We have successfully designed the brand identity for a new day surgery hospital at 152 Harley Street, London. Together with the design and production of brand and marketing materials, we have produced a mix of internal clinical and patient media for the day to day operational side of the hospital. Further, Mavo have designed and developed the 152 Harley Street website which will grow in terms of content as the clinic develops.
The world may have gone online and mobile crazy, but print design is still an effective and innovative way to communicate to clients. Here are some key things to consider when commissioning a piece of print communication for your organisation.
1. Decide on your time frame
It stands to reason, if you have left it until two days before your client event to send out invitations you might be better off telling them by email. Likewise, if your company brochure needs to be delivered in four days, but you have yet to find a printer, you might be better off reverting to an emailed PDF. When commissioning a piece of print design whether it be an invitation, promotional mailer, event banner, brochure or annual report… it’s important to factor in enough time to ensure the end result is effective. You will need to allocate time to: create engaging copy and a fantastic design; source the right printer; source the right paper stock (and envelopes); check your print proof; allow for final print delivery and delivery to your client (more details about each step in discussed in the following article). So make sure you schedule enough time for each stage to run as smoothly as possible.
2. Create your content
Before you can sufficiently know what you want designed, it’s important to know what you’re aiming to communicate. So aim to get all of the content, images, messages in place before engaging a design agency.
If your piece of print communication includes graphs, photos or illustrations collate as many of these as possible before the design process begins. In addition, if you have a brand style guide that includes the right font/s, logo/s, colour references etc. it is good practice to send this media to your design agency at the start of your project.
3. What size?
It’s worth properly considering the size of media you want to send, different sizes may be suitable for different circumstances…
For example, a recent client decided against printing an A4 brochure for an upcoming event as they’d seen so many people with tired arms the year before, lugging around bags full of heavy brochures and discarding of them at the end of the event. Instead, they decided on a handy A6 postcard size booklet which could fit neatly into the pocket of a potential new client and was more likely to make for an easy read on the train home!
It’s just as important to consider how long you want your print media to be. It is no use trying to cram a years worth of client case studies into a twelve page brochure. Equally, if you’re aiming to mail out hundreds of brochures, the more pages (or spreads) the higher your design and print costs, so try to get the balance right for your campaign and target budget.
4. Design concepts
Once you have all of your content in place, a design agency can create a series of concept designs from which you can choose your preferred design style. Typically you would need to allow several days for this, so make sure you factor in this time into your overall schedule.
NB. You might want to consider how your print media should be packaged too. If you are sending a newsletter or brochure by post for example you might want to commission a beautifully designed envelope too. Alternatively, if you’re hand delivering your media in person, then a well designed box or folder can add impact and help prevent damage to your media.
5. Final design and artworking
After you have agreed and approved your preferred design style, your design agency will go about designing and laying out your final print media. This process can involve several days of work and it is important that all final designs are set up as final print-ready artwork files. All images should be CMYK and 300dpi in resolution, bleed or cutter-guide instructions should be included and colours should be checked (to ensure the correct Pantone or CMYK colours have been used).
6. Proofreading
No matter how beautiful a design maybe, if there is a spelling error in a headline or a glaring grammatical error on page two the impact is quickly lost. So, once your final design has been created, it is vital to check for spelling or grammar errors and make any required final edits or amendments. You should see this as the ‘last chance’ before you make that bold move to send your final artwork to print.
7. Print production
While many good design agencies handle print production in-house, they’re equally happy working with printers that you may already have an established relationship with. Either way, it’s important to consider the type of paper and stock you’d like to use eg. matt, gloss etc. Sample swatches to choose from can of course be supplied by established print companies (and you should not expect to pay extra for these).
You’ll also need to consider how you would like to print your campaign. Do you want to print using a digital or litho printer? There is plenty more information about which may suit your needs here for digital printing and here for litho printing, but broadly speaking, for low volume print jobs, where a faster turn-around is required a good quality digital printer can achieve the right result. For higher volume or more bespoke printing litho is a much more appropriate choice and there is a range of finishes, effects and special colours that you should be able to discuss with your design agency and printer that can truly add ‘wow’ factor.
