Taking PRide in CIPR's regional awards

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) asked us to design an identity for its annual PRide Awards, which celebrate outstanding public relations across the 12 regions of the UK. The brief was to create an identity that would give the awards more prestige and gravitas to bring them more in line with the importance of the CIPR Excellence Awards, whilst highlighting the regional and inspirational aspect of them. The identity also needs to be flexible so that it can be used for subsequent years to build recognition.

Bearing that in mind, we created a marque made up of a stylised map of the UK, with black and white imagery from previous campaign entries to represent the 12 respective regions that are eligible for the awards. The rest of the UK map shape is made up of different sized pink and teal squares to add vibrancy and colour, whilst bold gold text on a muted gold background adds to the prestigious feel.

As 2013 is the 10th anniversary of the awards, we included a subtle light gold text reference to this without it being the focus of the identity, which means it can be easily removed for subsequent years.

Sarah Ion, Marketing Manager at the CIPR said:

“We’re delighted with the new brand look that to the point has created for the CIPR PRide Awards. We asked the team to develop a look that adds prestige but reflects the important values and qualities of our regional awards scheme. The new branding does this beautifully and we’ve already received great feedback from our regional and national group volunteers around the UK."

We’ve also designed an A5 call for entries postcard, web banners and graphics and are currently finalising an interactive e-brochure for entrants.

Showing off the PR Show

One of the best ways in which to make an impact when launching a new event is to make sure the identity is engaging and distinct, and support this with clear, concise messaging. The CIPR knew it would be in safe hands with us and are delighted with the results.

The Public Relations Show will bring together more than 1000 public relations professionals to network and discover the latest trends and tools in the industry. As it will be the first event of its kind in the UK, the CIPR really wanted to make an impact and generate awareness.

As such, we needed to come up with a vibrant, creative and engaging identity that was professional yet adaptable. As the focus of the show is very much on professional development, collaboration and learning, we based the logo around the idea that PR can guide and direct perceptions.

We created an iconic marque made up from different coloured interlinking directional boxes. When joined, they convey the message of synergy but they also have the flexibility to have elements used independently, on signage, wayfinding and sub-branding. They can also be used to help members and participants in the show find the information they need quickly.

The vibrant grey, dark turquoise, cyan and yellow colour palette offers visual intrigue and versatility for other marketing collateral, whilst the Avenir font plays a subtle nod to the current CIPR branding. We’ve created the master show logo and supporting logos that reference the different participants in the show - exhibitor, speaker, sponsor and visitor - for use across various show collateral.

We’ve created supporting digital collateral, including web banners and graphics to help launch the show, featuring the outline of old fashioned tickets and the blocks from the logo. Over the next few months we’ll be creating other print and digital marketing materials, so watch this space.

SeaBird R&A explores design shift

SeaBird Exploration, a global provider of marine seismic data for the oil and gas industry approached us to design its 2012 Annual Report. The brief to take the report to the next level was a welcome challenge. The client wanted a style and layout for the report that would provide a more contemporary look and feel, whilst ensuring it was professional, impactful, easy to navigate and a clear reflection of the SeaBird brand. We could also see there was scope to develop an enhanced visual language that could be applied across other materials. This would help to elevate the brand in tandem with improved market conditions and its positioning within the sector.

As a starting point, we wanted to create something that captured the essence of the brand. We adapted the seismic graphic device from the logo to capture this character on the front cover and then carried this device through the rest of the report to provide a consistent brand feel and visual interest. We created a main colour palette of grey and white, with bursts of yellow and blue providing more intense dashes of colour to draw the audience’s attention to the positive messages of growth and success, supported by key facts and figures. The use of grey and white allowed the mix of black and white and full colour photography to feel more unified and stand out against a neutral base.

We had a pretty tight timeframe for this so it was all hands on deck to turn it around, but with Sundays as working days in Dubai and the four hour time difference, we were able to meet every critical deadline.

See the full Report and Accounts as a PDF page turner here.

