For show n tell this week, Nigel brought along a book that he recently bought. It featured all of the posters for Obama’s initial election for the position of president. Some were very well done and others were not quite up to scratch but it brought up the topic of having the same brief and the many varying possible outcomes that can be produced. This is what Nigel and Caitlin will face when they take on the 100 days project which I’m sure will come up in a few blog posts over the coming months. Below is one of Nigel’s favourite posters which was designed by Ron English.

Adrian showed us a website for Capgemini which is a website with a huge amount of information. After sifting through a few of the pages we found they have used a great way to filter through events which really works on a content heavy site like this one.

Caitlin showed an awesome brand identity which she found on Behance. She was impressed by the strength of the brand and how the old photos were translated onto the web as small illustrations. Attention to detail was key in this process even down to how it has been photographed for their portfolio – it has all been thoroughly thought through.

And lastly Anne showed us a cool website that could take up a lot of your time and cure any boredom! You can make awesome spirograph like images of all different colours – if only they would let you output it as a vector!!

Poster by Ron English

Events Page

Brand Identity

Spirograph from Weave Silk

Turning 25 is a big deal. So to celebrate, we decided it was time for a new-look logo to go with our website rebranding.

The original red, white & blue Kiwi in the triangle logo was actually created through a logo competition, back in the 80’s. It’s been adapted throughout the years and spawned new logos; the corners have been rounded and new colours introduced. Which was another reason we wanted to change — to consolidate and create more cohesive branding.

Having worked with Transformer closely over the past year (they did a stellar job on our Buy NZ Made website revamp), we knew they were the team for the job.

But the brief was never going to be easy. We knew messing with an iconic logo that our 1200 members use needed a delicate approach. It couldn’t be too different from the original, but it needed to be contemporary, all the while resonating strongly with Kiwis. Of course the font would have to be designed by a Kiwi as well — investing in NZ design was a given! The new logo-type is a slightly modified version of National (patriotic, no?) from Klim Type Foundry.

We set Transformer to the task, but made sure we communicated everything with our members, and even surveyed them on the new design during the process.

The end process, as you can see, really nails the brief. Transformer solved the problem of the text under the Kiwi being difficult to read, with a fresh font and size that has more symmetry with the Kiwi. We decided to go black and white, rather than silver, to make printing more practical and avoid veering anything too tacky.  And of course, we had to keep the traditional red, white and blue colours as secondary option.

The curved triangle was important too, as our logo is often described as the ‘Kiwi in the triangle,’ so we didn’t want to lose that part of its identity!

We think by providing the other options of shapes, we’ve really catered for all the needs of our members and their different products and markets. Feedback so far has been really positive and we look forward to seeing it on NZ made products for years to come!

Kelda Hunter

Sales & Marketing Coordinator
Buy NZ Made

DINZ Best of the Best Designers Speak

As a designer it’s always good to keep up with the best of the best in New Zealand, and it is always inspiring to go along to talks like the Designers Institute of New Zealand Best of the Best Designers Speak. These sorts of events always inspire me and remind me of why I chose to be a designer in the first place.

Last Wednesday Adrian and I attended the DINZ Best of the Best Designers Speak 2013 and heard from talented designers from Alt Group, Designworks, Sons & Co and DDMMYY.

What They Spoke About

Dean Poole from Alt Group spoke of their clever and creative branding for the Auckland Art Gallery and how poetry and linguistics inspired this idea of a changeable brand for the Gallery.

Noel Blackwell and Jef Wong from Designworks brought their client along from  Silver Fern Farms and they talked about how they found a gap in the meat market to develop their brand and create a strong visual style that would stand out from the rest of the meat products in the supermarket.

Matt Arnold and Tim Kelleher from Sons & Co talked about how they had the privilege of taking the Silo Theatre print style into the world of web.

And lastly Kelvin Soh from DDMMYY talked about his vintage inspirations for the branding of Triumph & Disaster.

Who We Favoured

Adrian and I both really favoured Matt and Tim from Sons & Co. Not only had they mastered their brief of designing the Silo Theater website but their humour and structure of their talk was very entertaining. I also enjoyed hearing from Kelvin from DDMMYY and how he gained inspiration from items from vintage stores and second hand book shops.

It is always good to be reminded that we should invite inspiration from anywhere in life. take a look at our pinterest board to see what has been inspiring Transformer lately.

