Through our continued work with London based Diffusion PR, we’ve recently completed a brand and site update for a new arm of the business – Diffusion mobile.
Diffusion Mobile, as the name suggests, will specialise in helping clients with all aspects of mobile telecoms from content and applications, to mobile advertising and hardware.
The site shares a great deal with the previous Diffusion PR site, but with a nice new hand drawn flash animation and a few other tweaks throughout to reflect the new disciplines.
Today, Birmingham’s shopping streets will become home to a unique open-air exhibition, celebrating the city’s independent retailers. Working with Retail Birmingham a team of people including photographer Steve Gerrard, the team at Rewired and us here at 383 Project have been working on an exhibition, brochure and outdoor advertising to be seen across the city centre.
Being responsible for the fantastic photos there’s more to read over on Steve’s site as well as the official press release on Rewired’s site.
Our involvement has been predominantly on the accompanying brochure, map and outdoor advertising to help promote the campaign (more images to follow).
The Celebrate Independents exhibition launches today at High Street and New Street Birmingham, and runs until the end of the month. A special fashion show featuring Independent Retailers will take place at Radisson SAS Hotel, supported by Harvey Nichols, on Wednesday 8 July.
We’ve just designed a batch of tees for Urban Pie. Since Urban Pie opened in Birmingham it’s become really popular and there’ll soon be another store opening in Leicester. The tees will be worn by staff and also be made available for purchase online.
Following on from our recent win for the Style Birmingham account we’re pleased to announce the launch of the new campaign and website.
There are quite a few elements to the creative and so we thought it might be interesting for people to show how we’ve tackled the project in the last month, from winning the pitch through to delivering the goods!
Always in Style
When we pitched, our response needed to meet several requirements – these were to come up with a through the line campaign which would include a brand refresh, a series of outdoor adverts and a new website which made more of what was going on in retail in the city. Historically we felt that some of the creative had been a bit apologetic – Birmingham has a lot to shout about and we didn’t want to automatically assume that people needed a ‘value’ led campaign to be enticed in to the city during a recession. Instead, we wanted the new creative to be aspirational and position Birmingham as a retail leader within the UK.
Taking all this in to account we developed ‘Always in Style’ – a confident and factual statement about the city, it’s retailers and the experience visitors should expect when visiting the city to shop. Secondly, we decided to deviate from the previous location based shots on the high street, and opted for a classic white studio look, photographing the ‘Always in Style’ message in situ with the clothes.
We’ll hopefully get some better shots of the billboards when the weather’s nicer!….
Approach
To make sure that the retailers were given a sense of inclusion and ownership over what we were planning (it’s their city after all!) we invited key shops to supply clothing for the summer season. This way the ads would not only represent what’s available in the shops, but also become seasonally responsive. The plan therefore from here on in is to produce an entire new set of visuals for each new fashion season – no more regurgitating the same adverts over and over again, the city changes seasonally and therefore so should the ads.
Next, we selected models for both the website and outdoor ads who would reflect the spread of retailers in the city. As well as being multi-generational the cities shops span high end designer labels, major high street stores and cutting edge independent retailers. As such, we tried to select models who would match these different sectors of the cities retail experience.
On the day we also shot a little time lapse video, plus some other footage…
In addition to the outdoor media above there are a range of things planned for the coming 12 months on the digital front.
Currently, we’ve built a brand new website to replace what was already there and add a few new features. As well as the expected standard directory, news and other areas we’ve also included a new SMS service, blogs and a community driven Q&A section which we hope will start to involve people more in sharing their shopping experiences and opinions. We’ve also opened up comments on popular shop listings and are encouraging Retail Birmingham where possible to aggregate and link through to news items which may be of interest from the wider web. In the interests of transparency these sources will always be cited and news stories will always contain an excerpt, never copied in full. As with all site launches, these are baby steps towards where we want the site to eventually be, but communities don’t grow overnight and we think we’re at least now pointing in the right direction.
In terms of design we’ve tried to continue the emphasis from the outdoor ads and include the family of models and seasonal clothing wherever possible. As with the billboards, the site will get a facelift with each new fashion season, inheriting new videos, photos and colour schemes to suit wherever the fashion trends are at that stage.
We’re really excited about what’s been a very busy month and have really enjoyed getting stuck in to what we hope will be a successful twelve month campaign. Oh, and don’t forget to take a look around the site!
Over the last few months we’ve been busily working on an exciting new project for the BBC. Working with BBC Workplace 383 Project were selected to address the wayfinding and interior branding of the iconic White City building in London. Our brief forms part of a major ongoing refurbishment taking place within the complex over the coming months and sought to address both the practical navigation points of the building as well as creating an interior scheme which was visually engaging for staff and visitors. The team at White City summed the challenge up better than I can:
Space vs Place; What defines a place – is it the furniture, the people who occupy it, or the existence of a ‘function’ for the space that makes it ‘a place’. If ‘place’ is defined by the existence of a function, a recogniseable area or distinct character, then White City has a lot of space – and not much place. 383 were asked to create places within the many square footage of office spaces that the BBC had available.
The challenge was to create a sense of place – an area to refer to, meet at, or pause to contemplate between meetings without having to construct new physical spaces or alter layouts. The brief required a intuitive response that referenced the purpose of the building and encouraged a sense of corporate pride.
What did we do?
What we delivered had three main elements. Firstly, we addressed the main wayfinding issue by rezoning the building in to more clearly defined coloured areas and overhauling all the internal signage and lift graphics. To ensure better traffic through the maze of corridors we utilised a consistent coloured line which runs throughout the entire building and changes colour dependent on your location. This not only helps control foot traffic, but became a useful graphic device for the second part of the solution.
For the second part of the scheme we created over fifty wall illustrations from a bank of iconic BBC shows and quotes. These graphics will be used large format throughout the building and interact at various points with the corridor line – breaking and splitting to morph in with the illustrations. The illustrations not only provide interest to visitors navigating the building but help to zone specific areas of the space and give departments ownership over their own areas. A couple of our favourites are shown below.
The final challenge was to figure out how the large quote style could be used in the main entrance and reception area. The reception area has walls on either side several floors high and is the main entrance point for all staff and visitors. As such it was important to come up with something that would still hold interest day in day out and set the tone for the rest of the scheme. We adapted the static graphic style we’d come up with for the rest of the building and built a more timely version which pulls snippets of live information from various BBC sites, formats them in to the quote style and projects them across the walls. Using a series of custom flash animations driven by various RSS feeds we were able to create a constantly evolving and pre-moderated stream of information which slowly animates throughout the day.
You can view a few more images from the project in our portfolio.
