Andy Foster (collab with Martin O’dea)
SPECS
OUGD603
Background: Leeds is an emerging creative hub in the UK. With developments such as Leeds Trinity helping to re-build the city center and lower Brigate area. There is space for small studios to benefit from this and carve a niche that wouldn’t be possible in larger cities with greater competition. Concise Brief: Design the promotional material for our startup graphic design studio Hungry Sandwich Club. Brief: We would like to start up our own studio collaboratively after leaving university and need to prepare ourselves for this by creating an identity, self promotion and website. As this will naturally evolve as we go through the year, this project will be a long-running brief that is likely to change as we develop. Concept: Create a brand that stands apart from other design studios, particularly in Leeds. We want to build a brand that is based around playful design, colour and presents us as a professional and confident design studio. Tone of Voice: fun colourful inventive digital imaginative
Andy Foster (collab with Martin O’dea)
Personal Branding
OUGD603
Studio Analysis: Before starting to design anything, we took a step back and wrote up an analysis of studios we felt that we had an affinity with. We focused on the way they presented themselves online and in interviews. Brosmind (Spain) 1. Brosmind (Barcelona) Illustrators and image based designers. They work over a huge range of media and are constantly looking for new opportunities to apply their illustrative style in unfamiliar territory. This always leaves them outside their comfort zone. We like that they present themselves as characters. Clients are buying into their personalities and individualism, which is closely tied to the brand. This is an unusual approach for a studio, and definitely something we would be interested in exploring. 2. Nous Vous (London) Nous Vous work on a lot of community projects, and have received council funding to run workshops and build installations. While not something we would be interested in, we appreciate that this has been a great avenue of exposure for them. We want to find other ways of publicising our services. Like Brosmind, they are able to apply image-based design to a range of different projects, working in different media, scales and budgets but keeping their aesthetic in tact. It is worth noting that each of the members promotes their individual style and act as a collective. We would prefer to produce work as a company not as individuals. Hey Studio (Barcelona) We really like their personal description. Unlike NousVous you feel like it is engaging with you personally. It feels genuine and you get the impression that they believe what they are saying. We like working to the same visual principles as Hey, often stripping things back to simple shapes, strong colours and communicating clearly through flat graphics. Hey are internationally successful and have achieved so much for just 4 people. This is inspiring for us, as they have achieved their aims while remaining a small studio. More on blog
Andy Foster (collab with Martin O’dea)
Personal Branding
OUGD603
Logo Development: As we are attempting to set up our own studio, Me and Martin have collaborated for the personal branding project. This page shows the design of our own logo which will appear on business cards, our website etc. It is important that the logo resembles us as a company. We decided wanted the logo to be: + colourful + simple + geometric + fun I worked on the image part of the logo while Martin sourced a suitable typeface. We wanted to use a sans serif typeface which also had some resemblance to the geometric style we often apply to our work moving away from Futura which I have been guilty of over using in the past.
GT Walsheim Regular Andy Foster (collab with Martin O’dea)
Personal Branding
OUGD603
Website: While we worked on designing our full website, we created a simple placeholder site containing our logo and links to our twitter, vimeo and email accounts. Martin coded the website so that it changed colour every two seconds which helps to reinforce the importance of colour to our brand. I needed to come up with a solution to how we could link out to our different projects and Vimeo videos. I liked the changing colours that we used for the placeholder site and came up with the idea of turning a key graphic from each project into a sticker graphic and placing it on the blank canvas of the home page. The benefit of a system like this is that at this stage we are experimenting and we can have the flexibility to add and remove stickers whenever we like. These also help to show of our illustration style as soon as you reach the home page. Martin focused heavily on making our site as accessible on as many devices as possible. All of the icons rearrange and stack depending on the window size. We were also keen to be as efficient with our code as possible, using pure css rollovers in place of javascript.
Andy Foster (collab with Martin O’dea)
Personal Branding
OUGD603
Business Cards: We created a set of business cards which use the four colours we have used in the website keeping our brand colours consitent. We digitally printed these cards in college and were dissatisfied with the quality of print and thickness of the stock we used. Because of this we decided to invest some money in some letterpress printed business cards printed by The Print Project. Before we sent the artwork over to The Print Project we did an exercise to find out what size we wanted the text and logo to be on our card. We did this by printing out lots of variations of the same card, spreading them out and eliminating the cards until we had one front and one back left. These are the specifications for the business card we have ordered: 650 x 85 x 55mm 2pp Business Cards, 540gsm Colorplan Mist, blue to green split fountain on front, blue on back.
Andy Foster (collab with Martin O’dea)
Personal Branding
OUGD603
Manifesto: We have spent a lot of time refining what our studio should represent, the kind of work we want to take on and the kind of business we want to run. This process culminated in working on a studio manifesto to codify all of these ideas into one document. This gives us a strong basis to brand from, promote ourselves and create a confident business plan.
Studio Manifesto
nd Illustration is our
1. We are image-based designers
Graphic Design and Illustration is our bread and butter.
piano, but do we have b skills? By lucifer’s
2. We play to our strengths
We couldn’t lift a piano, but do we have mad print and web skills? By lucifer’s baguette we do.
rdworking and genuine. to sneak gherkins in
3. We want to make friends
We are honest, hardworking and genuine. We’re not the type to sneak gherkins in your sandwich.
ot to mix up the orders ime, every time.
4. We are reliable
You can trust us not to mix up the orders and to deliver on time, every time.
re amongst our nts. Our palette is wide, wrong with the house
5. We love fun
Fun and humour are amongst our favourite ingredients. Our palette is wide, but you can’t go wrong with the house specials.
nts, not against them. If ger for success, we will open arms.
6. We are a club
We work with clients, not against them. If you share our hunger for success, we will welcome you with open arms.
dio with big ideas, and g to add more skills to
7. We want to learn and grow
We are a small studio with big ideas, and are always looking to add more skills to the menu.
give you the regular. We ngle project.
8. We go the extra mile
We don’t want to give you the regular. We super-size every single project.
d Hungry Sandwich, we back for more.
9. We leave a lasting impression
Once you’ve tasted Hungry Sandwich, we hope you’ll come back for more.
Andy Foster (collab with Martin O’dea)
This tone of voice is something we have spoken about at length, and something that we think will be important to the brand and the relationship we establish with our clients.
Personal Branding
OUGD603
Sexy Sandwich Flyer : For Leeds Print Festival me and Martin decided to create a poster to promote ourselves as Hungry Sandwich Club. We decided that one of us should work on the front of the poster and one of us should work on the back. My illustration of a sandwich character was placed on one side and Martin used a quote from our manifesto for the other side. Martin’s design allowed the poster to fold down into a triangle shape resembling a sandwich.
Andy Foster (collab with Martin O’dea)
Personal Branding
OUGD603
About Us video: To make our ‘About Us’ page on our website more interesting we have decided to do an animation to show our skills in graphic design, illustration, animation and web. The scenes we have created bring our manifesto points to life and will be played in-between other animation and video work we have done in the past. I worked on the simple illustration style to allow us to animate the body parts with relative ease. The animations aim is to get our fun and light-hearted studio ethos across. We split the different animations between us so we could complete the About us video quickly. I worked on the bread and butter, small studio and hi-five animations while Martin worked on the print and web animation.
Andy Foster (collab with Martin O’dea)
Personal Branding
OUGD603