is very easy to maintain, with quick and simple content entry for all pages, including location information, and apartment availability".
We created several plugins and features specifically for the site.
Location section - based on a customised version of Google Maps, this has been created as a stand alone local search system designed to promote local landmarks, retail, hotel, entertainment (etc.) facilities. All data was researched and written specifically for this site.
Image gallery – as images were very important to the brand, we created a gallery system (based on SlideShowPro) to show the images in the best way possible using Flash where available and a separate non-Flash version for mobile/tablet users.
Custom apartment search facility. Used in both the Sales and Rentals sections, this was created from scratch for the site in order to present a very simple, intuitive way to search for apartments by multiple search categories. Due to the deliberately simple site structure, this is all presented on a single page, with high-resolution, zoomable floorplans opening into a lightbox overlay for each selected apartment (these are also available to download as a PDF).
Site has been designed to work well on its own and also as the online component of the iPad sales tool.
To complement the website, we developed an iPad tool to help facilitate sales. This needed to be developed quickly with no constant bug-testing or waiting on App Store approval. It also needed to be relatively simple to keep up-to-date and easy to use. As iPad Apps can be expensive and time consuming to create, we came up with a cost effective tool (essentially a supercharged interactive PDF). This enables the sales force to show potential clients all the relevant property information if there is no Wi-Fi connection, and allows them to access the website to show real time availability and pricing when an internet connection is available.
The website and iPad tool were also supported by a suite of printed marketing materials. These included a luxury wallet and brochure with floorplan inserts for each of the 87 apartments. We specified a high quality digital print solution for these inserts, which enabled the client to call off shorter runs, printing floorplans only when needed to tailor presentations for specific client needs, as well as reducing the environmental impact associated with printing.
About the Awards
The Awards are organised by Roberts Publishing Media Group, which has been publishing CIJ Magazine for over 19 years in Central and Eastern Europe. This year’s CIJ Residential Awards were held on 17 April 2012 at the Intercontinental Hotel, Warsaw, Poland and honour projects completed between 1 January 2010 and 31 March 2012.
