All Posts in Projects
We were delighted to be asked to create the Brand and Identity for Present!; a week long exhibition that brought together designers from across the world with the end goal of raising enough funds to build a 12-child home for street kids in India. The exhibition took place at The Proud Archivist as part of the London Design Festival programme last year and was a huge success. Thanks to everybody involved!
India is a beautiful, bold country full of rich culture, variety and colour. It’s a place you certainly don’t forget in a hurry and a place that is as intense as anywhere in the world. Luke and Elena (aka. Equals) visited India in 2014 and came back with unforgettable memories that will stay with them for a long time. Unfortunately what also stayed with them was the story of a railway child they met along the way. This same child was the key source of inspiration for Present! and the idea of design for good.
Equals wanted to make a difference and with both Luke and El working within design and PR, the two felt a purpose to focus on creating a platform for design for good that would make the design community come together and raise money towards the poverty in India. When Luka and El approached us with the idea, we were similarly as passionate to create a platform for equality and common good. While India is one of the most prosperous and fastest growing countries and economies in the world, poverty is also sadly equally as prevalent. India is estimated to have a third of the world's poor. We wanted to help make a difference in any which way we could by utilising the skills we had to facilitate a positive contribution.
The culmination of this dialogue was the creation of Equals – a not-for-profit project ran by Luke and Elena that looks to raise money through design to help those less fortunate. We were lucky enough to collaborate with Equals on creating Present!; A design exhibition as part of London Design Festival with over 60 designers from around the world coming together for a greater cause.
We had support and sponsors from a wide variety of sources, and to help us over the finish line we needed a little help in the form of crowdfunding. We worked with our friends over at Hungry Sandwich Club to help bring the story of Present! to life in the form of a campaign video. Thankfully the funding target was gained and the full potential of the exhibition could be a reality. You can read more about the Present! Kickstarter campaign here.
It was important for us to create a cohesive brand identity for the exhibition. The subject of India was a huge luxury and a perfect opportunity to create something bold, colourful and intense, just like the country itself. The visual identity for Present! utilised a display typeface that is condensed, bold and has hand rendered qualities. This was paired with a colour palette that references Indian sign painting and the milky hues of Jaipur.
Our messaging style referenced being in the streets of India and hearing the many voices shouting over each other whilst receiving visual messages and signals from all around you. It was important for us to create an event that referenced this and was positive in tone, whilst still not forgetting the reason why we were there, to raise money and make a difference to the lives of street kids in India. We did this by creating a messaging style that was positive and loose, whilst still containing the more serious call to action.
One of the most eye-opening and positive things about Present! was how the design community came together for a greater cause and was so open to help in ways that went beyond just a design submission. We exhibited 65 submissions from 65 designers located from over 16 countries around the world. A key theme throughout the exhibition was equality and a level platform – to emphasise this, we had globally renowned agencies exhibiting next to young designers just starting their design career. All designers created a poster in response to a set of specific briefs.
Elements of the exhibition were interactive and generated user-created content. An example of this is where we printed off a charity video by Angel House frame by frame, and encouraged exhibition guests to write and draw on the frames. Once the exhibition was complete, we scanned the frames back in and re-animated them for post-event promotion and social media.
We held design talks on the day following the opening of the exhibition featuring insightful talks by Craig Oldham, Stuart Watson of Design Studio London, Murray Sommerville and Malika Favre. The topics of the talks ranged from design in a global culture, to the growth of India as a global economy and a growing hub for the creative industries. Stuart Watson also talked about working alongside Present! on Design Studio's own project – Conversations with India.
Luke and Elena of Equals are travelling Asia as we speak and have recently had the chance to visit India again to see the results that Present! has had on the small underprivileged communities, helping to improve the facilities that are available to Street Kids. This wouldn’t have been possible without the design community and all who took the time to advise, collaborate, house, attend and submit to the week long event.
A big Thank You to everyone involved from all of us at Alphabet!
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Follow Equals: Twitter & Instagram
Printing Sponsor: Pressision
Paper Sponsor: Fedrigoni
Venue: The Proud Archivist
Special Thank You: Pressision, Hungry Sandwich Club, Wetransfer, Fedrigoni, Analogue, Dot Laser, Hire an Illustrator, Represent, Stuart Watson, Craig Oldham, Malika Favre, Murray Sommerville and The London Design Festival.
Artists:
&Larry (Singapore), Aaron Vinton (USA), Alphabet (UK), Analogue (UK), Asylum (Singapore), Attak (Netherlands), Bedow (Sweden), Ben The Illustrator (UK), Bleed (Norway), Bravo (Singapore), Bread Collective (UK), Brody Associates (UK), Build (UK), Casper Heijkenskjold (Denmark), Chantal Chya Hsu (Taiwan), Chistopher Burnett (UK), Craig Oldham (UK), Demian Conrad (Switzerland), Design by Toko (Australia), Design Studio London (UK), Dominic Kesterton (UK), DR.ME (UK), DU.ST (UK), Estudio Primo (Spain), Eve Warren (UK), GBH (UK), George Simin (UK), Giulia Garbin (UK), Hague + Hague (UK), Heydays (Norway), HORT (Germany), Hungry Sandwich Club (UK), James Clapham (UK), James Reid (UK), Jay Cover (UK), Joe Leadbetter (UK), Jon Bland (UK), Joseph Veazey (USA), Luke O'Brien (UK), Lundgren + Lindqvist (Sweden), Made by Tung (Canada), Malika Favre (France), Marcel Hausler (Germany), Monikers (USA), Mucho (USA), Murray Somerville (UK), Oh Yeah Studio (Norway), Only (UK), Orlando Lloyd (UK), Raw (UK), Roots (Singapore), Sam Barclay (UK), Sam Cook (UK), Sarah Boris (UK), Sarp Sozdinler (Turkey), Side by Side (UK), Sneaky Raccoon (UK), Spin (UK), Tom Love (UK), Tsto (Finland), Two Times Elliott (UK), Wade Jeffree (Australia), The Work Bench (Singapore), Yoni Alter (UK) & Zipeng Zhu (USA).