Whichever print choice you make always receive a ‘print proof’ before approving your final print run. Some printers can over-promise what can be achieved, while others tell you exactly how your finished item will look, but you might imagine it differently. So it’s important to receive and approve a proof of your final design. Whatever you do, don’t commission a final print run of any quantity without first seeing what your final product actually looks like.
8. Mailing list and delivery
Finally, if you’re posting your print media it’s really important to assemble a correct and up to date mailing list of who you’re sending to. If you’re strapped for time to do this properly the Royal Mail have an ingenious guide and service to help you with that too.
Earlier this year we were approached by charity 1GOAL – which aims to ensure children around the world have access to education – to help shape their brand and to create a host of creative campaigns that would help promote 1GOAL across the globe. With such big ambition it was hard not to accept and with support from international organisations such as FIFA, Microsoft, Telefonica and Facebook we were certainly in good company.
Defining the 1GOAL brand
Like many organisations in their early stages, the 1GOAL brand identity needed a little polish. Before we could begin the task of visually communicating (to the world) it was important to ensure the brand graphics (in this case a handwritten chalk logo and little else) were designed and set up using a consistent set of rules, to truly help the brand and its message ‘come to life’. So we got to work. We introduced a typeface and a consistent set of rules for its use. We created the 1GOAL logo in several different languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic and beond). We applied chalk marks around photographic imagery and introduced a consistent set of rules for headers, sub-headers and quotations. In short, we built up a ‘visual language’ that would mean campaign workers would have an identity they would know how to handle and be proud to use, and the outside world would begin to see (and recognise) a brand that had a real visual presence and personality.
If Football is the world’s most popular sport, and a charity needs to communicate to the world…
Since the very beginning, 1GOAL used football as a platform from which to communicate its message. But having the likes of Rio Ferdinand, Michael Owen and Ronaldo giving your organisation the thumbs up (or rather first finger up, which is the ‘on-brand’ pose for anyone in a campaign photo) is not enough to get your message heard.
During the months prior to the FIFA 2010 world cup in South Africa – a main platform for 1GOAL’s global initiatives – we designed and created a series of promotional media campaigns to really grab the world’s attention. This included a ‘Campaign Manifesto’ which featured photographs of well known footballing icons and renowned global figures such as Shakira, Matt Damon, Jessica Alba and Queen Rania of Jordan (all of whom have played their part in supporting and promoting the cause). We designed promotional brochures and campaign reports, which were handed out to world leaders. Newspaper adverts were created and featured in leading publications such as the Daily Telegraph and the New York Times. We designed and built animations for tv and web campaigns and a series of animated graphics to be played on large screens at football stadiums (from Tottenham Hotspurs’ home-ground to World cup pitches across South Africa). Web banners took pride of place on sites such as ESPN and Facebook. Plus, we created a series of in-store posters that were exhibited in high street stores across Europe with the backing of companies such as Staples.
And now, after several months of hard work and campaigning to get their message across, we’re pleased to say, the charity has nearly 20 million supporters world wide. Strategic and effective communication really does make a difference.
This is just the beginning…
With 1GOAL’s ambitious target to get over 70 million people supporting its cause worldwide, there is still plenty more to do. However, we’re pleased to say the charity has started to engage with Social Media platforms to further spread their message, and this, plus our continued efforts to help their communications be as creative and stimulating as possible puts them in a really strong position for the future.
What do 1GOAL make of Mavo’s efforts?
We’ve been lucky enough to develop an ongoing and close relationship with many of the team at 1Goal, and we’re of course enormously proud to have played our part in helping such a noble cause. Fortunately, 1Goal have been just as pleased to have worked with us.
‘Our brief to Mavo has been complex, with a need to cater to an incredibly broad audience – and we have been delighted with the results. Mavo’s creative take on the multitude of required executions – and the responsiveness and speed of their team – has exceeded our expectations. Their work has ensured that our name – emblazoned on thousands of T-shirts, watched on TV ads around the world, displayed on the big screens at the FIFA 2010 World Cup in South Africa and presented to world leaders at a global education summit – stands out from the crowd of other organisations clamouring for the world’s attention’.
Shaharazad Abuel-Ealeh, Chief Operating Officer, 1GOAL
If you’d like to sign up to 1GOAL please visit www.join1goal.org.
