Fantastic early light this morning, so I thought I would share the view from our studio here in Llangennith.
If any new or existing clients would like to visit us and take in the view then give us a call. We also make a mean cup of tea on the AGA!
It is annual report season and we’re just beginning work on the design and production of an Impact Review of the year for Groundwork Bridgend & NPT and for an Annual Review for St. Michael’s College, Cardiff.
On the prospectus front, we’re underway with the undergraduate and postgraduate prospectus for Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama and have just completed a brochure for the Richard Burton Company based in the new iconic building. We met the marketing team in the fabulous new facilities there yesterday. It really has the WOW factor! We’re going for gold this year, trying to improve on the prestigious Silver Heist Design Award we scooped last year for the prospectus.
On a personal note, we spent a wonderful hour last Saturday at the fabulous Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea in the company of Chuma Nwokolo, a Nigerian writer of poetry and short stories, attorney and political activist. This event is just one of the many fascinating and varied literary events that the centre organises. Don’t miss them!
A Happy New Year to all our clients. Let’s hope 2012 is a good one for everyone
It certainly is a big year for some: Groundwork Merthyr & RCT celebrate their 25th anniversary and Wales Co-operative Centre celebrate their 30th!
But let’s not forget my mother and father, Eleanor and Ted Froom, who celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary on June 9th and are already worried that they’ll steal the limelight from the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee that same week!
“Through our design agency partners, NB:Design, we created the perfect interface between our principles and passion that our clients could relate to immediately.”
Rhisiard Jenkins, Managing Director, Relcom (2011)
The above quote was taken from an article written by Rhisiard that appeared in the Western Mail earlier this year. Rhisiard had felt compelled to write about the process we’d gone through together to arrive at what he has called the perfect interface. At the end of the process, he’d had what he wanted, a new brand. But importantly, the branding process itself enabled him to see his business in a new light.
Relcom is a business that optimises the reliability of large scale maintenance operations through software solutions, allowing businesses to improve their bottom line because there is less down time on complex machinery. It is a revolutionary proactive, rather than reactive approach and its success can be seen in a wide range of business sectors across the UK. But Rhisiard felt his current brand and associated marketing collateral was not doing Relcom justice.
So our brief was to reposition and rebrand so that the design tangibles reflected what Relcom truly was and how it ideally should be seen.
Before beginning the creative process, designing and developing communications that would work hard to translate the Relcom brand on and offline, there was much strategic work to do. We called it homework and Rhisiard always got the homework we set him in on time while we got on with our bit!
This strategic branding process took many meetings, lots of cups of tea and sheets of A3 paper and felt pens as together with Rhisiard we unpicked his business and put it back together again.
We addressed areas such as:
- defining the business
- hierarchical structure of the business – nature of products and services
- competitors
- customers
- current perceptions of Relcom
- naming
Only then were we in a position to start the creative process. We created and developed a new brand that acted as a vehicle to translate the essence of Relcom across all design collateral on and off line. It needed to accommodate current needs and be flexible enough to accommodate future needs too. We needed to create a look and feel that would not be diluted and would resonate with the marketplace: as Rhisiard put it, the perfect interface.
We created a new identity/logo for the umbrella brand Relcom and for its flagship software, Merlyn. We designed a full range of stationery; business cards, letterheads, branded paper and compliments slips; we structured, designed and built a CMS website; we designed an innovative marketing brochure, an exhibition stand and a suite of PowerPoint slides. We created a happy man who felt satisfied that his brand embodied Relcom and said, this is who I am.
To find out more about Relcom and see our design in action, please visit www.relcom.org.uk
Groundwork is a social enterprise partnership that works across the UK to enable disadvantaged individuals and communities to change their lives for the better by engaging them in the environmental regeneration of their local area. Changing Places: Changing Lives is how they sum up this mission in their marketing communication.
We have been working with Groundwork in Wales for over seven years to show case their success via off line design communication. It started with Groundwork Merthyr & RCT, then Groundwork Bridgend & NPT and more recently, our third partnership, with Groundwork Cymru.
We have been creating and producing a wide range of communication including; annual reports and other corporate communication; impact reports; prospectus; 21 year anniversary brochures; leaflets; and, exhibition stands.
So it seems it’s true what they say – good things come in threes!
Wales now has its own National Museum of Art featuring the full range of the nation’s world-class art collection under one roof at Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales Cardiff.
For the first time National Museum’s mix of fine and applied art from the historic to the contemporary is shown in a single series of integrated galleries, giving a new visibility to art in Wales and to the art of Wales.
NB:Design is proud to have been part of the mix at Amgueddfa Cymru, and to coincide with the new gallery launch earlier this year, we designed and produced the prestigious Companion Guide, highlighting 100 examples for the collection. They tell us it is flying off the shelves! This project adds to other work we have done for NMW for special occasions, including the Centenary Review.
Left: Companion Guide. Right Centenary Report
Tim Bowen Antiques is a west Wales business that specialises in Welsh country furniture and folk art. It is run with passion by owners Tim and Betsan Bowen who see their product as living art and the original take on recycling: beautifully crafted old items find new homes, contemporary and traditional, across the UK and beyond.
But when it came to their website, recycling was not an option. It was off with the old and on with the new. You can see the results at www.timbowenantiques.co.uk
We are delighted to have been working on the structure and design of the site which develops the strong brand we have been building over the last five years, and complements their corporate brochure and twice yearly catalogue which have positioned them effectively as experts in their field and importantly, worked hard as commercial tools.
Earlier this summer, Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama’s dream of having its own world-class performance and rehearsal spaces became a reality. It opened the doors to its £22.5m purpose built facilities. The iconic new buildings stand at the entrance to the city centre and are already being recognised as the hub of cultural life of Cardiff.
We have been working closely with Nicola, Rhian and Emma, part of the marketing team at RWCMD, for over seven years and this year, the College’s 2010/11 prospectus (which we were proud to have designed) was awarded the prestigious Silver Award at the Heist Awards for Education Marketing. We were very pleased with Silver of course, but this year, the team (which we see ourselves a part of) will be going for Gold!
Left: 208/2009 Prospectus. Right 2010 Prospectus (Silver Heist Award)
This is our first blog, so we are really excited by the novelty (we keep telling our clients to do it but are only now getting around to it ourselves!)
We are working on some fantastic projects for various clients including; Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, Groundwork, Tim Bowen Antiques, Go Wales, St David’s Hall and the Wales Co-operative Centre – but that’s not we want to share with you at the moment. It’s our grandaughter Florence’s 1st birthday on Friday 21, so we want to share a few photos of her and her sister Megan who stayed with us a few weekends ago when the sun was shining and the surf was pumping here in Llangennith.
Birthday Girl!
Big sister Megan!
