May
26

Chart Toppers. After a difficult few years in the design industry, the Design Week Top 100 survey has been released for 2011 with some promising news. Overall, fee incomes over the top 100 consultancies were up 14% compared to a 13% drop last year which is very positive. Imagination has held on to the top spot from 2010 with an 18% rise in fee-income. The consultancy has reported a total fee-income of £40.1m, compared with the £34m it posted last year. Digital powerhouse AKQA has held on to second place, with a fee-income of £37.2m, while Checkland Kindleysides came in third with a fee-income of £15.4m. Good news for Foolproof and Flow Interactive who reported the highest growth in fee-income over the past year, at 116%. All details via Design Week. Full details are available in this week’s Design Week supplement, with cover the illustration by Leandro Castelao.

Chart Toppers.

After a difficult few years in the design industry, the Design Week Top 100 survey has been released for 2011 with some promising news. Overall, fee incomes over the top 100 consultancies were up 14% compared to a 13% drop last year which is very positive.

Imagination has held on to the top spot from 2010 with an 18% rise in fee-income. The consultancy has reported a total fee-income of £40.1m, compared with the £34m it posted last year.

Digital powerhouse AKQA has held on to second place, with a fee-income of £37.2m, while Checkland Kindleysides came in third with a fee-income of £15.4m.

Good news for Foolproof and Flow Interactive who reported the highest growth in fee-income over the past year, at 116%.

All details via Design Week.

Full details are available in this week’s Design Week supplement, with cover the illustration by Leandro Castelao.


Apr
13

Supermarket Sweep.

It was great to hear that the identity I worked on for The People’s Supermarket, produced at Unreal was this week awarded a Brand New Award in the category of Comprehensive Identity Programme.

I’m chuffed to see the work sitting amongst the likes of Wolff Olins’ Arab Museum of Modern Art and the Science Museum rebrand by Johnson Banks. The awards celebrate the best in brand design from 2010 and are run by UnderConsideration, the chaps behind the ever popular Brand New industry blog.

The project will shortly feature in an upcoming publication and iPad app so watch this space. A full list of winners is available here. Congratulations to everyone.

It was also announced this week that the project was also shortlisted in the Medium Sized Branding Scheme at this years prestigious D&AD Awards which is great news. The awards system was made more transparent this year, with shortlists and nominations being announced online during each day of judging. Though the project won’t feature in the annual, it’s still very rewarding especially as there were no Yellow Pencil nominations at all this year for any branding scheme, somewhat surprsising and disappointing for the branding industry as a whole. View the shortlist and results here.

In other news, the project was also recently selected as one of the Top 10 Best Rebrands of 2010 by online design publication FastCo Design!

Mar
04

Print Futures Awards.

Launched in 2003 and funded by the BPiF, The Printing Charity and Unite the Union, the Print Futures Awards offer grants of up to £1,500 to help fund training and education for young people within the UK’s print, publishing and graphic arts industries. 

At the end of 2010 I was approached by the Awards team to help them evaluate and develop their awards programme for 2011 and beyond in an effort to reach a higher number of young people and renew awareness of the great scheme.

Following this evaluation, I was then invited to develop a new brand for the awards. The new look has a vibrant and contemporary feel, stemming from a new identity made from the outline of a tree created through flowing ink. The logo comes in three colourways – cyan, magenta and yellow and the ink effect in featured throughout brand communications.

In addition to the new identity, I designed a dedicated microsite for the first time in the awards history and a new branded Twitter account to keep followers up to date with the awards process. Furthermore, an increased presence on blogs and social networking sites all aim to build a successful campaign for 2011.

So, If you’re aged between 16 and 30, are a UK resident and want to develop cracking print and design skills, visit www.printfuturesawards.com to download the application form. the closing date for entries is April 12th. Good luck!

Jan
07

ABChairs

These fantastic alphabet chairs are from conceptual designer Roeland Otten based in Rotterdam. He’s produced all 26 letters as seats made from laquered MDF and they’re available to be built upon request.

Currently each chair has to be designed individually but there are plans in future to manufacture them for the mass market in the likely form of the rotationally moulded LDPE plastic.

Watch this space and get your orders in now! 

Dec
20

Chilean Winers. ‘Tis the season and at Unreal we’ve just launched our Christmas promotion. To celebrate the rescue of the 33 Chilean Miners earlier this year, we’ve re-packaged 33 individual, bottles of Chilean Wine. We’re dishing them out to clients and key contacts in place of the usual Christmas cards and bottles of Champagne, as a celebration of the good news story of an otherwise somber year. People all over the world watched the Miners rescue and as we researched the project, we found that Chilean wine sales in the UK alone rose 25% in the days following their release, as people came together in celebration. Each one of the 33 bottles is named after one of the miners and numbered in order of their rescue, buried beneath a layer of rocks, and comes in a tube representing the Fénix 2 rescue capsule. As recipients retrieve their wine, they reveal a replica of the message sent up to rescuers which exclaimed “Estamos bien en el refugio los 33”, meaning “We are okay in the refuge, the 33 of us”. There’s full details of the project over at www.chileanwiners.com. Merry Christmas!

Chilean Winers.

‘Tis the season and at Unreal we’ve just launched our Christmas promotion. To celebrate the rescue of the 33 Chilean Miners earlier this year, we’ve re-packaged 33 individual, bottles of Chilean Wine. We’re dishing them out to clients and key contacts in place of the usual Christmas cards and bottles of Champagne, as a celebration of the good news story of an otherwise somber year.