The personality of a brand

Last month was our turn to host the latest G7 event, a networking forum for the property, design and construction sectors. At each event, the hosts give a short presentation about an industry topic to encourage some lively debate, over a glass (or several) of wine.

We chose leading real estate company CBRE’s headquarters in Henrietta Street for the event. Not only is it a great entertaining space but it was also the perfect way for us to show off the interior environment work, including wayfinding, wall and window graphics and experiential digital graphics, we had created for its offices...which leads us nicely onto the topic of our presentation.

Taking a tongue-in-cheek look at brand personality - what it is, the importance of carrying it across all touchpoints, including the office environment and how we’ve done just that for clients - we challenged guests to a game of celebrity ‘Guess Who’. Based on a list of personality attributes, such as ‘impeccably dressed, stylish and proud to be British’ for one and ‘thought provoking, contemporary cool and quirky’ for another, we asked guests to guess the four personalities.

To show how we have bought personality to our clients’ environments/interiors, we then linked each personality and their attributes to one of our clients, with CBRE as James Bond going down very well with COO Martin Lewis.

We used Dawn French, whose attributes included ‘cheeky, light-hearted and energetic’ to represent Newsprinters, whilst Brian Cox was perfect to showcase the creativity we’d brought to The Francis Crick Institute, as he’s ‘approachable, young’ and ‘making science fun.’ Finally, Damien Hirst was ‘thought provoking, cool and quirky’ to reflect the work we did for Yahoo!’s Swiss headquarters.

Although intentionally light hearted, we did have a serious message behind our talk, in that design does have a major impact on people’s experience of an environment, the perception that it gives and the impression it can create.

See our presentation here and if you need any help expressing your brand personality or with your workplace environments, do let us know.

Growing our own stories

Having created the identity for the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council’s (EPSRC) Growth campaign last year, we’ve designed a range of marketing materials, both print and digital, to promote the campaign, including an iPad/iPhone app, microsite, concertina brochure and A5 postcards.

The aim of the Growth Stories campaign is to highlight the ways in which the EPSRC is promoting economic growth within the UK through its funding of research projects to as wide an audience as possible. These stories range from an award winning, wireless heartbeat monitor for premature babies to the invention of new, flexible organic solar panels.

To bring the stories to life across the different media and grab people’s attention, we used large, bright and colourful photography that represented each story whilst short, snappy copy explained the background to each story. Each image is featured in all its hi res glory on the custom designed and built iPad/iPhone app, which takes advantage of its ‘retina' screen. We also designed a promotional microsite to showcase these stories to a wider audience through editorial and social media. This ensured the content is accessible to everyone, whether viewed on a mobile, tablet or desktop.

EPSRC used its stand at The Big Bang Fair in London this month to create interest in the app and website, with a pocket sized concertina brochure featuring some of the stories and A5 teaser postcards given to school children. The app and website were launched a few days later with the first batch of 20 stories and a further story will be added each week for the rest of the year.

EPSRC was delighted with the app, and Communications Manager Gemma Hulkes had this to say:

"We worked with TTP to create EPSRC’s first app, the contributions from them were invaluable and it was great to have their digital communications knowledge and expertise."

You can get hold of the free 'GrowthStories' app for both iPhone and iPad from the App Store. You can also see some of these stories on the custom microsite created to promote the app: www.epsrc.ac.uk/growth/ - look out for new stories being added each week throughout the year.

An innovative environment

Having already updated the look and feel of the Fostering Innovation 2013 Awards for the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the next stage was to create vibrant, stylish venue dressing, trophies and supporting printed material for the event at Altitude 360º, on the top floor of Millbank Tower in London.

The Fostering Innovation Awards recognise and celebrate the innovative work of BBSRC supported scientists who are delivering economic and/or social impact. This year’s competition saw the introduction of a new award, Excellence with Impact, which joins the Innovator of the Year and Activating Impact Awards.

Our challenge was to implement the award branding across the event space, complementing the stylish location, creating an exciting, coherent look and feel and directing the people flow throughout the venue, from the initial visitor experience at the entrance to the three award areas on the 29th floor.

