Archive for the ‘branding’ Category
Rip Curl Boardmasters Festival - Poster Designs
We spent a very wet weekend at the annual Ripcurl Boardmasters Festival held in Newquay, Cornwall. The Boardmasters event celebrates surf, skate and music with the Vans Skate competition, the Ripcurl Surf competition and the Unleashed Music Festival.
We were wondering through Newquay and found a Ripcurl shop sporting all the usual surf gear as well as all the previous posters promoting the Festival. It is interesting to see how the event posters have evolved over time.
As you can see the posters were originally very photo driven and have evolved over time to incorporate heavy use of vector graphics. It’s interesting to see that they never seem to use the same logo design, but each years logo utilises the use of the wings and blocky fonts. The posters all seem similar in style - they all look very distressed and rough and a lot of attention is given to the typography. However,as each year goes on, they have shifted the focus from surf and skate to music - the posters have to reflect the evolution of the festival.
There are other Ripcurl events held internationally and I have popped a couple of posters below, I love the use of the clean lines and illustrations for the female events.
So what do you think of these poster designs? Over used vectors and destroyed look that you’ve seen too many times before? Or nice sense of style and branding?
Tags: branding, Graphic Design, poster design
Posted in Graphic Design, branding | 4 Comments »
When is it the right time to re-design your website?
After reading David Aireys blog post ‘Why are designers never 100% satisfied?’ we got thinking about our own online presence and whether it was still saying and doing what we wanted it to. The current version of the Eightyone Design website is now about 18 months old and I wonder whether it is time for a rethink.
The branding and visual style of the site is still in keeping with our offline branding (stationary, business cards, etc) so we are not thinking about re-branding, but a lot has changed over the last 18 months so when it is time for a website re-design?
When we designed and built the flash based Eightyone Design website, its purpose was to be a very simple, basic site that would showcase some of our portfolio. We wanted to keep it simple so opted to have four sections to the site:
- Home Page - with a brief overview of who we were and what we did.
- News Page - to feature small news stories.
- Portfolio Page - a simple image viewer showcasing some of our portfolio.
- Contact Us Page - for our contact details and a email contact form.
We chose to build the above sections into a small and simple flash based website so we were able to animate and add some depth to the simple content. The only exception was the news page which used php to pull an RSS feed onto a html page in order for google to better rank the content.
Then came the Search Engine Optimisaton. With the site being completely built using Flash, there was little to no content for Google and the other search engines to rank. We set about building some static HTML pages in order to provide some textual content and also to provide an alternative version of the site to be viewed if the user did not have the Flash player installed.
So this seemed to work OK and we started getting some good page ranking from Google. But now, 18 months on, we are starting to question our current website design.
Since the launch of the Eightyone Design website we have launched our own Graphic Design Blog which has been receiving some good traffic since switching to Wordpress to power our content. The blog is allowing us to break out from the local area in which the majority of our clients are based and potentially expand our target market. I also wonder whether using a Flash based website is the most effective way to showcase our work. There is also the problem of Google v Flash. Also, the current design does not feature much information about Eightyone Design.
Our original thoughts for our online portfolio was that is should be more of a gallery than a website. However, this has caused us to only show visuals of our work without any description on the design process of the projects. In his article ‘Creating The Perfect Portfolio‘, Collis Ta’eed explains the importance of an explanation of a design project:
If you present your portfolio with explanations of what they are looking at, how the work solved the business needs of the client, and any other salient details, the viewer is much more likely to understand the value in your work. Remember that many leads won’
t have a design background, and may not fully appreciate the work or the effect of good design.
This would hint that our current site does not fully explain our services and how a potential client can benefit from them.
So now to my question, When is the right time to re-design your website? And to answer this I am asking for your help.
