Moving Ideas

Frank represents creative sector in Belfast Business Top 50

Last week we found ourselves amidst the good and the great of Belfast business as Frank was named one of the city’s top companies in the aptly named ‘Belfast Top 50 Business Awards’.

Hosted annually by Belfast Media Group and backed by sponsors IBM, Invest NI and United Airlines, the event spotlights the year’s fifty champions of business who are creating jobs and wealth in the city… ‘in the teeth of a crippling recession’

Damian and Stephen attended a formal event at Stormont’s opulent Long Gallery alongside an esteemed list of eminent guests and captains of industry.

With Belfast’s finest showing up on the night to collect their awards and take a bow, Damian ‘took one for the team’ and stepped up on behalf of Frank. Damian commented that the event was; ‘…a proud moment of recognition for growth in our competitive creative sector. As the year closes in, this is a sign pointing to continued success in 2012’.

Read about the Belfast Top 50 here.

Mac Talk

With the emergence of the social web, the way we use digital media has really turned a corner. User-generated content is king and geeks everywhere have shifted focus from the static to the plastic, creating spaces that capture and showcase the global conversation we call ‘social media’.

Last week we posted a story about our contribution to Culture Night. You can check it out here.

Another digital conversation doing the rounds is ‘The MAC & Me‘ — an online art experiment created as part of a digital media strategy which Frank delivered for The MAC — the shiny new arts destination due to open in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter in early 2012.

Like CNB11, we visualised an online conversation about The MAC. The MAC & Me homepage displays the latest fifteen tweets that use the hashtag #themacandme. These are then arranged in coloured bars whose heights vary by date and time of day.

We also added an archive page that stores and showcases every tweet captured in the conversation. Like a digital repository, this data can be repurposed for real world artistic projects like an exhibit or projection for the opening of the building itself.

Since launching, The MAC & Me has gathered significant traction offering The MAC a unique opportunity to see and share the palpable excitement that exists for this landmark project.

Visit themacand.me and tell us what you think.

Culture Night Belfast 2011

Culture Night 2011 is finally here! We’re really excited about the return of Culture Night, taking place tonight across a record 30 towns and cities. Last year, 15,000 people attended well over 100 events in Belfast alone. Culture Night Belfast is proving to be even bigger and better, with over 160 events planned across 100 venues – with gigs, choirs, dancers, poetry, exhibitions, theatre, street performers, tours and workshops, plus the first ever Culture Night Parade.

We’re taking our contribution beyond the studio and placing it in the hands of everyone attending an event in Belfast. Harnessing the power of mobile applications and the data they share, we’ve created a mobile-friendly website which aggregates photos, tweets and check-ins.

We need you!

When you’re out tonight, be sure to tweet your thoughts using the #cnb11 hash-tag.
Instagram users: Tag your photos with #cnb11 and they’ll show up on the site.
Foursquare user? We’ve got you covered. Check in to “Culture Night 2011“.

The CNB11 website, cnb11.com will display a realtime feed as the night develops. Be sure to bookmark the site, or better yet – add it your homescreen!

Ranting? It’s a Sign.

Designers and other creative professionals could be accused of sharing a lot with the infamous Westboro Baptist Church congregation. They both feel the need to defend their dearly held ideas from a world that doesn’t understand. They both congregate in a tightly knit community in which they compete earnestly for the respect of their peers. And they both like making big signs.

It’s not entirely surprising. Most designers study at college in a kind of creative sandbox, a world largely without clients in which they respond to fixed design briefs and work towards a solution that suits their areas of interest and specialism. Furthermore, the academic study of design history has a lot in common with the study of art history, with abstract discussions of composition, national political influences and movements in visual style looming large. The canon of design principles is presented to students much like infallible religious scripture and most designers begin their working lives with the fervour of the newly ordained.

This is good – this passion and enthusiasm is something that the best designers keep alive throughout their career, but… it’s also dangerous. Designers who feel that they ‘own’ the ideas tend to undervalue the contributions of those less versed in design theory. However, being an expert in all aspects of creative practice doesn’t make you an expert in the nature of your client’s business or their customers’ behaviour. If designers try to impose an idea or solution without having absorbed and interpreted the knowledge and expertise that their client brings, it’s always going to be a sterile, one-dimensional exercise.

