Design on the mind

We are proud to have worked with the Environment Agency on this project; not only is it an environmental issue that is close to our hearts, but it is a Bristol issue that we have helped to tackle. The whole process was a pleasure; devising the concepts for the billboard advertising, the photography, the graphic design and the overall communication challenge.

The Client

The Environment Agency is the leading public body for protecting and improving the environment in England and Wales. It’s their job to make sure that air, land and water are looked after by everyone in today’s society, so that tomorrow’s generations inherit a cleaner, healthier world.
They strive to achieve this goal in many different ways; Influencing and working with Government, industry and local authorities to make the environment a priority. Taking action against those who don’t take their environmental responsibilities seriously is another.

The Challenge

One of the issues faced by the Environment Agency is the illegal dumping of toxic and other waste, also known as fly tipping. Aside from individuals who will quite happily dump a shopping trolley in a river, there are ‘organised’ fly tippers, that is, people or illegal carriers who dump large quantities of waste in order to avoid the charges associated with disposing of it responsibly.

The Environment Agency needed an advertising campaign that would not only raise awareness of the environmental and social issues associated with fly tipping. But also make businesses and communities aware of the fines that are incurred for the illegal dumping of waste.

The advertising campaign needed to be designed to appear on billboards and bus backs in the south Bristol area for a period of 6 months during 2007.

The Solution

The designers at Deckchair quickly came up with a few concepts for the campaign. One of the ideas was to show the reality of the fly tipping situation in South Bristol. A lot of the illegal carriers dump dangerous rubbish, chemicals and white goods in the back lanes of residential areas where young children play and could easily be harmed.
Using a young model (Florence, my daughter) and a renowned fly tipping location Deckchair’s creative team produced a hard hitting image with incredible impact to fulfill the brief.

The billboard:

The bus back:

The Result

The campaign has recently been honored at the National Environment Agency Communications Awards 2007 through Clare Rogers (project manager) with an award for ‘best visual interpretation of our brand’, and was short listed from over 100 entries. We are absolutely thrilled with this great result for our client. This of course is aside from the huge success of the billboard campaign itself.

Press Coverage

We achieved good local press coverage for the campaign with articles in The Bristol Evening Post and The Western Daily Press. Also, national press coverage with articles in the Chamber Link Magazine and Design Week.

Bristol Evening Post, Clare Rogers of the Environment Agency and Florence pose in front of one of the billboards in South Bristol.

Western Daily Press use the poster for their article.

Testimonial

Clare Rogers, Campaign Manager, Environment Agency said:
“Faced with the challenge of communicating a message to a hard-to-reach audience, we needed considerable creative input and some fresh ideas, stepping right away from our traditional corporate style. Deckchair gave us a range of great concepts to test on our audience, then delivered the complete package, based on our market research.
It’s rare to find a company so responsive to what you are trying to achieve. The results are stunning and our design has won a communications award for ‘best visual interpretation of our brand’.”

Leaflets

To back up the billboard campaign, the Environment Agency asked Deckchair to produce a duty of care leaflet to be distributed throughout Bristol, Bath, North East Somerset and South Gloucestershire Council boroughs. The leaflet is designed to make people check the waste carrier’s licence of any waste removal services that they employ. Using a model we recreated the typical scene of a ‘man with a van’ collecting unwanted items from a household. The message comes across loud and clear in this neat and informative leaflet:

Promotional

Deckchair also produced a fun and eye catching fridge magnet as a promotional item to be handed out at events to help to drive the message home:

Final Report

Clare Rogers at the Environment Agency asked Deckchair to produce a 40 page final report for internal use to compile the strategies and information for the BREW (Business Resource and Efficiency Waste programme) ‘Cleaning up Bristol’ Campaign. The report has been beautifully put together in a perfect bound book printed on recycled paper.

Do you need creative design for a campaign? Give us a call 0117 9299150 or pop by and meet the team.

Toni 

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Tattooing has been used throughout history for many different purposes and has strong roots in many cultures. Recently there has been a surge in the popularity of tattooing in Europe and the USA, mainly as a form of self expression. These modern tattoos take their artistic influences from many places. I find the Japanese style of tattooing to be particularly beautiful. We are talking serious art here folks, fantastic isn’t it?

Please excuse my heavy use of pictures in this blog but I know you are finding it just as fascinating as I am!