The Options
As far as we see it, there are currently three options open to us for redesigning the website. The first is to move the blog articles to the home page and make the site more of a blog site with our portfolio accessible through a navigational link. This would offer more content and keywords on the home page of our site and hopefully increase our page ranking for search engines. There are a few Graphic Designers sucessfully marketing themselves in this fashion (David Airey / Just Creative Design / Graphic Design Blog) so maybe this could be the way forward? However, our little blog is by no means as popular and as busy as the blogs I have mentioned (and the ones I haven’t) so would this be a bad idea to place emphasis on the blog rather than our portfolio? There also seems to be many of these sort of blog sites popping up and I wonder if it would cause us to ‘blend in with the crowd’?
The second option would be to use a magazine style Wordpress template that would feature both portfolio items and blog articles on the home page. Themeplayground have posted a list of Magazine themes in their article ‘The Best WordPress Magazine Themes Available’. I particularly like the look of the Mimbo Theme and the Revolution Theme. Using a magazine would give greater prominence to our blog articles than our current design (which currently only features a link through to the blog) and would allow the user to decide what they wanted to see, portfolio examples, info about our company or blog entries. However, my one criticism of magazine style templates is they can be somewhat overwelming with no clear emphasis. I sometimes don’t know where I want to go first.
The third option would be to redesign the site using html rather than flash. This would allow for greater search engine optimisation without changing the current priority of our portfolio over the blog. Again, there are many successful graphic designers using this format to great effect (Truly Ace Design / Tracey Grady / Spoon Graphics). However, the one thing I do feel about our current flash based website design is it does look somewhat different to other sites and does carry through our branding very effectively.
So there is a fourth option. We could carry on using our existing design which seems to have ‘earned it’s keep’ over the past 18 months. We have found many new clients through our website so are we being overly critical of our little flash site? There are many graphic design agency’s using flash based content (Toast Concept / St Lukes / We are Collective) so should we carry on as we are?
Conclusion…sort of?
As with any graphic designers online presence, our website needs to showcase our portfolio in order to appeal to the widest range of clients as possible and I am unsure that the current design does this effectively.
We are looking for thoughts on our current site design and format. What do you like about the site? What do you dislike? Do you think it appeals to potential clients? And also any ideas you have to improve the site.
We will be following this up with another post showing our initial ideas for the redesign based on your comments.
Tags: branding, Web Design
Posted in Web Design, branding | 18 Comments »
Gender in Logo Design
There are two of us here at Eightyone Design Steve (male) and Me (Lucinda - female). We can never stay out of each others projects (even when told to!) and often collaborate on work, particularly logo design as this is something that we are both equally passionate about.
My interest in gender and logo design started about a year ago when we designed a logo for a economic consultant. She held a brain storming session with some friends and colleagues to get some feedback on the designs we submitted. This was a very helpful session and there was a general consensus between the group on a particular logo, type face and colours. As a simple exercise the group went through the logo’s and gave them a gender, (which is something I had never given much consideration to when creating a logo to appeal to both sexes). It turned out that all the logo’s that I had created they had marked as female and all the logo’s that Steve had created they marked as male. Which lead me to wonder if subconsciously we do design logo’s that appeal to our own gender?
We recently created a logo for Wakeham (an asbestos consultant) and once again we both worked on logo concepts for the client, but this time the logo had to appeal to a male market. As a quick exercise I showed the logo’s to a friend and asked them to rank them with manly ones at the top and less manly logos at the bottom. Surprise surprise my logo’s were at the bottom (and the chosen logo in the middle). So does that mean that I can only design female orientated logo’s?
One thought is our logo design process, we generally go away and sketch our ideas and then meet back up and discuss what we are going to develop and submit to the client. We are aware that we don’t want to submit designs that are similar (as often we come back with extremely similar sketches - its quite scary!) so it’s a possibility that my male oriented designs get sidelined and the more female ones get developed and submitted.
Obviously I’m not saying that men create male looking designs and women create female ones, it can’t be as black and white as that. I have since created an event logo for a rugby event in Newquay which was intended for a male market and Steve didn’t have a great deal of input on this one as he was working on other projects (not due to me giving him the boot!), however the client was thrilled with the design so I know that I can create logo designs for a male market.
I’m not too sure if I have a conclusion for this post really, it’s just that I find this subject particularly interesting and wondered if anyone has had any experiences of gender specific design or can recommend any further reading on the subject?