We split the floor space of Altitude 360 into four zones, one for each of the three awards and the fourth for the presentation area. We carried the yellow, vibrant pink and blue colours from the starburst logo across the award zones, giving each zone its own colour so they were immediately identifiable and offered visual intrigue for guests.

For each zone we created a large perspex triangle, vinyl wall lettering and graphics along with window borders in its allocated colour. Coloured lightbulbs completed the effect and provided a warm glow, especially effective as the evening approached. Coloured floor vinyls at the entrance and across the venue floor was the perfect wayfinding system for visitors, guiding them into the individual areas.

We also created supporting print and digital material for the event, including the invite, brochure cover, animated slideshows using the logo shape and colours shown on screens throughout the venue, and the three award trophies made from the respective coloured perspex.

The event was a real success and BBSRC was delighted with the look of the venue on the night.

 

Making the complex simple

view the site here: www.coveburgess.com

Newly formed architects Cove Burgess recently approached us for help in refining its identity and creating a website. Both partners wanted the identity and collateral to reflect their approach to architecture, ie. pared back, stylish and ‘less is more’. Similarly, they felt that the website should be used to reinforce their credentials for contacts they had already met, rather than it pulling in new business from first time visitors. They wanted it to simply and quickly whet the appetite of any potential clients and leave them wanting more. They imagined it as a ‘second date’ website ­­– a good way of putting it!

Following this thinking, the identity needed to be simple and understated yet sophisticated. The use of Optima fitted the mix of modern and traditional whilst the differentiation of ‘Cove’ from ‘Burgess’ through two tones of grey created a stylish, pared back identity. The use of foil printing on the business cards reinforced the high-end, luxury feel and set the benchmark for follow up collateral.

We created the website in Wordpress CMS using a custom designed theme. Throughout the project we had to resist the urge to add too many 'common' website elements such as news pages and blogs etc that would perhaps improve SEO or more obvious 'calls to action', but would also depart from the extremely minimal and unique cornerstone we agreed upon at the outset.

The site structure was reduced to the point where only essential information was retained and the homepage features a simple horizontal menu (styled in the brand font) and large image carousel. The case studies page was paired down to just six key projects and a very concise description for each. Whilst both simple in style and in use, the site was created to be as easy to update as possible by the client should they wish to do so.

Cove Burgess are extremely pleased with the website and refreshed identity. Partner Timothy Burgess, said:

"Our approach is to make our clients lives easier; taking their complex projects and deliver them with the minimum of fuss. To the point got this immediately, which is not really surprising, as they do the same thing. The brand and the website are both simple and clear, exactly as it should be!"

Hacked off

Update:

Since writing this blog, it has become even more apparent that website hacks have increased still further - there's a particularly nasty ongoing attack on Wordpress based websites right now. For specific information regarding this 'botnet' attack and what you can do to safeguard your site, this is a good blog post that covers most of the info you need. We will continue to update and monitor all sites that we maintain to ensure that none of them are compromised.

How safe is your site?

Ok, so that sounds like some marketing scare headline to get you to buy something, but it's important to raise awareness of an issue that seems to be becoming more and more prevalent at the moment.

Here's the story...

We created a website for a client last year, who recently contacted us to find out why the site was suddenly being flagged as potentially 'compromised' on Google - although confusingly, the site itself still looked absolutely fine.

However, after some investigation we discovered that the site had in fact been 'hacked'. This was a particularly sneaky attack as it showed itself only to search engines – and as the site itself looked fine, the owner assumed all was still ok.

Fortunately, our hosting provider (see below) was able to discover when the site was compromised and was able to restore a backup of the clean version of the site - within 24hrs its Google listing was back to normal and everything was fine. We reset all admin passwords, updated the CMS software and checked any files for security issues. That should plug any possible security holes, but of course there are never any 100% guarantees. It looks like this was a rather advanced, automated attack that was designed to detect and exploit any newly discovered vulnerabilities.