A big Thank you to James who works for Total Tattoo magazine for allowing me to use his pictures of the London Tattoo convention 2007.  

The recent growth in tattoo culture has inevitably led to advertisers jumping on the band wagon, particularly where the brand is designed to appeal to a young audience. Levis are always on the ball:

Converse use a similar style of advertising, but here you can see that the model has actually been ‘branded’ with the Converse logo. The advertisement suggests the consumer’s  loyalty to the Converse brand by him ‘wearing’ it permanantly.

It is not just the ’street wear’ brands that are doing this either, have a look at the Chanel eyewear advert below:

However, talking of brand loyalty I thought I would include this picture that I find absolutely hilarious, especially in the light of Google’s recent behaviour with the Blogger platform. See Randa’s blog: Google is getting to big for it’s britches. I suppose if you are going to tattoo your favourite brand on to your body you had better hope that you are always going to like it!!! (I think the font is a bit wrong too?)

I absolutely love this advert for Fransesco Biasia purses and handbags. Obviously it is not a real tattoo but they are still cashing in on the idea.

These Brazilian adverts for sandals are certainly eye catching:

Gisele, the model, is not really a heavily tattooed girl but they have certainly made it look very realistic.

I would just like to include one more advertising picture for Playstation that is great fun although a little dark. Even though it isn’t really about the tattoo; the image still emulates the sub culture:

Thanks to Ads of the world for providing all the advertising pictures.

Can you think of any other examples of advertisers cashing in on trends? How do you feel about the increased popularity of tattooing? Are you a heavily tattooed person who is annoyed by the trend ruining your individuality?

Toni

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Every now and then I come across the work of a talented artist, designer or photographer, and it’s always a great inspiration. James Starr was exhibiting at Room 212 in Bristol a few weeks ago and I have to say he is one of the more impressive artists I have seen there.

James is a painter, printer and illustrator. His images are created using a mixture of original screen printed material, photography, freehand illustration and collage. He has traveled as an expedition artist for BSES Expeditions to the USA, South Africa, Iceland and Arctic Norway.

I spent quite a bit of time chatting to James and he took the trouble to pop by our house to drop some work off to me and my partner. (James, it is at the framers; can’t wait to get it back! :)). It was a great pleasure to meet a talented local artist and genuinely nice person.

Stop by James’s website sometime and have a look: James Starr

Toni

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This is a fascinating yet possibly controversial series of photographs depicting the process of cremating a human body. Although the usual purpose of this blog is to talk about design, I felt it was an opportunity to highlight what I find to be an interesting topic for discussion and give you a sneak peek at the latest work of a great photographer (and good friend of mine).
Stephen Lewis has been a press photographer working for various newspapers since 1998; he now also does weddings in a documentary style. Over the last few years he has been doing an MA in photography (like he didn’t have enough to do already). This exhibition is part of the final show for the course.

Stephen talks about his work:
“I initially set out to document the mechanical process of cremation but found my own mantra for the project in the ‘The devil’s in the details’. That is, little elements of the process became fascinating and I found even the most mundane of objects in such an environment became charged with significance and symbolism. Metaphors of death, symbolic suggestion of religious belief, suggestion of an after-life, even the evidence of life itself, in the most mundane items and even in the construction of the crematorium itself.”

“The more obvious imagery can be found in the photographs of the actual burning of the body which reflect a hell-ish vision. These were achieved through the viewing aperture which is a small window of very thick glass. The intense temperatures inside the chamber and the glass itself created a slight distortion, this coupled with the speed and unpredictability of the flame movement and no way of knowing how the body will ’sit’ as the coffin burns away, made it a challenging but extremely fascinating process with which to work.”

“One central aim of this project was to show the unseen ‘journey’ that many of us will take but obviously never experience and through that journey to confront the viewer with the processes of death and our own mortality. Ultimately I have found through the care and attention to every detail taken in the cremation process, a sense of the dignity ascribed to the dead and through that a sense of our own humanity.”

See the exhibition and that of the other MA grads:

Personally I find this work fascinating, thought provoking and original. What do you think? Do you feel moved by the pictures? Offended?

Toni 

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We have designed a few websites for schools in and around Bristol in the last year and have just launched our latest project; the new website for Colston’s Girls’ School.

Colston’s approached us at Deckchair to design an up-to-date and fresh website using the Colston’s colours and style. They wanted the website to become a resource for students, staff, parents, govenors and prospective parents and students. They also needed the website to be updateable by their staff, include an ecommerce shop and many other features.