We recently collaborated with Duke Studios to fabricate and work on the artwork for a series of light boxes housed inside the awesome Headrow House; a brand new multi-storey venue in the heart of Leeds which encompasses a Beer Hall, Music Venue, Restaurant, Cocktail Bar and not forgetting the Roof Terrace.
The Lightboxes are positioned within the corridors and stairwells that connect the sub-venues of the building and they needed to be bright enough to light the spaces at night whilst also acting as pieces of art in their own right.
Using the Headrow House mother brand colour scheme of White, Black and Orange, we decided to focus the designs around abstract patterns that reference the different sub-venues and the city of Leeds that surrounds the venue.
Some patterns are more industrial, focusing on the materials, interior and forms found within the venue. Others are more abstract takes on Culture, Food, Music, Drinks. All key components of the new venture.
When creating the designs for the Lightboxes, as well as them being functional in lighting up the corridors and stairwells, we also wanted them to be a standout feature within the venue, particularly when the place comes to life with people at night.
We worked on creating a grid system for all graphics. The grid system allowed the visuals to remain consistent and controlled for existing and future iterations. It also allowed the light boxes to extend the gridular modular spatial design and tiling throughout the space.
When creating the design, we always had user interaction in mind and it's great to see the lightboxes proved to be a focal point of the venue, with lots of people getting creative themselves, taking photographs in front of the installations and uploading to Social Media.
Headrow House is an awesome new venue right in the heart of Leeds City centre and we're proud to have been a part of the process of bringing it together. We look forward to seeing people enjoy the venue and the light boxes for some time to come and hopefully we'll be working with Duke Studios and Headrow House some more in the not too distant feature.
Credits
Venue : Headrow House
Lightbox Design : Alphabet
Lightbox Build : Duke Studios
Photography : Nick Porter
Recently we were approached by Leeds City Council to be a part of the design team behind a new installation for Leeds Train Station.
Following the success of the British Art Show 8, there has been some really exciting cultural and visual public art pieces springing up around the city of Leeds and we were super excited to be invited to be part of this one, which was commissioned by Leeds Bid.
The brief was to create a visual welcome to the city that celebrated the culture and diversity of Leeds. This was to be located in the entrance of the Train Station, on the main concourse, which is a highly visible space with thousands of visitors daily.
We worked as part of a team of Leeds-based Design Studios, Illustrators and Artists which consisted of Ourselves, Hungry Sandwich Club, Kristyna Kaczynski and Idiot's Pasture, and was led by Something More.
After multiple workshops and idea generation sessions, we agreed that the piece needed to be highly visual and have instant impact. We also wanted the installation to be a celebration of the city and have the potential to be constantly changing, updating as the city grows.
The final proposed idea was to create a typographic structure of the word 'Leeds' which was a confident and bold welcome to the city. We decided that each letter form would also double up as a blank canvas for artists to display their work, with the opportunity of this being updated regularly to provide new art that can be themed around big events in the city.
When designing the letterforms themselves, it was key that each letter had a lot of internal surface area. This was to maximise the size of the canvas that the commissioned artists could work with. After lots of different stages of design with the whole creative team, we settled on a bespoke typeface that had a 'bloated' treatment. This treatment allowed us to be able to remove the cuts in the 'E' and 'S' as well as the counter in the 'D', which in turn provided the maximum amount of surface area whilst retaining readability and legibility of the word 'Leeds'.
We wanted the letters to be placed in a 'scattered' formation within the main concourse of the station in order for the installation to become a natural part of the overall space. We wanted people to engage with the piece by walking in between the letterforms and even sitting on them. This meant that the physical form of the letters needed to be visually engaging but also structurally sound.
In the end, and with help from XKX Projects and Something More, we decided that the outer shells of the letterforms would needed to be formed from Steel to be robust enough. As this was a public art piece, we decided to apply a white powder coating finish on top of the steel to provide a clean, blank canvas for the art as well as smooth inviting surface for passers by to touch, sit on and interact with.
The clear polycarbonate sheets were attached to the inside of the letterforms with small Metal lugs. The sheets were printed using clear vinyl film which allowed for parts of the design to be opaque, emphasising the interactive value with the passing commuters.
The 5 contributing artists (including ourselves) created the initial pieces of art to be displayed in the letters and worked to a brief entitled 'Celebrate Leeds', where we each visualised what was great about the City, and what it means to us.
You can read more about the project on the Windows of Leeds website. A massive thanks to everybody involved with this project and we were delighted to be a part of it.
The project was commissioned by Leeds Bid, Unfold and Network Rail.
Fabrication and Installation was by XKX Projects.
The Design Team behind this project was led by Something More and consisted of
Alphabet, Hungry Sandwich Club, Kristyna Kaczynski and Idiot's Pasture.
Photography & 3D Renders are by David Lindsay & Something More.
