With the poor reputation that has surrounded the wealth management sector over the past few years, we were keen to create a clear, precise looking design for Kestrel. With the inherited name lending so many attributes we only needed a visual nudge to bring the identity to life. All the imagery was selected to suggest Kestrel’s view of the world.

Visit kestrelip.com

 

It felt good for L&CO and our client and friends at Reed Learning to leave the B2B Marketing Awards (the largest of its kind in the world) with a lump of gleaming metal. The satisfying dimension to this award is that it’s not just about design but effective communication based on results – read our submission. While ‘The Little Book of Learning’ and ‘The Little Book of the Future’ were fun to design, the real reward comes in seeing them perform for Reed Learning.

 

Starlight helps grant the wishes of seriously and terminally ill children, entertaining over half a million children every year in hospitals and hospices throughout the UK. They asked us to help them launch their Christmas of Happiness appeal, we ask you to go and visit and get involved.

 

Our field trip to New York enabled us to visit some of our friends at Arkadia & Co., MBLM and Verse. It’s always interesting to see what is happening in a parallel universe. Naturally we balanced the work with the play, enjoying several of the city’s museums, restaurants and clubs along the way. We also spent quite a lot of time looking up.

 

It’s been a very fertile nine months for us since the calendar clicked over to 2011. Sometimes you can go ages without one and then all of a sudden five come along (almost) at once. We were hoping to announce our fifth brand launch or re-launch of the year this month, but as the big day creeps towards October we’re just going to have to tease you gently with an appropriate photograph.

 

On August 16th we helped SHL – the world’s largest provider of psychometric assessments – to relaunch with a fresh new face. Actually we commissioned nine fresh new illustrated faces to represent the different areas of the business. The South African team made a cake based on one of the illustrations and we even provided an outline for employees to create their own.

 

View SHL case study

The ABPI is the association that represents, research-based biopharmaceutical companies in the UK. We helped re-launch the association to coincide with their move to new offices. We hope that our new design will have as long a life as the previous logo which was introduced almost 40 years ago. 

 

View our ABPI case study.

Ben Cooke launched The One Foundation in June to provide financial assistance to ensure community based projects in Jersey are able to achieve their full potential. We designed the visual identity to work across the many sponsorship activities the foundation will become involved with. We enjoyed creating the brand from scratch which will be seen initially on the Jersey team strip for the Island Games in late June. 

 

The brief from Reed Learning was to design a guide to collaborative learning through online channels to help build the Reed brand and capture data from potential clients. The booklet’s content combines short articles from guest writers from the likes of Google and LinkedIn with handy hints on using online tools to help learn. We decided on a retro futurist look to support the future of learning theme and created an engaging and nostalgic feel for the little book. So far there has been an incredible response and a re-print looks likely.

 

Last month was our busiest since records began (2002 that is), and with so many projects on the go we reached out to our network for some support. Joined by our creative partners in Australia and South Africa, as well as closer to home, we were able to maintain a broader perspective and deliver some of our best work. Despite this we still made time to spend at Nottingham Trent School of Art & Design to help inspire our future network.

 

It can be both exhilarating and daunting to start a project with a blank screen and create a product from a simple idea, but this is exactly what we did for NicheHunters. Working with our clients in Jersey and our web-build team in Delhi, we have invented a brand that we think is going to revolutionise recruitment and social networking in niche markets. 

 

Who said print was dead? We still design and produce the Training Directory every quarter for Reed Learning. It’s been five years since we started working with Reed to refresh their look and feel. Since then we have been on a journey of constant evolution, working across both print and digital media to ensure their communications are both coherent and engaging. 

 

Mezzo-soprano Wendy Gerbier gave us a powerful and emotional performance at our ‘&CO’ party, where we celebrated the people who have helped us over the past eight years. It was wonderful to be surrounded by our friends, collaborators, colleagues and clients – the many individuals who put the ‘&CO’ in our otherwise rather concise name.

Jones Lang LaSalle asked us to bring six facts about the global retail property market to life for their stand at the annual MAPIC conference in Cannes. We created an animated sequence using their bold black and red colour scheme which illustrated these facts and figures.

 

View MAPIC animation sequence.

We have been talent hunting for several months now – there always seems to be so much about, but does anyone ever really stand out from the crowd? Tom Feilla joins us this month and we think he does. We believe ideas and typography lie at the heart of everything we do, and Tom’s experimental work (see left – typefactory identity system designed for a concept museum of typography) illustrates this beautifully.

