A rich history for new housing

We’ve worked with developer Richardsons Capital LLP and Carillion on a number of projects and, as such, we were the natural choice to create the naming and identity for their latest residential development – a joint venture with Gleeson Homes – in Thanet, Kent.

The development’s location was key to our naming and branding approach, as it has great historical significance. For any history geeks out there, the local area of Richborough is thought to be the landing site of the Roman Invasion of Britain in AD43 and went on to become the formal entrance to Roman Britain.

The Roman port was marked by a huge arch, so we used this for inspiration and came up with Richborough Gate. Playing again with the historical connotations, we created a simple, elegant logo, featuring a representation of a wrought iron gate in a light lime green on a dark blue/grey background to illustrate the coastal link. The Garamond font used for the logo reinforces the area’s links with the past, whilst the modern graphic approach keeps the identity contemporary and fitting for the new residential development.

We’re also in the process of creating a microsite for the Richborough Gate development, which will act as a portal to direct potential buyers to the associated marketing agencies. We’ll update you once this is finished, so watch this space.

Give us a glue

The art of origami and pretty paper plants aside, understanding paper folds is essential for designers and clients alike. Whether designing a leaflet or pop-up children’s book, paper folds are as important to design as typefaces, formatting and illustrations. There’s a lot more to it than just folding a piece of paper in half or half again (in a ‘here’s one I made earlier’ kind of way) and believe it or not, paper folding is considered an art form.

Choosing the right layout, and therefore folding, reinforces the message of your document, engages the reader, makes you stand out from the crowd and lets you control the way the message is revealed – all pretty powerful stuff.

Paper can be folded into some downright crazy shapes, most of which you’ll never need, so for now we’ve just covered the basics in our handy guide, along with bindings and their typical applications. So whether you’re looking for a concertina, standard or parallel map fold, we’ve got it covered here.

» download our PDF guide

Learning to love logo formats

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.

» Download our logo format guide here

A gold star for Excellence

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.

CIJ Residential Award win for the Palazzo Dorottya website

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 website

www.palazzodorottya.com

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.

Like?

Unless you've been hiding under the digital equivalent of a large rock over the last few years, you'll be aware of the huge impact 'social media' is having on the world at large. From Twitter to LinkedIn and Google+, these have given us all new ways to communicate with our friends, build brand awareness or plan the next major riot.

In terms of social media though, nothing can really compare to the behemoth that is Facebook, but many companies are still holding back from any kind of social media presence (especially when it comes to Facebook) as they see it as simply a glorified way for people to 'tweet' about their pub-crawl plans and 'like' pictures of kittens etc. - not exactly relevant for most B2B companies. Sure, we've all heard tales of B2C marketing successes - but again, that's when marketing directly to the consumer.

Even so, more and more traditional B2B companies are starting to explore this new frontier. Twitter seems to be the usual jumping off point - setting up a Twitter account is incredibly simple and with a maximum of 140 characters, most of us can just about find the time to write a tweet every now and again (although even that amount can sometimes seem daunting to those new to the idea).

Are you a tweeting fanatic or are you still sitting on the fence and waiting before you dip your toe in those mysterious social waters? And just because social media is the current 'trend' of the day, should you feel forced to join the herd? Facebook presents a few challenges in terms of building an audience and posting relevant content, so if you are new to the whole thing, then Twitter is probably the best place to start. It can be very effective when trying to raise awareness of your brand, getting your point of view out to a wider audience and even increasing your search engine ranking, so it really is worth trying (and talking of raising awareness - see the additional note 'Going Viral' below).

Here's a tip when starting out - one of the key things to do is find a 'voice' - remember this will be the Twitter account for the company, not necessarily yourself, but this doesn't mean that you have to be dull or 'matter of fact' – in fact those who simply use Twitter to post press-releases won't get a lot of followers. Use the channel to communicate with a different audience and in a different way. Don't forget to follow people you also find interesting and don't be afraid to RT (ReTweet) anything you think will be interesting to those who follow you. Throw in some links to interesting things on your site and use it to publicise any news or blogs you want more people to see (this can be great for SEO too). Finally, don't make the mistake that many first time Twitterers make - don't think of it as one way communication. If someone comments on your brand, your work or sends you a direct message - be on the other end of the line and answer their query, engage with them!

