Bye Bye Blogger Blogger Bye Bye

With the launch of our new website complete with news and blog posts, this will be our last post here on Blogger. Check out our work across branding, print, digital and workspace environments on our new website at www.tothepoint.co.uk.

To enquire about working with us or to just get in touch, visit our contact page or give us a call on 0207 378 6999. And if you're in our neck of the woods pop in for a cup of tea and a chat (and a biscuit if you are lucky).

From now on if you want to read our news and what we get up to, click here: www.tothepoint.co.uk/news 

It’s time for us to blog off!

Peace. Out.

Slippery When Wet

Last month we unveiled the new logo for the Oxford City Royal Regatta…and this month we have the official poster to go with it! Don’t say we never treat you!

The poster is suitably themed for the event, taking inspiration from posters of old. The design will be used on various formats across the event…we were all hoping for a few tea towels but will have to make do with a few drinks on the day!

If you are a rowing fanatic, then why not pop down for an enjoyable day out and a glimpse at our posters up close and personal. More information on the event can be found here.

June Round Up

Delightful Diana

Diana Vasilescu has joined our account management team, and is settling in well as she brings a wealth of experience from working across marketing and branding services.
Graduating with a BA in advertising in 2010, she dived straight into a fast-paced environment early on and after completing her internship in an ad agency, she became more involved in project managing a variety of through the line campaigns with a strong focus in the FMCG sector.

She later took on a much bigger challenge and moved across the pond, where she discovered her passion for branding and strategy, developing engaging brand stories and delivering projects for the property and interior design sectors. At to the point, Diana is working closely with Charlie and Will, handling day to day client liaising, as well as untangling all the strategic knots that help bring a brand to life. When she’s not running from one client meeting to another, she enjoys getting all the wrong answers at pub quizzes and finding the right answer to the eternal question “What are we having for lunch today?”. Your challenge is to guess where she is from when you get to speak with her.

Tour de Croydon 

Last month the men’s Pearl Izumi Tour Series and the women’s Matrix Fitness Grand Prix Series came to Croydon showcasing the best in world cycling. The big news however was the talent that was the Croydon BID/Pearl Izumi bike team, consisting of Matthew Sims Croydon BID, Georgina Dawkins Croydon BID, Tony Middleton AIG, Steve Avery Home Office, Simon Schutte Home Office and our very own Simon Hutton. The conditions were not ideal but that didn’t stop our valiant heroes from tearing round the circuit. They raised money for The Mayor of Croydon's chosen charity: http://www.croydoncommitment.org.uk/About-Us. Congrats to the winners - The Met police or MPCC to their cycling friends.

Jeff Koons at Newport St Gallery

Escaping the thunderstorms, Brexit, football, and the general sense of impending doom last Saturday, James did something that most Londoners struggle to do at the weekend and went to an art gallery.

The recently renovated Newport St Gallery in London opened its doors a little while ago to house exhibitions of work picked from Damian Hirst’s art collection. The first exhibition was a collection of works from the celebrated abstract painter John Hoyland. Hoyland has now been replaced by Jeff Koons, showcasing works from 1979 to 2014.

If you’re not familiar with the work of Koons, it’s quite likely that you’ve seen his giant stainless steel balloon sculptures, one of which defies all sense of proportion in the second room of the gallery. The gallery website quotes Norman Rosenthal describing Koon’s work as “manifestations of a joyful acceptance of American culture” which rings true when perusing the otherwise seemingly unconnected objects on display, from vintage hoovers, a celebration of basketball (and balls) and a giant sculpture made from PlayDoh.

Jeff Koons' work will be on display at Newport St until 16 October, and admission is free. A perfect place to spend a rainy afternoon in London. Just be wary if you’re taking the kids, you might want to cover their eyes as things get a bit saucy in room 3.

A day in the lakes

As a practice for his full Ironman in August this year, our MD's son, Tom, took on the Half Ironman in Ullswater last weekend. Not for the faint-hearted, it involves a 2k swim, a hilly 48 mile cycle and a 13 mile fell run. An extra competitive edge was added by roping his brother Sam and other mates into entering the event as 2 relay teams.

