Studio Brief 2 - Creative Advertising Collaboration - Research

The creative advertising collaboration brief requires a design and concept for the visual identity of the end of year show. During this collaboration, working as the graphic designer, along side the art director and copywriter, will mean not being as strongly involved in the concept and idea and instead focusing more on the visuals and design. Here is research on a few examples of successful branding:

Vroom - Michael Bierut - Pentagram

This simple typographic campaign is bold, dynamic and eye catching. They tried to communicate “convenience, accessibility and ease of use” in this new visual identity for an online platform for buying and selling new cars, and even created a custom typeface - vroom sans - which evokes dynamism by being slanted and italic. The campaign utilises a bold primary red to replicate raceway flags and to be punchy and bold. 

Whats great about this campaign is that they’ve identified what the character and narrative of the campaign needs to be and linked it well with the concept of the brand, rationalising each design decision. This means that when you’re looking at any bit of design for it, you know why everything is there. I really like the use of red, its statistically the most attention grabbing colour and works well , I also really like the blurred dynamic vroom billboard which takes such a simple idea and produces it with great effect and creates something instantly evocative of cars and motion. In terms of subject matter, this visual identity doesn’t link with what I have to do, however in terms of its bold minimal typography, theres a lot I could learn and use as influence.

Future Academy London - ONY

This rebrand is a little more relevant to the current project as it rebrands a London creative college. ONY, a Russian design studio were tasked to refresh the brand and modernise it, so they took influence from the city of London itself, modelling typography from architecture and replacing outdated patterns with bold spot coloured backgrounds and geometric shapes. 

I think the work on this rebrand is really contemporary and they’ve done a great job modernising the visual identity which was their main aim. I especially like what they did with the London coat of arms, cutting it down to simple geometric forms, and the geometric type works well and is quite unique. Taking this into account in the context of this project, it will be useful to take on board the idea of appearing modern and contemporary to show that the uni is modern and cutting edge.

D&AD Visual Identity - Village Green

This branding work is really very cool and probably the most in keeping with the direction this project will go. These bold graphic posters focus on shape and form, displaying the letters of D&AD in different styles and typefaces offering a diverse collection of shapes intermingling on the page, representing the diversity and breadth of work and maintaining a bold and attention grabbing identity. The 3D shapes on each poster pull the design out of the page and contrast the flat black shapes with great effect. 

I think it’d be great to do a project similar to this, establishing a simple theme and concept and embedding that in the design. In terms of the idea of using different shapes and letterforms to represent diversity and different creative disciplines, that is very similar to the end of year show visual identity from last year, but what I’ll take away from researching this branding will be to not convolute the concept/theme and just pick something well which can then apply visually well to the design.