Tags: branding, Graphic Design, Logo Design
Posted in Graphic Design, Logo Design, branding | 2 Comments »
WBR World Beach Rugby Summer 08 T-shirt Design and Development
Beach Rugby is the game of tag rugby played on the beach. The WBR World Beach Rugby clothing brand was created by Lovell Rugby (The UK’s leading Online Rugby Store) in order to fill the quiet gap in trade between the end of season and pre-season training. Back in 2006, we designed the logo and the initial collection which went to retail in May 2007. Now, almost 18 months on and after having sold over 10,000 garments, the clothing range has been expanded to meet with the demand for the rugby fashion wear. In this post we show how we went about creating the Summer 08 range and the promotion to accompany the collection.
The Summer 08 collection of World Beach Rugby clothing is in fact the third range for the brand. The first, Summer 07, consisted of 6 simply designed t-shirts all with a sporty / surfy style. The second range, Winter 07/08 again consisted of 6 tee’s as well as a couple of Winter garments. Both of these ranges were create to test the market and see what, if anything, would sell. After two successful ranges, Lovell Rugby decided that Summer 2008 was the time to expand to a more extensive range featuring hoodies, caps, flip flops, trousers, board shorts as well as tee’s, polo shirts and rugby shirts.
The project began almost a year ago in August 2007, where we met with the guys at Lovell Rugby as well as the clothing manufacturer who briefed us with the list of garments required. We were also presented with figures of what designs had sold previously and after some discussion about where we all saw the brand going we set to work. It seemed that the garments that had previously sold well were those that had designs in unconventional places, ie spreading over the back and sides of garments. We set ourselves a project timeline outlining when initial designs would be showcased, sampling stages and finally promotional deadlines.
We began by breaking down the clothing and sketched where the designs would be on the each item, what type of material would be used and what colour dye we wanted. We started loosely sketching designs to go onto the garments discussing type of prints stitching and embroidery. In doing this we began to build a synergy within the collection. From there we split the collection between the two of us to work on the designs in more detail. This process took a couple of months, usually we find it quite difficult to put a project down in mid flow, however with such a long enduring project it was relieving to work on other projects as we went allowing us to return to the project with fresh and excited eyes.
As well as the garments themselves we also had to develop other ideas for ‘perceived value’ in the form of trims, neck labels, side patches, washing instructions and swing tickets. The patch used in the neck and over the side seams was to be the same design printed on a rough canvas material with a washed out and distressed look. In discussing ideas for the swing ticker which would be attached to the neckline it was clear that we did not want to produce something that would most likely be thrown away. To solve this, we created a dual purpose swing ticket which could be peeled of as a sticker and hopefully be used by the end user to further promote the brand.
In October 2007 we pitched the initial range to Lovell Rugby offering each garment in several colour options. On the whole the designs we received well with only a few being dropped. We then chose a selection of colours to be sampled by the manufacturer. The artwork had to be prepared and guidelines were written for each garment. These included the type of material to be used, garment and design colouring, stitching, print type, embroidery, where the design was to sit on the garment.
By November 2007 we had received initial samples of the collection and overall we were very pleased. Next followed some fine tuning on the range. Some garments were dropped and final colours chosen. There was also an issue with the sizing of the designs which had either come out too large or too small. Laying the samples out we were able to see a fluidity and synergy throughout the collection.
In December 2008 we received final pre-production samples which looked great and were much more in line with our original ideas. We were now ready to start work on the promotion for the range. This would include a range of promotional material, with a completion date set for April 2008:
- New World Beach Rugby website
- Promotional Brochure / Catalogue
- Magazine advert
- Emailer newsletter designs
- Promotional Website banners
As the Christmas period was upon us we started the promotion production in January 2008, where our first port of call was with an excellent local photographer, Mike Evans (www.mike-evans.co.uk) who took some stunning photographs of the range which we would later use for the brochure and product banners, he also photographed every product for use on the website, magazine advert and emailers.
We decided to keep the promotional material clean and simple ensuring that Mike’s excellent photography had full focus. The brochure was the first piece to be created as this had printing lead times. Once that was under our belt we moved onto the website, followed by magazine advert and product banners.