People all over the world watched the Miners rescue and as we researched the project, we found that Chilean wine sales in the UK alone rose 25% in the days following their release, as people came together in celebration.

Each one of the 33 bottles is named after one of the miners and numbered in order of their rescue, buried beneath a layer of rocks, and comes in a tube representing the Fénix 2 rescue capsule. As recipients retrieve their wine, they reveal a replica of the message sent up to rescuers which exclaimed “Estamos bien en el refugio los 33”, meaning “We are okay in the refuge, the 33 of us”.

There’s full details of the project over at www.chileanwiners.com.

Merry Christmas!

Nov
22

How low can your logo? I recently stumbled upon this very amusing competition set up to create the worst logo in design history. ‘How low can your logo?’ has been created by US design agency Fuzzco and is currently accepting submissions in its ‘Cull for entries”. The premise is quite simple… Design the logo for their fictional company - Excellencio. The client is described as “a global leader in providing a focused, broad range of services to a world-class, international, region-centric clientele”. Obviously the whole competition is tongue-in-cheek and a pastiche of everything from today’s multinational organisations, the briefs often presented to agencies and the recent surge in crowdsourcing. Despite the humorous tone, the prizes are pretty decent! For me, the direction (pictured above) is the best part of this competition - yes it’s over the top but the foundations of truth underneath it all are both sad and funny at the same time. Scarily, the submissions, most of which are from respected, decent designers, have also managed to capture the reality of poor design which is usually churned out in crowdsourced activities - as seen recently with the Gap activity. If you’d like to enter, you have until the 8th December!

How low can your logo?

I recently stumbled upon this very amusing competition set up to create the worst logo in design history. ‘How low can your logo?’ has been created by US design agency Fuzzco and is currently accepting submissions in its ‘Cull for entries”.

The premise is quite simple… Design the logo for their fictional company - Excellencio. The client is described as “a global leader in providing a focused, broad range of services to a world-class, international, region-centric clientele”.

Obviously the whole competition is tongue-in-cheek and a pastiche of everything from today’s multinational organisations, the briefs often presented to agencies and the recent surge in crowdsourcing. Despite the humorous tone, the prizes are pretty decent!

For me, the direction (pictured above) is the best part of this competition - yes it’s over the top but the foundations of truth underneath it all are both sad and funny at the same time.

Scarily, the submissions, most of which are from respected, decent designers, have also managed to capture the reality of poor design which is usually churned out in crowdsourced activities - as seen recently with the Gap activity.

If you’d like to enter, you have until the 8th December!

Oct
18

Quick Brown Fox. Regular followers of the blog will be familiar with my slowly expanding collection of vintage signage. The number of letters I currently own stands at eight, and in an attempt to develop the obsession in to more of a ‘project’ I’ve come up with a plan… My aim is to build a series of letters capable of spelling out the classic typesetting phrase and English pangram ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’. The current vintage lot is made up from kind donations and purchases from as far afield as California and Devon. As you can see, I still have a fair way to go, but I’ll update my blog as and when I get more.

Quick Brown Fox.

Regular followers of the blog will be familiar with my slowly expanding collection of vintage signage. The number of letters I currently own stands at eight, and in an attempt to develop the obsession in to more of a ‘project’ I’ve come up with a plan…

My aim is to build a series of letters capable of spelling out the classic typesetting phrase and English pangram ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’. The current vintage lot is made up from kind donations and purchases from as far afield as California and Devon.

As you can see, I still have a fair way to go, but I’ll update my blog as and when I get more.

Oct
11

Magnetic Attraction.

I absolutely love the new identity, typography, photography and art direction for Magnetic Man and their album & singles artwork. The designs were produced by Non-Format in collaboration with Like Syrup.

The monogram, logotype have clearly inspired the great lightweight typeface and it hangs together superbly. It’s all also been applied to billboard advertising which is up and about this week.

Sep
24

Power to the People.

At Unreal, we’ve been working closely with a brand new co-operative supermarket; The People’s Supermarket. Set up by chef Arthur Potts-Dawson, retailer Kate Wickes-Bull and an army of others, The People’s Supermarket is a community-based shop that’s managed and owned by members and open to all. It’ll feature soon in its own Channel 4 documentary series.

The supermarket’s based just down the road from Unreal’s studio so we’ve been lucky enough to develop a brand as it continues to expand. The tag mark developed, based on Euroslot hole-punchers used in the retail industry, has just rolled out into their communications and a sub-brand for their shop-based kitchen has also been developed.

Keep you eyes peeled for the show, on Channel 4 in the new year.

Sep
16

Lady Gaga Vs. Neutra Face

I might be a bit behind the times on this as it was released in 2009, but if you’ve not yet seen ‘Neutra Face: An Ode to a Typeface’ then you definitely need to click play on the video above. It’s very, very funny.


A parody of Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’, the song features lyrics such as:

“I lay it out like they do in magazines
check out this typeface it’s like smoking nicotine (I love it)
using Adobe’s not the same without a Mac
if it was lead it would be lined up on a track”

It was co-created by Mark Searcy and Jason Kinney from the States, and brought to my attention by @janeymacrae. Thanks guys! If you’d like to download the song, there’s details on how to do that here.