On the other hand, a genuinely collaborative approach will reap real rewards. Working in partnership with the people commissioning the design work to discover the real issues and opportunities allows for the creation of a focused and relevant creative brief and shared, agreed goals. With all of this in place, the creative team can bring their knowledge and skill to bear, exercising all of that passion for the craft, while the client has a clear sense of purpose and context when giving their feedback.

Believing in the intrinsic rightness of your own ideas is just lazy thinking. If you find yourself regularly ranting at the ignorance of others, maybe you need a sign.

Stephen Shaw is a Director at Frank, a design company specialising in brand, digital and broadcast design.

Follow Stephen @stephentshaw and Frank @frankideaworks

Redesigning Frank

If you’ve visited the Frank website lately you will have been met by a holding page. Our website, just over a year old, is gone, replaced with an announcement that we’re working on a new one. Why? Don’t we have enough work to do already? What was wrong with the old site? It looked nice and worked well, what happened?

Re-focusing

In the last year or so, Frank has re-focused, returning to core values, values of simplicity, ideas and craft. Our core strengths, creativity paired with a constantly refined methodology has allowed us to create work that is, if we may say so ourselves, our best to date.

Rather than just updating the “latest work” section on the website, we wanted to devise a web presence that truly practices what we preach. Simply put, we wanted to design the best website we’ve created yet. We’ve always liked a wee challenge.

Under Pressure

By taking the website down and replacing it with a holding page, we are putting the pressure on. A design agency’s website often gets the cobblers kid’s treatment, being the last priority after all the client work is taken care of. By taking the site down we’re forcing ourselves to stick to our deadline. Let’s see if it works.

Updates

As we’re working on the redesign we hope to document the process on the holding page, We could say it’s to make the process open and transparent, or even that it hopefully will provide an interesting peek into the Frank design process.

But really, it’ll just help keep us on track. Now let’s go cobble some shoes.

A different brand of investment

Is an Investment Company a brand? A big question that rattled around in our heads when we were introduced to the team at Lough Shore; a new investment company established in Northern Ireland with some seriously inspiring goals. We kicked off our discussions around the company’s need for a new brand identity and their ambition for a website to act as their principal marketing platform.

Brand is a word so deeply burned into the psyche of western business culture that it feels like it’s always been part of our lexicon. Its origins go back to the post industrial age in America where competing products distinguished their wares through benefits that promised a better future. Fast forward to the emergence of corporate branding in the late nineties and today’s explosion of brand culture across every product, place, business, even people.

In recent times, our creative team at Frank has tackled branding challenges for charitable companies, arts and cultural organizations and now, investment vehicles. Everyone it seems is in on the act. And true to this age of social media, the latter two examples are in the business of leveraging influence and building communities — audience and portfolio respectively. Brand is a powerful mobilizer for both.

Great brands tell stories that are shared, create influence and inspire action. And Lough Shore Investments has a compelling story to tell. In the words of founder Danny Moore: ‘Lough Shore’s mission is to invest in high potential management teams and partner with them to build great businesses. Our goal is to bring ten great companies to exit or IPO by 2025’.

We facilitated a lively workshop with the client team to mine their ideas, attitudes and thoughts. Plotting a series of points, we shaped these into a model for the brand comprising a set of governing beliefs and the essential truth that defines the business. We articulated this idea as the pursuit of greatness. Signing off on the blueprint for the new brand, we identified a creative springboard around which we could begin to visualise and test our thoughts. The notion of expedition chimed with our client team, capturing the brand’s emergent DNA as well as the commitment and rigour required to build a world-class investible business.

Following a collaborative process to sketch, reduce and refine a visual approach, the new Lough Shore brand identity sprung to life. And as with a previous blog post, logo is just a part of the story. Most importantly, the creative team at Frank have given Lough Shore a distinctive visual language that will grow and evolve, always reflecting the firm’s quest for achievement. As it happens, the Lough Shore logo is rock hard and iconic. Reminiscent of a causeway stone, its 6 sides represent the home counties with a nod to lone star swagger.

On reflection, brands need commitment to become great. Commitment from their owners to a big idea… as well as alignment across purpose, voice and identity. This requires control — best delivered through a trusted creative partnership — and confidence to allow flexibility, change and opportunities presented by new technology.

So back to our initial quandary. Is an Investment Company a brand? In recent times I’ve come to think that the truly great brands possess two critical attributes: 1.) The power to define a culture and 2.) The ability to inspire a following. These being the measures, this investment company most definitely is. It might just be one of the greatest.