Tom finished 36th out of 199 competitors, completing it in 5 hr 14m and shaving over 90 mins off his previous time when he competed in the same event 2 years ago. All the results can be found here: http://www.trihard.co.uk/results/a-day-in-the-lakes-results. So for now the training continues in preparation for the Ironman in Copenhagen - so double the distance plus a bit - a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile cycle and a marathon - back to back. This is all done in the memory of his brother Charlie and to continue supporting the amazing work of the RNLI. 

If you want to find out more about the event, his training or even want to join him on a weekend cycle, you can follow his blog at http://challengecharlieironman.tumblr.com and obviously we are still hoping to raise more money for the RNLI.  You can donate at uk.virginmoneygiving.com/SomeoneSpecial/teamhutton

w.w.we're nearly there!

For those of you who have got this far in our enews, we'd like to offer you a sneak peak of our new website here. We're really excited and almost ready to announce it to the world but with all the different browsers and versions out there we need a bit of time to test and ensure we're happy to shout about it next month... Or maybe earlier... We'd love to hear what you think, good or bad, and hope you enjoy what we've been crafting for our 25th year in business.

Special K

We are very excited to be working with the nice people at recruitment consultants Kinsella Legal. They came to us looking to refresh their brand identity and revamp their website. Kinsella is a boutique legal recruitment agency based out of Holborn. They focus on building strong relationships with both clients and applicants, attributing their success to date on the personality of their people. The current identity and support materials of the organisation, led by Siobhan Kinsella, were already packed full of visual personality which makes them stand out in a sector that is normally very dry and corporate but imagery was starting to take over from message.

The aim of the refresh was to keep the fun, colourful and elegant aspects of their visual language but refine elements and move the look on with a more contemporary feel. The colour band with its distinctive colour palette was an important element of the identity toolkit that they wanted to retain but they were happy for us to evolve the logotype and even look at a more icon based representation for the brand.

The selected logo and support toolkit still conveys the vibrant personality of the business but with a clever twist of typography we have created an iconic K that integrates a rotated L to represent the K and L of Kinsella Legal. This simple typographic icon becomes a standalone element that can be used across various media but will be ideal for digital, from animations to the website favicon.

We have also introduced colour variations of the logo that have been taken from the colour band to introduce flexibility and create a stronger link between the two for enhanced brand recognition. We are looking forward to applying the new brand toolkit across all of Kinsella’s materials, especially their website where we can really start bringing their brand to life.

This is just the beginning of the relationship but we wanted to show off this shiny new identity and tell you to watch this space, and theirs!

And the winner is….

Congratulations to EFG Asset Management who earlier this month won the best marketing campaign award for their discretionary materials created by yours truly! 

The award ceremony soiree was held by WealthBriefing, who provide news, features and information for the wealth management and private banking industries.

The ‘award-winning campaign’ (got a nice ring to it, don’t you think?!) is the ongoing project we’re working on with the team at EFGAM called In8. See our original story here.

Last year we created a clear and unique campaign for the team with a fresh approach to asset management design using iconography and infographics to help inform and engage their audience. 

The materials went down well when we presented them to the key stakeholders at EFGAM and the designs now successfully cover their discretionary materials worldwide. The guys over at WealthBriefing obviously like them too;

“It was the highly systemised content programme of this entry, with its high visual impact and commitment to return on investment that impressed judges.”

We’re currently working on a wider range of publications and documents for their general services marketing, evolving the visual toolkit but still keeping all materials clear and consistent with the In8 campaign brand. As always with the team at EFG Asset Management, the materials are disciplined by nature, flexible by design.

Row, Row, Row Your Boat...

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Earlier this month we were approached to help lend a creative hand to the Oxford City Royal Regatta. We were tasked with creating a special logo to celebrate the regatta's 175th year.