In total, It took 8 months to wrap up the whole project and was extremely exhausting and relieving for it to come to an end. However, it all seemed worth it when in July I was giving a talk at a local college and low and behold one of the students was wearing one of our t-shirts. All of a sudden gushes of pride washed over me as I realised that thousands of people were wearing our designs, I know it sounds crazy but I hadn’t really thought of that until I saw someone actually wearing one.
Although it was a long and hard project, we were really pleased with the final outcome and feel immensely proud to have people out there wearing our designs. What made the project so much fun was having complete control over every aspect of the brand from designing the prints to choosing the material and then completing the promotional work. It really was a very enjoyable experience.
For more information on WBR World Beach Rugby or to view the full collection of t-shirt and clothing designs, visit the new website at www.worldbeachrugby.co.uk
We have just completed designs for the Winter 08/09 World Beach Rugby range and are currently awaiting samples. Once we have some photography we will post some of the designs on the blog.
So what do you think of the Summer 08 WBR World Beach Rugby collection? Something you would wear? I’m interested to know if you have you ever had a huge project where you’ve wondered if there is light at the end of the tunnel (or even outside your office!)? Or any other thoughts or experiences on T-Shirt / Clothing design?
Tags: branding, T-shirt / Clothing design
Posted in T-shirt / Clothing design, branding | 4 Comments »
Design development for Wakeham Asbestos
Back in February we were approached by Wakeham, a new company in the asbestos industry who offers training and consultancy. The company required a full set of branding as well as brochure and website.
As with every design project, we start at the beginning - the logo. They felt that their industry was particularly male dominated and wanted a logo which was strong and bold yet quite simple. After an initial discussion we concluded that the logo could center around these themes:
- Utilise the “W” of the company name
- Focus on the “A” in the company name highlighting Asbestos
- Use the three strands of the business (training, management and surveying)
- Focus on some imagery or representation of asbestos
Other than requiring a strong, bold logo, Wakeham didn’t have any other specific requirements in mind. The logo was to be used online as well as brochures, stationary, invoices etc, therefore it had to work on all types of media.
Stage 1 - Sketching
We started by utilising the “W” of the company name combining it with shapes representative of the three strands of the business (training, management and surveying). A lot of time was spent sketching “W” type shapes. We wanted the logo to look contemporary as our research had shown that competitor logos were very dated, we therefore needed something different, something fresh and alive. However, we were also aware that the logo had to appeal to a B2B market as well as B2C so therefore had to look somewhat corporate.
Once again we combined the three strands of the business concept when focussing on the “A” in the company name. As Wakeham are a consultancy we liked the idea that they can handle all aspects of your project and so developed several umbrella type designs.
It’s easy to get carried away when you are designing and creating a logo and once we looked over the logo’s we decided to present the following concepts:
The client immediately liked one of the logos. They did have a few minor adjustments to the tracking of the text and the corporate blue colour so we experimented with both these aspects.
From the logo the stationary was then developed. This was quite a seamless leap and the logo transfered well to the letterheads, compliment slips and business cards.
We then started work on the brochure, Wakeham supplied all textual content as well as a rough layout. They wanted the brochure to be simple and easy to read and as there was a lot of textual content we decided to break the layout into sections. We ensured the contact information was repeated on the brochure so people could find it without too much trouble.
Wakeham had few minor text adjustments with the brochure, but overall they were happy with the design and the corporate branding that was emerging.
Using the style of the brochure we created a simple, clean website. Again the contact information is repeated on every page, allowing users to get in contact easily.
This was a great project as the client had some initial guidelines and ideas and knew a lot about their market and who they were trying to target. However, they also gave us enough free rein to explore other possibilities and ideas.
So what does everyone think? Did Wakeham Asbestos choose the right branding? We would love to hear your thoughts.
Tags: branding, brochure design, Graphic Design, identity, Logo Design, Web Design
Posted in Graphic Design, Logo Design, Portfolio, Web Design, branding | 11 Comments »