But that's just Twitter, what of Facebook? Well over the last few years, Facebook has steadily been rolling out changes to the way it handles 'brand' pages. Facebook is no longer just for individuals and there are now many more tools to enable either a B2C *OR* B2B brand to have a presence. You only really appreciate the true power of Facebook when you set up a page and then look into the advertising possibilities - the sheer range of targeting information and options is quite staggering. Want to advertise to women in London and New York and Tokyo, all between the ages of 24 and 28 who like Skydiving and Crochet? No problem!

One of the biggest of these recent changes is the Facebook Timeline. Any normal Facebook user will already be familiar with the Timeline layout as that rolled out to personal profiles several months ago, however, this now goes live for brands today. This means a whole new layout to the page, so any existing content will probably need to be re-looked at. So if you've already got a Facebook page, you'll need to make sure you're ready for the change, and for those who haven't explored the option, well, now's a good time to try!

The nice thing about the social media revolution is that the tools are free and the hard bit isn't actually the figuring out of technology/software - it's the creation of content (and not just once, but once a month at least!). This means that it's pretty easy for most people to figure out how to setup their Facebook page and add interesting content for your potential audience. That's not to say that more advanced features aren't available of course.

One tool we've recently been exploring is 'LikeIt Pages' - this is an interesting new service that aims to give the average user much more in the way of options when it comes to their Facebook pages - from encouraging users to 'Like' you, to giving extra content 'rewards' when they do. The system is pretty easy to use and any limitations are more down to the way Facebook works rather than problems with the software itself.

If you'd like to find out more about how you can use social media to spread the word and attract more business, give us a call or email me at: ben@tothepoint.co.uk. For further information about LikeIt Pages or setting up your Facebook page to take advantage of the new Timeline see the links below:

For further info:

Our Facebook page (feel free to 'like' us!)

LikeIt Pages

Top 6 guides to starting a Facebook Brand page

Top 6 changes to Facebook with the new Timeline

Timeline for brands - a complete guide

and finally a very nice use of the new Facebook Timeline - the D&AD Easter Egg hunt


Additional note - Going viral:

Just as I'm writing all this stuff about the potential power of Twitter, it's nice to see that our little typography game we created last year 'I Shot the Serif' has gone viral again. You can see the current Twitter chat here: https://twitter.com/#!/search/tothepoint.co.uk - the point is that without doing any additional marketing (over and above the occasional tweet), we had more hits to our site than EVER before yesterday (that's over 3000 unique hits in one day - not bad considering we usually average around 150 per day). And if that isn't a nice way to demonstrate the power of social media, I'm not sure what is!

When it simply ASDA happen

As St Martin's Quarter was a live construction site, we couldn't enter until works were complete, so we worked within a tight deadline to produce an additional set of hoardings and window coverings across the site in time for ASDA's grand opening.

We had already created a number of modular system hoardings for the development, which were designed to be moved from one stage to the next once work was complete. However, in the run up to the completion of the ASDA site, further work had been carried out on site, meaning additional hoardings were required in a very short space of time.

So, it was all hands on deck as our hoardings guru Glenn had to recce the site and obtain measurements and then it was over to the team back at base to design and layout the visuals and supply all the artwork in time for production and installation.

Altogether, we produced 150 modular panels and 13 window coverings, featuring the development’s branding, charcoal grey and lime green colour palette and lifestyle imagery to communicate the benefits of the development to the local community.

Both the hoardings and window coverings were delivered on time and the opening of ASDA on 26 March was a great success. The fantastic feedback we’ve had from the client made the tight turnaround worthwhile, and Carillion Richardsons’ project manager had this to say to all the collaborators on the scheme:

“My congratulations to you all as a team for your part in ensuring that the opening of the ASDA store on Monday was a success. I would also like to thank you all for the hard work, effort and long hours that you have all put into the project recently to make this happen.”