We are currently working on the poster that will work not only as a point of information but also will be used for merchandising. We are taking art deco classical rowing and boating posters as inspiration, so watch out for our June e-news.


To find out more about the regatta you'll have to check their website here for details but the event starts on 20th August.


CSP Merger

You may remember that towards the end of last year we launched CSP’s website www.cspretail.com.

 

This month they’ve announced their strategic alliance with Staunton Whiteman to become a leading integrated property advisory firm in the out-of-town retail sector. With such a landmark change, both firms are shouting from the rooftops, and their websites, to announce the new partnership. We were on hand to ensure all went smoothly with a pop up window, logo and content update timed to go live with the announcement to the press. Take a look at their updated site and read about their new merger at www.cspretail.com/investments.

Not So Silent Witness

In last months enews we introduced the new brand identity we have been working on for Witness Mountain. One enjoyable Friday evening we were fortunate enough to be treated to a wine tasting session with Eva, the owner of Witness Mountain. We sampled various wines from the Somlo wine region in Hungary. Opinion was divided on the outright winner, with some people leaning to the stronger and more full bodied whites as opposed to the smoother, crisper whites.

It was also interesting to hear more of the history of the region, the growers and everything in between. Keep your eyes open for more from Witness Mountain as we work on their marketing materials. Egészségére!  

Cut Me Some Slack

Picture the scene; a dingy university library in Nottingham, one evening (well, most evenings) in the mid 90’s. Whilst other students are down the pub a small handful are crouched around computer screens chatting online. Nothing special about chat-rooms I hear you say, but remember this is before most people had email, when the only means of chatting with anyone was to queue outside a phone box so you could tell your Mum you were still alive before your 10p ran out.

Fast forward to a more civilised time, today, when things couldn’t be more different. Nowadays there’s a ton of different ways to communicate online. SMS, Snapchat, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, Viber… the list goes on. And who uses email nowadays anyway?

We recently came into contact with one of the new services that grabbed our attention. Started in 2013, as the next brain child of Flickr entrepreneur Stewart Butterfield. Slack is described as a ‘cloud-based team collaboration tool’ and is one of those techy ideas taking over the world from seemingly nowhere.

At first glance, you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s just a re-packaged chat room of olden times. So how has this seemingly old tech reared up to be one of the new toys that all the kids wants to play with?

It’s power is in community. Becoming popular more with businesses than individuals, Slack offers a team or company a handy personalised, cloud based messaging service that’s great for organising teams and topics. So individuals no longer have to trawl their inbox for that titbit of information someone sent them the other week, it’ll be right in front of them in a neat little categorised box.

Slack is also heavily customisable. Where it gets especially exciting is opening up this to ‘the internet of everything'. Hook up Slack to your smart fridge and even your central heating at home. It’s not just an old school chat room, it’s your new inbox and even your own personal assistant. We're excited!

There’s Been A MURDER

At the Natural History Museum no less!!!! There is no need to fear, however, as the culprit was identified and apprehended by 150 amateur investigators...As you may have guessed this is not fact, but indeed a work of fiction. One of our designers, Lizzie went to the Crime Scene Live event at the Natural History Museum (NHM). The premise was this…a body and bloodied clothes had been found within the grounds of the NHM and it was up to the rookies to solve the murder. Here is Lizzie's account of a most enjoyable evening.

On arrival each member of the ‘investigation’ team were handed their white jumpsuit and rather fashionable blue plastic shoe covers. The group was split into three and sent to separate areas of the museum. The first room was the evidence room which contained case files and witness statements taken when the body was originally found. After taking down copious amounts of notes and looking at photographs intensively for any hidden clues, we were then taken to the entomology room (by far my favourite). Here we were given a talk from a scientist that uses his knowledge of insects to help the police force with real life crime scenes. It was then up to us to identity the type of fly found on the body, which can help determine time of death. This room also included timing live maggots to see how fast they can wriggle over a certain distance! Last but not least was the fingerprinting room. Police officers from the Met spoke briefly about fingerprint identification techniques and then let us loose with powder and magnifying glasses! The last piece of evidence here tied the whole murder together and allowed us to correctly identify the suspect!