After doing some more research into the matter - primarily to ensure this doesn't happen to any of our other clients' sites, we quickly came across plenty of similar stories, and it's not just limited to the smaller / lower cost sites. Let's face it, if the US Federal Reserve can get hacked, there's not much a small business can do to stop a genuinely determined cyber attacker.

Worryingly, whilst these hacking attempts are nothing particularly new, there does seem to be a significant increase in attacks to smaller websites over the last few months (especially those based on common, open source CMS such as Wordpress or Joomla – which power around a third of the world's websites between them).

So, how do you know if your site's ok or if it's actually been compromised – whose responsibility is it and what can be done?

How can I tell if my site's ok?

Well, the simplest thing will be to make sure you check your own site regularly - if there's anything that looks odd, out of place or broken, it's always worth investigating. Search engines will sometimes pick up on site hacks before you or your visitors so it's a good idea to do a search for your own site every now and again and make sure it still appears and its listing is correct. Also, take notice and take action if anyone contacts you to let you know your site is behaving 'strangely'.

If your suspicions have been raised, we recommend using this free site checker (it's a bit like anti-virus for your website). Type your website in and wait for it to tell you if everything is ok. This is a manual, one off process - but you can subscribe to their service for around £60 per year for constant site monitoring (they also claim to be able to fix site hacks too).

As an alternative, you can also sign up to Google's Webmaster Tools. Simply sign up, add your website URL and you then need to add a verification code to your site. Once added, Google will notify you if there are any issues with your site - ie. if it detects any viruses or malware.

What can I do if my site's been compromised?

This will largely depend on the type of attack and how badly it's been affected. For most of the time the hack itself is easy to remove - often there's simply been some additional code 'injected' into the homepage - removing this *should* fix your site, but if the hack is more severe, you'll need to get your developers on the case. Once the site is back up and running, you'll need to make sure you get them to check any possible security risks, upgrade your software /plugins/extensions etc. and change your access passwords.

Whose responsibility is it to fix?

Once your site has been designed and launched, it's usually down to you to manage and maintain it. If you have a maintenance contract with your development company, then you'll usually need to check what this covers, as most of the time this simply covers simple bug fixes and content updates. In general, it can be quite tricky to determine exactly how hackers gained access to your website files, as there are new security 'holes' being discovered and patched all the time. So, unfortunately, unless you're paying someone to manage your site AND site security - then keeping it running, up-to-date and virus free is down to you!

So what can I do?

One option is to sign up with a company such as Sucuri.net, who claim to be able to fix malware attacks, but this is no guarantee and will depend on the type of attack your site was subject to.

Similarly, you'll also need to check to make sure that your site is being regularly backed-up to ensure you can restore an older version should something go wrong - sometimes, if a site has been extremely compromised, a backup restore is the only way to make sure it's fixed properly.

In general and certainly with regard to the open source Content Management Systems, it's a good idea to keep the software that runs your site updated to the latest version as that can often contain security fixes. Sometimes (especially in the case of Wordpress) that's as simple as logging in and clicking 'update' - but be warned, with each update can come changes that might not sit so well with some of the custom features you may have on your own website - so it's usually best to check with your developers before upgrading.

Keep a tight control over access to your site:

• be very careful with your admin passwords and the number of users who have admin access.
• remove access for anyone who leaves the company, or who should no longer have direct access to your site. This also includes third parties who are no longer contributing or maintaining the site.
• use secure passwords that can't be guessed easily. Do not use the name of your company, service or website. 
• passwords should ideally be 8+ characters long and include upper case characters and numbers.
• try to change your passwords on a regular basis - but at least once a year.

What else you need to do:

Consider taking up a maintenance package for your site which includes regular security checks and daily backups. The exact services will depend on the package you choose, but extended contracts can include 24/7 monitoring for any file changes and suspicious activity, verifying new CMS or plugin updates, and archiving monthly backups for two years so that any attack can be fully investigated. Our hosting partner, Didgeroo, also offers maintenance packages, including high-speed dedicated web servers with daily backups, monthly archives, website security updates and 24/7 monitoring.

And of course, we're also here to help, so if you're looking for an audit of your current website, to refresh it or redevelop it completely, get in touch.