Caitlin

Silo Theatre Website

Auckland Art Gallery Branding

Triumph & Disaster Branding

Silver Fern Farms Branding

Recently Nigel took part in a Street Art event held at a very modern church, The Upper Room, TUR, in Newmarket . The goal was to introduce the young members of the church to different types of art and to give them the opportunity to make their mark on their own space.

Three artists led the groups

Cruz Jimenez (http://www.sanderson.co.nz/Artist/33/Cruz-Jimenez.aspx)

Matt Dowman (http://antoinettegodkin.co.nz/artists/?artist=Matthew+Dowman)

Nigel Smith (http://raw-art.co.nz/?page=nigel

Here are the results:

Special thanks to Stephanie at Spicers Papers for donating so much great quality paper(http://www.spicersnz.co.nz)

Just over two years ago, Transformer made the brave decision to take on this loud, fresh out of training, very talkative girl they knew little about. They have trained and nurtured me into a person who now feels confident to take on the next stage of challenges. I’m sure Nigel now wishes he had invested in some good noise-cancelling head phones!

I can’t thank the team here enough for what they have helped me learn and achieve and will be forever grateful for the effort they have put in to me. I have also met a bunch of amazing clients who have given me the opportunity to put some crazy ideas into reality.

I am now heading off on 6 weeks of travel (Australia, Abu Dhabi, Turkey, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia) before settling in England for two years where I will be aiming to live and work. I will keep Transformer up-to-date with my adventures so if any one is curious, they can fill you in.

Stay awesome.

Ange Baker

Dubrovnik, Croatia

Well OK, maybe not quite ‘nothing’, but you know the kind of brief where you’ve got very little time, no budget for a photoshoot and all the client can give you is some terrible photos they shot on their phone through a car window in the rain. You’re feeling a bit guilty about jumping straight onto istock again as you’ve fallen back on that solution a few too many times lately. So, what’s left? DIY.

My absolute hero of making-stuff-out-of-not-very-much-design is Reid Miles, the man behind Blue Note’s iconic jazz covers of the 50′s and 60′s (he carried on into the 70′s but to my mind the flamboyant fashions of the day didn’t gel with his pure aesthetic approach). Reid would mask use of poor photography, do weird tricks with film processing, do type with letraset and purposely blow it up so you saw the imperfections and use big, bold Bauhaus-inspired blocks for emphasis. Of course there were times when he’d have the most beautiful, smoke-drenched portrait to work with and he had the good taste to leave well alone and simply crop it with care. But it’s his more ‘graphic’ covers that do it for me. Rather than being limited by his meagre budgets Reid saw having only two colours and an out of focus photo as a pathway to creative inspiration.

Fast forward half a century and there are still many great practitioners taking the DIY approach. I love 3 Deep‘s minimal approach to colour and typography. These guys are some of the best art directors working today and can come up with the most amazing photography but they’re also not afraid to pare back to make a strong, graphic statement. Take their work for 6 Scents for instance – dynamic, original design built from only simple black and white shapes and numbers.

In between, Neville Brody and Peter Saville did the same – Brody making his own iconic fonts and Saville creating bold solutions from abstract shapes and colours.

Dutch designers Studio Dumbar were a big favourite of mine when I was at art school for their DIY approach. In their early days if they didn’t have good source material they’d often make crude models from seemingly random objects and shoot it themselves. Of course as they progressed clients began to approach them with big budgets asking for “that home made look”. They still produce beautiful, minimal work that blows me away every time I see it – take this identity for OVG Real Estate for instance. Can you imagine Bayleys or Barfoots going for that concept?

We have much to learn from the wonderful mix of boldness and elegance coming from many contemporary Asian designers. This poster for a retreat with teacher Thich Nhat Hanh uses ancient sumi-e drawing styles in a modern, light-hearted way. OK, so this example does have a photo but the concept and execution rely on a cool idea rather than an expensive photoshoot.

I love the work of Hideki Nakajima for its brave use of colour and simple forms. It feels like it comes from an authentic respect for its past but has a contemporary, global sensibility. I hope the increasing Asian influence in Auckland will help us break out of our reliance on retro-kiwiana and encourage us to build a strong, visual language for the future.