For those interested or obsessed with detective shows (like Lizzie) we can highly recommend this…especially as you get to keep the forensic gear after!

Explore with Crossways new website

Hot off the press, we’d like to announce the launch of our new website for Crossways Business Park in Kent. 

We originally designed the site for Land Securities who used to own the Business Park. Caxtons now manage the site and we were asked to re-vamp the website to bring it up to date and add functionality for tenants. The new website required an online directory of tenants and services, including an interactive map that worked as well on mobiles as it would on desktop computers.  

Rather than ‘re-inventing-the-wheel’ we focused on Google’s Map API combined with a back-end put together in Wordpress. Our own custom built Google Maps plug-in meant we could apply our own bespoke styling and functionality. This included a fresh overlay showing all the units and services in the park, alongside a filtered directory listing, allowing users to locate tenants by name and by area as well as locate local amenities.

After a group training session here at ttp headquarters, our client was off and quickly uploaded all the info they needed with minimum fuss. And of course we remained on hand for the occasional query or photoshop expertise.

The site is now live and you can view it at : www.crosswayskent.com

Volcanic Appellation

We have recently been joined in the studio by Eva Cartwright, owner of the Somlo wine shop in Hungary where visitors can sample over 160 wines from Somlo-hill. We've sampled 6 of these so far but as we are now helping with her identity and branding for promotion of these wines in the UK we should be able to fit in a few more.

We started with the naming and although 'Somlo Wines' locates the vineyards and shop we felt some of the other background information would capture more interest from potential customers in the UK. The name Witness Mountains caught our eye. Eva told us the story of the mountains of Hungary, or volcanoes as they were, witnessing the sea that surrounded them receding to form what is now the Mediterranean. This environmental change on a huge scale is not only clearly visible from aerial views but it left a very fertile land that is perfect for growing wine.

The Romans discovered the true potential of this land and many of the vineyards have evolved from their original vines. The nature of the volcanic and sediment rich soil, the Terroir, gives the wines their unique flavour and the opportunity for the UK market to try something different. Eva's current hashtag #govolcanic is likely to be retained to sign off the story but we discussed the opportunity of asking customers to look at her wine from a 'different perspective' in a very conventional market. This became one steer for the development of the logo.

The selected approach is a simple typographic play on the strapline 'different perspectives', and also fits well with Eva's request for something modern and functional. We see this flip of words becoming part of the visual language of the brand across all marketing materials.

This is just the start of our relationship with Eva and Witness Mountain Wines while she looks to crack the English market and gain recognition for her wide selection of Hungarian Volcanic wines over here. Obviously this means that we will still need to play guinea pig and have the wines tested on us! It’s a hard job but someone has to do it. To find out more about Witness Mountain Wines you can view the current shop site at somloi.hu.

McCoys - Fully Flavoured

Our new full-flavour website for McCoy's Crisps has now launched! It’s the second of our websites for KP Snacks and you can check it out at www.mccoys.co.uk.

On hitting the homepage, you might be forgiven for thinking ‘what the snack’ has this got to do with crisps?! Working with McCoy’s ad agency WCRS, we implemented a social aggregation tool to enable them to feed key content from their various social feeds; Twitter, Facebook….etc. This helps to keep the homepage content fresh and ever changing, but more importantly keeps content in-line with the launch of McCoy's new campaign which is all about the FLAVOUR. In short, a snappy homepage reflecting the noise created by WCRS’s 'above-the-line' activities.

And it really is all about the FLAVOUR. Keen to move on from being portrayed as the crisp of choice for the UK’s pub culture, the new direction for McCoy's is about the vibrant taste and flavours. So with that in mind, as with our website for KP Nuts, colour is key and especially so with the new drive behind McCoy's.