The website features:

• A bespoke content management system – allowing staff to update all areas of the website themselves and upload information and pdf files easily.
• Ecommerce shop to sell uniform, sports kit and stationery.
• ‘Letter to home’ feature, allowing letters to be directly sent to parents from the website.
• A-Z index of content and site map.
• Slide show of images on the home page created in Flash.
• Professional photography session including the school buildings, lessons, students, staff portraits and more to produce quality pictures for the website and printed materials.
• Training sessions and support for the staff to use the content management system.

 If you need any advice or help with content management systems or you are wondering if a system like this would benefit your business then give us a call for a chat or pop in for a cup of tea if you are local.

Toni

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Image Credit: NASA, Donald Walter (South Carolina State University), Paul Scowen and Brian Moore (Arizona State University)

I saw this picture on the Nasa website yesterday and it made me think; Isn’t it amazing? We can take a picture of something happening 7,100 light years from earth of a star 40 times more massive than our sun blowing a giant bubble of material into space.  We can take a picture on a mobile phone and send it anywhere we want, we can load albums online to share and download images at the touch of a button. What would those pioneers of photography 100 years ago think if they could see this picture? Perhaps just 500 years ago it would have been considered sourcery or some sort of religious intuition?

Images are powerful things, designers and advertisers utilize this power everyday for  persuasive communication. Although today people realize that images can be manipulated very cleverly there is still a real authenticity to a picture that can’t be denied. “Seeing is beliving”.

What image sticks most in your mind? Or what image had the most profound effect on you when you saw it?

Toni

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Well done to Sham Tanna, our photographer who shot the billboard photograph for our advertising campaign for the Environment Agency. The graphic designers at Deckchair came up with the concept for the campaign and Sham worked under our creative direction to produce the image. We are proud to announce that the picture has been announced as the Winner of the AOP Open 2007 with five Judges Choice Awards and the winner of the Public Vote Award. (Thanks to all of you who voted for us)

From over 1,700 entries and an exhibition of 84 images, the Open Judges chose the picture as their number one, describing it as ‘captivating’ and ‘arresting’ with “a dynamic tension and a strong suggestion of narrative that made it intriguing and at the same time compelling” (Terence Pepper, National Portrait Gallery).

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A few months ago, our creative team of graphic designers at Deckchair designed and produced a high impact billboard and bus campaign for the Environment Agency. It was designed to tackle the fly tipping problem (illegal waste dumping) in the Bristol area. When the Environment Agency approached us with the project we were very pleased to be involved with something ‘green’ and also something that would have a positive effect on our local area, Bristol.

 We quickly came up with a few concept ideas for the campaign; we needed the billboard to be high impact with a clear message to really make people think about where their rubbish goes. The reality of the situation is that a lot of the illegal carriers dump dangerous rubbish, chemicals and white goods in hotspots in the south of the city. Most of these locations are in the back lanes of residential areas where young children play and could easily be harmed.

We all agreed that this was a strong directive and we could produce a hard hitting image to convey this message using our extensive experience with professional photography. We chose a location for the shoot and set the scene for the picture. Florence, our young model was an absolute star as the shoot took most of the day and hundreds of frames to get the shot we wanted.

The result is a visually stunning and hard hitting photograph that conveyed the message perfectly and fulfilled the client’s design brief.

The campaign has recently been honored at the National Environment Agency Communications Awards 2007 through Clare Rogers (project manager) with an award for ‘best visual interpretation of our brand’, and was short listed from over 100 entries. We are absolutely thrilled with this great result for our client; it is fabulous when great design is commended and appreciated.

Clare Rogers, Campaign Manager, Environment Agency said:

“Faced with the challenge of communicating a message to a hard-to-reach audience, we needed considerable creative input and some fresh ideas, stepping right away from our traditional corporate style. Deckchair gave us a range of great concepts to test on our audience, then delivered the complete package, based on our market research.
It’s rare to find a company so responsive to what you are trying to achieve. The results are stunning and our design has won a communications award for ‘best visual interpretation of our brand’.”

The photograph has also been short listed in a photographic competition run by The AOP (Association of Photographers). There will be an exhibition of these images at the AOP Gallery in London starting 22nd August 2007. You can vote for our photograph here (if you feel moved to do so!)

Toni

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