In Europe there seems to be a swing towards contemporary evolutions of the bold simplicity of the German and Swiss schools of the mid-20th Century and the brighter Spanish and French work of the 70′s and 80′s. Somehow all of this DIY ethic is feeding into an exciting melting pot of great new digital work coming out of everywhere from Brighton to Bucharest. I love this constructivist influenced five-booklets-in-one publication from the Universität der Künste Berlin called Design Reaktor Berlin - it feels like it comes from half a century of design aesthetic and yet is also utterly ‘now’.

So now you’re probably thinking I’m going to show off lots of Transformer‘s work that takes the minimal approach. Well this is something I’ve pondered for many years – whilst I love this kind of work we don’t do much of it ourselves. We did do this recent poster for Amnesty where we all burnt matches in the shape of the word Hope and photographed it to make an, um, striking image.

But I guess at heart I’m a maximalist and I love texture, colour, multi-layering etc so minimalism is not my natural response to a brief. Someone recently said to me that we often admire the opposite of what we do ourselves. How true.

Nigel

This is from a blog published by Design Assembly

IM for JLL Four Seasons Hotel

We have designed various Information Memorandums for real estate agency Jones Lang LaSalle, but this is one of our most recent ones for the Four Seasons Hotel in Sydney. This particular IM was perfect bound with a hard leather cover and included stunning imagery and an elegant layout to reflect the high standards of the hotel. This job was well received by the target market and the feedback they’ve received was outstanding. We are proud to work with big international clients such as Jones Lang LaSalle and we look forward to continuing to work with them in the future.

Take a look at this project and others we have done for Jones Lang LaSalle in our portfolio.

Carren Richardson-Park

What do a design company and a marketing consultant have in common? Everything!

When Nigel asked me to share their new space and provide help with their clients, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse…

I provide marketing strategy and research to a number of clients, including corporates, SMEs and independent agencies. This includes all things brand strategy, positioning work, customer experience and communications planning, along with customer research and insight hunting. I do have a depth of experience in DM, so can work through detailed customer relationship management programmes and even invent a good old-fashioned loyalty programme if you need one. I’ll be working with Nigel and the Transformer team where clients need help with their brand development in a structured way – providing research where there is a dearth of insight into what customers think, and other marketing help as needed.

Look forward to meeting with you over the coming months. I’ll be the one in the corner drawing diagrams and banging on about understanding the buying process…

Best,
Carren

Carren Richardson-Park
carren@transformer.co.nz
021 304325

For a bit of background see carren.co.nz

Poster for Strike exhibition

Amnesty International is running an exhibition and Trademe auction of tiny art created on Beehive matchboxes. The exhibition has been named Strike and we had the pleasure of designing all of the promo material. We started with a laser light and photographed it with a slow shutter speed to produce the Strike logo and overall identity. We then incorporated these elements into the brochure, artist cards and invitations.

After this came the fun part. Mo gave us a huge bag of matches which we used to spell the word ‘HOPE’ – which we then lit on fire! With Ange and Caitlin photographing, and Adrian, Nigel and Anne on fire extinguishing duty, we have produced a big poster which will be featured at the exhibition.

Two of our designers also contributed artwork to the exhibition. Nigel painted two boxes while Caitlin chose to craft hers.

Nigel:
Mo gave me two matchboxes. I think she only wanted one entry but it gave me the idea that I could do two pieces, that would work separately, but also could sit together. Matches remind me of my misspent youth where music and smoking always went hand in hand. So I had the idea that it could be in the classic tradition of rock ‘n’ roll skull imagery with words from famous songs – “a hunk a’ burnin’ love” from Burning Love by Elvis and “C’mon baby light my fire” from Light My Fire by The Doors. Inside the matchbox there is the line “all things are on fire”. This is from “The Fire Sermon” which looks at obsessions, clinging and attachments – a long way from a carefree, rock ‘n’ roll youth!

Caitlin:
I enjoy being crafty with my hands and I am really interested in creating design which people can interact with. My solution to this matchbox was a pinhole camera. Encased in the camera shell is the matchbox with film reels on either side. The film runs through the matchbox and a photo is taken when the shutter is released. This is the matchbox that keeps on giving!

These matchboxes along with all of the others will be on exhibition:
10am – 3pm, 27 Feb – 2 March.
Museum of the Vernacular, 16 Kerr St, Devonport.

The Trademe auction begins on Feb 26th

Ange