First harnessed in 250 BC, wind is one of the safest and cleanest sources of energy man has ever known. Broadview Energy was set up to develop wind projects in the UK from site identification and evaluation, through to construction and operation. As they move into a new stage of growth they asked L&CO to create a fresh look and website – broadviewenergy.com.

Inspired by too much exposed brickwork in the L&CO studio and of course our name, we have decided to create a series of posters to celebrate the ampersand. This logogram can be traced back to the first century A.D. and the Old Roman cursive, in which the letters E and T (‘et’ meaning ‘and’ in Latin) were occasionally written together to form a ligature. We just love this little character.

It’s important for each of us to maintain a fresh perspective and glean new sources of inspiration, it’s one of the reasons why we enjoy travelling. This month will see us visiting Croatia, France, Hungary, Jersey, Scotland, Wales and various other corners of our own island. Over the year quite apart from our professional travel commitments we have ventured further afield to Greece, China, India, Malaysia, Mexico, The United States, New Zealand and South Africa.

Once we had established the new name we needed to find a way to clothe it to lend both a sense of solidity and tradition but with a touch of tongue in cheek style. We employed a series of antique illustrations accompanied by captions to adorn everything from business cards to PowerPoint presentations.

Inspired by Gogos Crazy Bones’ kids collectable World Cup figures, we are offering our clients the opportunity to become official sponsors of this month’s (L&CO) World Cup. For an undisclosed sum (to go to East Sheen Primary School) they can have their logo adorn our prime-time advertising hoardings.

We are currently working with two new start-up businesses and between figuring out their respective personalities and bringing them to life visually, we focus on what to call them. For each project we have created over 450 possible names, just two or three of which make it through to the black hole of legal searches. Watch this space.

Just in time for the annual Oxford & Cambridge boat race we created a refreshed logo for the Oxford University Boat Club, evolving their traditional coat of arms for use across all of their publicity material.

This month we helped Jones Lang LaSalle launch a new advertising format in the Financial Times. The project was really about creating a global advertising framework for the business as part of an holistic approach to design around the world.

We can’t really tell you any more at this stage, other than it’s a happy coincidence that this sassy social brand is relaunching on Valentine’s Day. At least it kept us warm over the past couple of months.

We created a series of simple illustrations to represent each stream of Reed Learning’s business. They form the section dividers for printed and digital media as well as posters for their training centres.

Our work for Frog Capital was recognised at the annual Benchmark Awards for excellence in brand communications and can be seen in this year’s Benchmark book.

It’s not everyday that we see our work carved in ice and made into a vodka bar. But at the LateRooms 10th anniversary ball at The Monastery Manchester this month we were treated to this rather cool prospect.

This month saw the opening of EMT’s new flagship store in the centre of Tallinn. In addition to the nine plasma screens and wall graphics, we designed a giant neon ladybird based on the company logo to sit in the window and create a landmark at this busy junction.

Working with our advertising partners at Gill Creative we designed a concept for a family of new black and platinum cards for American Express. Of course we’d love to tell you more, but for now we can’t.

As Reed Learning turned their attention to the corporate market, we felt they needed a series of illustrations to keep the family of communications together. We commissioned ourselves to come up with the ideas as well as drawing the final illustrations.

This month with the Ashes in full swing we were asked to design the cricketing catalogue and other printed items for online sports memorabilia company Sportspages.com. It was hard to go wrong with such a rich source of imagery.

Our Little Book of Learning was created for Reed Learning to inspire people to think differently about training and to help position Reed as a learning portal.

Working in concert with our strategic partner Simon Paterson we continue to help Shell, advising them on their brand identity and working with their other lead agencies.

In April Paul Barlow co-hosted a forum in New York with one of our North American friends David Boorstin. It was a wonderful opportunity for independent agencies to meet and discuss their work and reflect on the world of design and branding. We hope to host next year’s event in London.

Clarity & simplicity – the idea of seeing everything in black and white lies behind our new identity for Dominion, a trust company with headquarters in Jersey.

We helped relaunch Foursome Investments as Frog Capital who received some great coverage in the Financial Press. This idiosyncratic private equity house are now keen to build a pond in the courtyard of their Kings Cross mews home.

This is a poster designed by Paul which was selected for the Design for Obama website designforobama.org – the 44th and yet the 1st black president of this multi-cultural society. We’re proud to be associated with this great event.