If you’ve seen our website for KP Nuts, the layout may look familiar. That’s down to our Wordpress multi-site approach, keeping things consistent across the KP Snacks range, as well as economising on the technology behind the build. Content is managed by the KP Snacks teams.

Anyway enough of the technical stuff, flavour is calling and we are off for a packet of salt and malt vinegar!

April round up

The Yorkshire sculpture park 

On a recent trip back to the Northern Wastes, our resident Yorkshireman James decided to take his family on a cultural tour (or did they take him?) starting with the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. For those of you who don’t know, the YSP is actually an art college nestled in the grounds of a stately home just South of Wakefield. 

Rolling fields and public bridleways surrounding the park give way to a strange combination of cows, ramblers, and Henry Moore sculptures. In the gardens themselves permanent (and some temporary) installations can be found, from the likes of Hepworth, Gormley and other local artists or resident students.

What’s particularly special at the moment is an installation by the New York artist Kaws. Playing on the familiar theme of pop-culture and cartoons (especially by the likes of Disney) Kaws’ tongue-in-cheek pieces mimic familiar forms and characters with a sinister twist. Always recognisable by his signature crosses for eyes and balloon like skull & crossbones heads, the figurines might remind you of the kind of cute vinyl figurines often seen in designery gift or skate shops… however these are super-sized. A trek across the valley to the Longside Gallery reveals more colourful sculptures (ranging from large to humungous) and some canvasses that hark back to Kaws’ graffiti roots. 

So if you’re in the area before the 12th June the YSP is well worth a visit. If you don’t make it in time, go anyway as there’s plenty of permanent works on display for a great afternoon out. It’s not all ‘grim oop North’.

Bradford Industrial Museum

Continuing the Yorkshire theme, the next stop on James’ Northern jaunt was Bradford Industrial Museum. Moorside Mills, just on the outskirts of Bradford isn’t quite as imposing as the more famous Salts Mill in Shipley but packs in several floors of steam engines, vintage vehicles and milling machinery. Amongst all this is a large room full of vintage printing presses surrounding the museum’s very own operational printing gallery; a representation of a victorian printing office.
The mind boggles when you take in the ingenuity behind the original Linotype and Monotype machines, not to mention the old Heidelberg presses of various shapes and sizes collecting dust. If you’re lucky enough to visit at the right time on a Wednesday (James wasn’t) then you could take part in the printing workshop and have a go at letterpress printing yourself. If you get inky enough you might be given a souvenir bookmark to take home. So should you find yourself heading towards Bradford on a rainy day with nothing to do, give the Photography Museum a miss and go here instead. 

Capturing the Capital on Camera.

Whether you’re capturing the hustle and bustle of busy central squares or snapping stylish shots of iconic Thames-side landmarks, London’s photographic opportunities are endless. For quite a while now, our senior designer Sarah has been looking for a way to push her keen amateur photography skills to the next level… she found it last week in the form of an evening photography class just around the corner from our London Bridge studio in Borough. Here are Sarah's thoughts on her night by the river.

I met my tutor Nigel in the National Theatre one freezing night recently and, following a brief intro, set off along the Southbank with camera and tripod in hand. There were about 10 of us in total, all with a decent understanding of aperture, ISO and focal ranges, and all with a keen desire to improve our skills behind the lens.

As the evening progressed we walked along the banks of the Thames, stopping along the way by London’s famous bridges to capture the views on camera. From the stark, utilitarian beauty of Blackfriar’s Bridge to the vibrant illuminations of London Bridge, we listened as Nigel shared his knowledge and took shots we’d never have dreamed of before.

The final challenge; Tower Bridge. “It’s like Kate Moss…,” he said, “You can’t take a bad shot of this bridge!” ...and he was right.

Charlie the pot head

Our account manager Charlie was throwing some shapes this month, not on the dance floor but with clay on a pottery course over at Stepney City Farm! Charlie had high hopes dreaming of jugs and salad bowls, however what came out of the kiln was rather smaller and simpler…! As with most creative processes it was a labour of love and time.