We're certainly a little wiser now and will be adding additional security systems into every website we create (large or small). Unfortunately, that also means admin passwords will now be both long, complicated and difficult to remember - there's always a down-side!

PR that Matters

view the website here: www.matterpr.com

You may have noticed in the press (wink wink!) that we recently created a logo, graphic language and website for the newly established communications agency Matter PR.

Matter PR was started by David Reid, who we’ve worked with before on various projects, so when he left to start his own thing, he naturally came back to us to help give his agency an identity.

“I had worked with tothepoint on projects at EPSRC and the Institute of Physics and was impressed by the extra effort they put into understanding their clients. They have a great knowledge of the science and engineering sector, having recently rebranded the British Science Association and The Physiological Society, and always deliver creative ideas that really resonate with your audience," says David Reid.

Whilst our starting point for the identity was ‘A PR agency that is more than public relations’, we also knew that the identity needed to resonate with science and engineering organisations.

Working with David, we chose the name ‘Matter PR’. As a word it not only suggests something of importance but also pays a nod to the science industry, as matter is the physical substance of everything. It implies that this agency creates work of substance and importance, that communication matters (clever word play, eh!).

Using the Periodic Table as our main influence, we created a logo by taking the square containing Pr, and re-appropriating it to mean public relations (Pr is actually the element Praseodymium but we don’t think they’ll mind us borrowing it…). Across the identity and the collateral, we also subtly use the common three states of matter (solid, liquid and gas) through photography, which adds vibrancy to the agency’s collateral.

By using graphics that embody and emphasise the agency’s expertise in the science sectors, we are able to give a newly established agency a bold, instantly recognisable marque.

The logo has been applied to basic stationery and promotional material, along with the website we designed and built. We used open source CMS to allow the site to be easily updated, whilst the free flowing imagery and subtle hierarchy on the homepage gives the site a more bespoke feel.

David has let us know he's received great feedback so far from his clients, and has even picked a theme song for the agency in the form of "The Elements" by Tom Lehrer.

The concept of a cube

Toasting the success of The Concept Cube

The Concept Cube is a consultancy set up to help entrepreneurs and businesses lift themselves to the next level. The company approached us for a logo and brand identity, and very much wanted the thinking behind the name of the company to be part of this. The ‘cube’ represents the multi-dimensional nature of starting and running a successful business, with each side representing The Concept Cube’s expertise in areas such as investment, marketing and management to help grow these businesses and bring their ideas to life.

Now, as we all know the cube is a very popular logo (a simple Google search will bring up pages, some exciting and innovative, some… not so much and others we’ve seen a thousand times before). So, the challenge was to create a 3D shape that was fresh, engaging and modern.

We chose a hexagon with each face comprising different shades of purple, and using the technique of trompe l’oeil to create the illusion of a 3D cube. The grey type of The Concept Cube acts as an intriguing contrast to the vibrant purple of the hexagon. Along with the purple master logo, we created a number of divisional logos in other bright hues using the same tints, but in red, blue, green and orange.

It's been an interesting project to work on, and we've had some lovely feedback from The Concept Cube, who had this to say:

"Our business is about finding the appropriate partners that can be brought together to bring a concept or business plan to life for everyone's mutual benefit. Our work with TTP achieved this as well as reflected our business ethics which are to be fair and have fun. It has been a very satisfying relationship so far and we hope to be able to work together as successfully hereon."

The Concept Cube is now open for business and has started work on its first project, which looks set to be a fantastic success...and not just because we’re also working on it! The company is developing New Zealand’s first 100% Blue Agave (that’s Tequila to the uninitiated, but like Champagne and the French, ‘Tequila’ belongs solely to Mexico.) Now, we’ve tried a sample of ‘Te Kiwi’ (the project’s working title) and we were seriously impressed with its quality, smoothness and flavour. It slipped down a treat!

We’re working with The Concept Cube and Echo Brand Design on the branding and packaging for the official launch, which is set for next year, so watch this space!

Toasting the success of The Concept Cube