It might sound a little bizarre for a design and digital agency (who has web design as one of its principle service offerings) to pose the question: ‘is a new website what you really need?’. However, over the last few years we’ve had to pose that question to clients on a more and more frequent basis. You see, in many cases what clients are really after is a ‘following’ or a way to engage their audience. Whether that be to promote their brand, campaign, services, products or beyond… a website forms only part of the answer. In fact, thanks to the rise of: platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Linked-in and apps, widgets and adverts that now take pride of place in these domains; self-funded and self-contained mobile apps that work across iPhones, iPads, Android and beyond; easy to use third party blogging platforms like WordPress; online video streaming through Vimeo or YouTube; downloadable self-broadcasted podcasts… nowadays, it’s perfectly possible to engage an audience online without having a website at all.
But how do you decide what is the ‘right’ form of online or mobile marketing tool for your organisation?
A much debated, ‘lead story’ recently published in Wired magazine announced to the world ‘The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet’ to a furore of web designers and developers across the globe. Yet in principle (aside from a headline that was bold enough to sell several thousands of copies of Wired magazine) what the article was really mapping out was the rise, over the last 5 years, of alternative modes of online and mobile communication (social media and mobile apps a case in point).
Of course, the web is not dead, as this fair-minded response to Wired’s feature article succinctly puts it, the web is just continuing to evolve.
‘The web is healthier than ever. If nothing else, the dramatic growth of Facebook, which most people interact with through their web browser, should help to cement that idea. We may be using specific apps to access specific web-based services, and we may be making less use of all-in-one browsers like Firefox or Safari, but that has little or nothing to do with the web being dead.’ Matthew Ingram, Gigaom 2010
What has in fact occurred, is that there are now increasingly more sophisticated and broader ways to communicate online and through mobile apps. The key is deciding upon which are the best routes or tools for your organisation. More work has to be done up-front, in a strategic sense, to consider target audience, the message, the content, budget and time-frame of your online campaign before deciding upon the most effective medium. This is of course something that a decent design and digital agency can help with. But it’s well worth considering what others have done first, and weighing up the pros and cons of different types of interactive marketing properly beforehand.
As Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine puts it: ‘The Internet is the real revolution, as important as electricity; what we do with it is still evolving.’
We’ve been delighted by the ongoing support for 1GOAL. The hard work of the organisation together with our creative design and digital campaigns have played a part in helping the charity grow its support base to a global count of 18 million people. We hope our animation recently played in Times Square, New York helps to grow the brand even further.
What’s more, you can now see Mavo animation work at the beginning and end of this testimonial for 1GOAL by Spurs and England centre forward Peter Crouch!
A little note from the geeks in our digital department…
According to recent data published by StatCounter, users of internet browser Explorer 6 have dropped below 5% in Europe, North America, Oceania and are declining fast across Asia and Africa.
Here at Mavo, we test every website we create to be accessible to the largest possible audience. As Explorer 6 has always been, a ‘debugging nightmare’ for any diligent web developer – because of it’s creative interpretation of web standards – we’re happy to announce that our support for IE6 has at long last come to an end.
NB: If on the off-chance you still fall in that small percentage of people still using IE6, do yourself a favour: update to Explorer 8 (or get yourself Firefox, Chrome or Safari). Geek rant over.
We’re delighted to announce the first phase launch of the new-look Sofar Sounds website to help promote this fledgling live music events group. Later in the year, we’ll be designing and developing additional features to include artist pages and search by artist music video links but, until then, the site links users to Facebook, YouTube videos and a mailing list.
As part of our ongoing work for 1Goal, earlier this month we designed an animated pitch-side banner to be shown at Tottenham Hotspur football ground. We hope this and our advert design (in the match day programme) was eye-catching enough to help the 1Goal cause!
Aside from our ongoing design work for 1Goal, we’re busy working on brand and print graphics for SEO company ISM and putting the finishing touches to the soon to be launched interactive app’ for Investec Private Bank, watch this space…
We’re delighted to be part of the 1 GOAL campaign which aims to give 75 million children a fair chance in life. We’re currently designing a series of print media to help the charity promote its global cause. More news and links of our work for the campaign will be uploaded to the Mavo portfolio soon. In the meantime, you can find out more about the great work the charity is doing here.