Visit Lough Shore Investments

Logo shmogo… Nobody died.

I’ve been reading with mild amusement, recent hype around the latest in a long line of logo redesigns. Starbucks it seems, are the latest to go under the knife. In the words of Terry Davenport SVP of Marketing: ‘It’s a big year for us; we’re 40 years old and going into the new year we have big news as we unveil our new brand identity’.

Far from a logo revamp — and doubtless for well considered reasons — Starbucks has decided to consolidate and define a new strategy for the road ahead, and in doing so embark upon a process of reinterpreting how its brand is experienced across its various platforms. Unsurprisingly, the coffee behemoth has spun the process as a shiny upgrade to celebrate 40 years… no bad thing.

Somewhere within this eminently sensible process, the hallowed ‘Siren’ has been tweaked, refined, whatever… provoking the creative industry’s version of red top pap; ‘Starbucks in disastrous logo shocker!’ … ad nauseam. We’ve all had our fair share of this (notably at Frank, when working on BBC Northern Ireland’s new brand identity); that is, working with companies on a rebranding process, borne out of real need and solid thinking, only to be reduced in the eyes of ‘experts’ as a bad logo, a waste of money or a schoolboy error.

Progressive changes to Starbucks' logo

Other recent examples include global business consultancy PWC’s rebranding derided by some as just a bad logo job and perhaps deservedly, the abuse directed The Gap’s ill-informed venture into crowd-sourcing by numbers.

My feeling is that bad press goes hand in hand with publicizing a rebrand. The so-called ‘experts’ are only too willing to wax lyrical about logo design and bizarrely connect aesthetics to business performance. Go figure that one out.

The most interesting thing about the Starbucks hype is that as creative professionals, we invest significant time and energy explaining and rationalizing the creative process – but perhaps some of us are too quick to appraise the process as merely logo design. Sure, logos are pretty important and there are as many great examples as terrible ones. However — as with brand naming — many businesses thrive in spite of bad design. Put simply, a logo is NOT the be all and end all… it’s a badge, a signpost, the messenger-boy for a brand’s promise to its fans and prospective followers. For real effectiveness, consider brand virtues such as imagination, consistency and the capacity to engender engagement and interaction.

As a parting note on the Starbucks logo story; the revamp in question involves dropping the company name and the word coffee from the logo (the horror). For my money, it’s a bold move and an example of true brand strength. Time of course will tell.

Have you been involved in rebranding process gone right or wrong? Tell us your story.

Decking the Halls (& Toys)

Five hours, five people, some christmas decorations, the random assortment of toys that live around the studio (we should know better), a couple of DSLRs, fevered imaginations and a large dose of Christmas cheer! The strange, hilarious and oddly magical ingredients for this year’s Christmas message. It all wound up as a short movie (with alternative endings!) which you can watch for yourself at:

http://bit.ly/merrychristmasfromfrank

RANSOM Present National Anthem

A few of us here at Frank have now seen Ransom’s fantastic new production, National Anthem and we’re pleased to report that it had us grinning from start to finish so we are. Frank’s first collaboration with RANSOM and Colin Bateman’s first stage play is humorous and dark in equal measures so it is. Ok, enough of that!

It occurred to us that we’d captured the dark side with our infinite broken piano keys, while the stage designers had set about parodying the more comical aspects by tackling a parody of a public sector PR campaign. Complete with the obligatory cheesy photo portraits and ’Here’s Me’ tagline, this fictitious Northern Ireland rebranding programme took the form of promotional t-shirts, posters and flags, and yes, Badger that adorn the store room stage set.

National Anthem comes highly recommended and runs at The Baby Grand, Belfast from Monday 18 – Saturday 30 October as part of the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queens… so it does.

Frank appointed to University of Ulster Creative Roster

It’s been a busy summer for Frank – with a non-stop schedule, increasing digital and moving image work, the odd design conference here and there and the obligatory raft of new business pitches…

We were delighted to hear that we’ve been reappointed to Invest NI’s select list of design company’s that consult on their Design Development Programme. As one of the incumbent creative teams, Frank has been appointed to Invest’s new digital media roster, reflecting our increasing work in interactive design.

We also had a second epic win with our successful appointment to provide creative services to University of Ulster. One of only four companies on this new list, we’ll be working with the Institution on all editorial design and digital media projects for the next three years. So a busy spell, some nice results and looks like… more of that to follow!