As St Martin’s Quarter is an ongoing project for us - having been involved in the name generation and branding for the development - the site visit also gave us the chance to see the first stage installations of signage and banners in situ that we had previously designed.

The opening of ASDA marks the completion of the first phase of the development with the second stage due to begin any day. So, watch this space for another update as we’ll also be supplying hoardings and signage for the retail and commercial units.

click on the images below to view larger

More bang for UK Space Agency's buck

We’ve had our heads in the clouds this month, applying the branding, the applied graphics and creating and updating videos for the display screens for the UK Space Agency’s stand at the Big Bang Fair, part of National Science and Engineering Week.

The UK Space Agency is at the heart of UK efforts to explore and benefit from space. Following the tender win for the project we got to work designing graphic visuals that would both give the illusion of being in space and also inspire children to learn more about space and its science. We created internal graphics of a starry sky, using blues and purples to create a backdrop straight from the depths of our universe, and laid out text, logos and other graphic panels for the whole stand.

It was a pretty quick turnaround from winning the tender to the event so we needed to keep tight control of the project management for this. Having supplied the artwork to the UK Space Agency's stand contractor, PG Events, for the build and installation of the stand, we ensured that the visuals were implemented to our specification and the stand and digital elements were completed in time for the fair.

Matt Goodman, Head of Communications at the UK Space Agency, said: “To the point did a fantastic job in a tight timeframe, delivering on the brief to create a stimulating stand, with dynamic graphics to create an inspiring atmosphere for visitors at the fair.”

The Big Bang Fair is always a success and the UK Space Agency’s Train Like an Astronaut stand was one of the most popular at the fair.

We’re also in the middle of updating the UK Space Agency’s brand guidelines as well as creating a logo to celebrate the anniversary of 50 years of the UK in space, so keep an eye out for updates on this in a forthcoming blog.

Stimulating growth

The Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is the main UK government agency for funding research and training in engineering and physical sciences.

We’ve worked with the EPSRC on several projects over the last couple of years, helping to communicate to the public what the EPSRC is and its role in society, and this project was no exception.

Engineering and physical sciences stimulate growth in many of the UK’s most vital sectors and without them the UK’s ability to generate future growth would be severely damaged. As such, it’s essential for the EPSRC to demonstrate how the research it supports is vital to contributing towards the UK’s growth – something that is always important, but even more so in this tough economic climate.

And that’s where we came in. We needed to create a concept that was bold, memorable and instantly communicated the idea of growth for the economy to audiences including government, the general public, businesses and academia.

We created a campaign brand that consisted of the word ‘growth’ made up from different industry sector icons such as health, construction and engineering. The primary colour palette used pure Cyan, Yellow or Magenta as a backdrop to Black and White cut-out photography which added drama and visual interest, whilst being sector specific.

The campaign will be launched at the Cheltenham Science Festival in June, and then be used at other events, on press releases and the EPSRC’s website to build on the initial launch.

Young man, there's no need to feel blue*

brilliant 'CMYK' photo by 'Auntie P'

Of course, we’re preaching to many of the converted here, but the subject of print colours seems to baffle many non-designers. The recent comment from a client that 'CMYK' sounds like a Village People song is a case in point!

Young man, are you listening to me…

And once you start explaining that the colours seen on screen aren’t the same as print colours, some clearly just tune out. So whilst the Village People comment caused a lot of amusement in the studio and has been added to our 'quote bank', it did also throw up some interesting questions about how much clients do and should know about the colour processes. We see this as an essential part of branding, especially when considering the consistency of your brand across all current mediums, from print to digital.

So, in a nutshell, print colours are typically CMYK (that's Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black - Black is represented as 'K' for Key) and Pantone, whilst the on-screen and web colour spectrum is RGB (Red, Green, Blue), but it’s not always that simple. So, for this month’s top tips we’ve put together a handy little guide describing the different colour models and whether they are for print or screen usage.

Get our colour guide here (PDF)

Make sure you take a look at next month’s blog as we’ll be continuing with this theme and looking at logo formats and their different uses, something else that confuses non designers and often designers too!