We are half way through our week long reveal of Truce Commission posters created by rival design firms. What is the Truce Commission you ask? Well we invited 12 rival design consultancies to do posters for each other. Why not? They always advise clients not to attempt their own creative work on the grounds they might be too close to certain issues to be objective. And it proved particularly timely as a way of marking the international day of peace – September 21.
We’ve already revealed the posters that rivals SEA and The Brand Union came up with, as well as the creative work resulting from the Howdy and Brilliant Path, and Cubo and Constuct ‘rivalries’ when they were given each other’s design briefs. Now it’s time to look at what Gardiner Richardson and Lloyd Northover thought of each other, you can find the work, briefs and rationales below.
And remember, The Drum is continuing the Truce Commission by asking more agencies to get involved. Our first new brief will be published on Friday. Find out more here.
Lloyd Northover's breif for Gardiner Richardson
Background:
Lloyd Northover was established in 1975. If you look back over the last 37 years, we’ve been there doing our stuff at almost every crucial moment. We were branding other airlines whilst Thatcher was causing her BA furore. We were developing the FSA brand when the world of finance was undergoing one of its many loss of confidences. We’ve worked in higher education as it’s gone through over two decades of dramatic change. And so on.
We’re a brand communications consultancy that encompasses strategy, creative and implementation. It involves all the projects you’d expect and so much more. We’re specialists in place branding, higher education, business to business, government and the public sector, and financial services. What unites our diverse sectors is that they’re comprised of grown ups that want to tell the compelling truth about themselves. In the organisations we work with, we’re usually working with the senior team.
Our message:
We’re so busy managing brand positioning for our clients, we haven’t completed the exercise for ourselves. Cobblers’ children! Though we’re clear about the raw, driving messages behind it, we haven’t found the right shorthand or interesting expression of it.
What we’re like?
• We connect our disciplines – so we have account managers who are visually literate, creatives who can think, strategists who understand creative and delivery. No silos, just versatile communications specialists.
• We connect our outputs – because we develop strategy, creative and manage implementation, our work is better. Our strategy is accountable, our creative works in implementation, our implementation respects the big idea.
• We connect what we learn in one area and translate it to another – our sector expertise is diverse and it enriches the whole. So what we’ve learned in place branding, we’ve translated into higher education where place is all important. And so on.
• We connect with people – we have long term client relationships (longest is 14 years), we’re fun to be around, we have empathy and we’re grounded.
What it means for those who work with us?
We make the right connections – we don’t just think in straight lines. We take the complex, see what really matters and make it simple. That’s what good communication is all about. We connect people with their goals – we’re brand communications specialists. Though this means the kind of projects you might expect (rebrands, guidelines etc), it means so much more besides (helping client bid teams turn their bids into real pieces of communication, developing recruitment campaigns etc). We connect our clients with their goals by the best means possible, whatever it is, whether it’s what they anticipated or not. We connect until we find the right creative spark that lights the touch-paper – and this runs through everything we do.
We’d love to find a succinct and interesting way of getting these messages across please!
Our visual brand:
Our visual brand is black and white. The colour is provided by the work we do for our clients. You’ll see these principles play out on our website. Our logo comprises the LN symbol, but also the Lloyd Northover typographic mark. They need to be used together and probably don’t work as effectively together online as they should (the relationship between symbol and name isn’t suffi ciently clear and defi ned, the typographic mark is lost amongst the other copy). Cobblers’ children again! Our tone of voice: Our website will give you a good sense of this. We’re straight talking and aim to make the complex simple. We’re thoughtful but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. This also means
we’re quite prepared to be light hearted and use the vernacular!
Our poster:
As you can see, we know what we stand for but spend so much time working with our clients, we haven’t really captured our message succinctly and well. We’d love our poster to get across the heart and soul of our offer, talking predominantly to prospective clients, but also the rest of the creative world.