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
Martin O’Dea (collaboration with Andy Foster)
Studio Analysis
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
Martin O’Dea (collaboration with Andy Foster)
Studio Analysis
OUGD603
Logo Development: In developing a logo for our collaborative studio, we wanted to communicate fun, colourful and professional. We decided that we would design the primary logo to be used on a colour background, reinforcing this aspect fo the brand. I focused on finding an appropriate typeface to use with the brand. This was important as it would represent us in print and web and needed to be functional enough to cover as many use cases as possible but dierent enough to create brand recognition, connect with our audience and set us apart from other studios. I settled on GT Walsheim by Grilli Type as it had a lot of the geometric aspects that we tend to favour in our work, and has enough unusual quirks that it gives a distinct character from futura-inspired sans-serifs like Avenir. It also had a friendly appearence without looking childish or overly rounded. Andy devloped the logo sandwich graphic and we combined the two elements. A lot of manual tweaking was needed to get the contruction, spacing and alignment to the standard we wanted for the final logo.
GT Walsheim Regular Martin O’Dea (collaboration with Andy Foster)
Studio Analysis
OUGD603
Edible Type: In developing a logo for our collaborative studio, we wanted to communicate fun, colourful and professional. We decided that we would design the primary logo to be used on a colour background, reinforcing this aspect fo the brand. I focused on finding an appropriate typeface to use with the brand. This was important as it would represent us in print and web and needed to be functional enough to cover as many use cases as possible but dierent enough to create brand recognition, connect with our audience and set us apart from other studios. I settled on GT Walsheim by Grilli Type as it had a lot of the geometric aspects that we tend to favour in our work, and has enough unusual quirks that it gives a distinct character from futura-inspired sans-serifs like Avenir. It also had a friendly appearence without looking childish or overly rounded. Andy devloped the logo sandwich graphic and we combined the two elements. A lot of manual tweaking was needed to get the contruction, spacing and alignment to the standard we wanted for the final logo.
GT Walsheim Regular Martin O’Dea (collaboration with Andy Foster)
Studio Analysis
OUGD603
Website: We bought the domain hungrysandwich.es for our future site. Initially we designed a placeholder site for this domain to link out to twitter, vimeo and email. Behind the logo, I implemented some some javascript to make the background switch between our chosen swatch colours every 2 seconds. Eventually, we redesigned the site to link out to our projects across the web. To do this, we decided to use a sticker aesthetic to put projects onto the existing placeholder. With the site, I was concerned with making it as efficent and responsive as possible. The sticker rollovers were made using CSS sprites instead of javascript to ensure that they would work with a low footprint cross-browser and device. I was careful to tweak my media queries to make our site functional on as many devices as possible, making the stickers rearrange and eventually stack at different breakpoints. In our thrid revision, we designed our own project pages that used a responsive image solution to serve different sized images to the use depending on the screen width. This meant that a mobile user was not served the same huge image file as a HDTV.
Martin O’Dea (collaboration with Andy Foster)
Studio Analysis
OUGD603
Business Cards: As part of our personal branding, we deisgned and printed a set of business cards in digital print. Even on the thickest stock we could put through the printer these felt cheap and throw away. We felt that this didn’t reflect well of either of us and so we ordered a set of letterpress business cards from The Print Project in Shipley. In order to ensure that we didn’t make any mistakes on an expensive order, we printed off different sizes of the front and back of the card to see how they compare in print. We quickly identified the sizes that we wanted for each. This exercise was so important for me as it became clear that what I had thought looked a good size on screen looked way too big in print. Without actually printing them off we would have end up with a much worse results and it would have been a very costly mistake. 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.
Martin O’Dea (collaboration with Andy Foster)
Studio Analysis
OUGD603
Manifesto:
Studio Manifesto
nd Illustration is our
piano, but do we have b skills? By lucifer s
rdworking and genuine. to sneak gherkins in
ot to mix up the orders ime, every time.
1. We are image-based designers
Graphic Design and Illustration is our bread and butter.
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.
3. We want to make friends
We are honest, hardworking and genuine. We’re not the type to sneak gherkins in your sandwich.
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.
Martin O’Dea (collaboration with Andy Foster)
Baased on our studio analysis, we discussed the best ways to present oursleves within our own studio, figuring out what it is we both are good at, what we want to do and the way we would like to conduct business and engage with clients. From this, we wrote a studio manifesto to have one document that summarised Hungry Sandwich Club. This gives us a strong basis to brand from, promote ourselves and create a confident business plan. For the copy, we concentrated heavily on our tone of voice, mixing fun, reliability and professionalism in equal measure to create something that says more about us than a tradition about us description. I coded a web version of this manifesto to display publically on our website.
Studio Analysis
OUGD603
Sexy Sandwich Flyer : The class was given the opportunity to sell work at Leeds Print Festival 2014 and we decided to use this as an opportunity to use this as a platform to promote our collaborative studio in preparation for graduating. Andy worked on creating the ‘sexy sandwich’ character while I worked on the reverse side. We chose a 2:3 format that would fold into a sandwich triangle to boost brand recognition. As we wanted to distribute these to as many people as possible, we printed them digitally at low cost and were able to sell them all, leading to some new twitter followers and even a commision, I enjoyed the day selling the prints. It is the first time we had publically presented ourselves as a studio and I liked the process of engaging with people throughout the day and spreading promotion in this simple way.
Martin O’Dea (collaboration with Andy Foster)
Studio Analysis
OUGD603
About Us video: As part of our collaborative studio self-promotion, we wanted to produce an animation for our ‘about us’ page as we would be able to demonstrate key skills in design, illustration and animation while comunicating a tone of voice that is consistant with the brand we have developed. after brainstorming ideas for animated scenes, we decided to base them off the written points from our manifesto which is quite visual. Together, we created a storyboard and broke the scnes up into chunks. Andy developed a visual style for the characters and objects, and we divided scenes. to work on. I worked on the longer and more complicated piano scene while Andy worked on the bread and butter and ‘big ideas’ scenes. They ended up fittng together really well and we were both extremely happy with the results.
Martin O’Dea (collaboration with Andy Foster)
Studio Analysis
OUGD603