Identity and website for Blue Monday

For some of us, coming back to work after the Christmas and New Year’s break is, at the very least, a grind. Often gloomy and cold, the season’s inevitable over-indulgence can leave many of us willing the end of January and the welcome sight of our next pay cheques. So, with this in mind, Blue Monday was created as an antidote to this notoriously difficult time of year – another fabulous, socially-focussed project created by People United.

Launching on January 25th 2010, everyone can get involved. Through even the simplest of gestures, a usually troublesome Monday, can be turned into an inspirational day, promoting, trust, friendship and human connections.

As soon as we heard about the project we connected with it, providing design donation in the form of brand identity and supporting website. Let’s face it – the last couple of years have been somewhat challenging, so it’s great to get involved in something with such a positive message at its heart.

The identity needed to show characteristics of strength and lightheartedness, whilst appealing to as broad an audience as possible. Swapping the counters of a heavy slab serif ‘B’ for hand-rendered, classic cloud shapes and pairing a vibrant blue with an almost-black, resulted in a strong visual language that should see Blue Monday through many years of development and growth. With weather featuring prominently across all Blue Monday’s assets, the visual language consistently marks the tension between happiness and sadness. Persuasive, uplifting copy was kindly supplied by Mike Reed of Reed Words.

The outcome is positive and playful, but also authoritative. Naturally, we’re pleased that siteInspire liked it too. Hopefully, all of this will encourage involvement in the project and build a growing and consistent community of positivity that can tackle the season’s heaviness head on.

Dynamic identity for Converge, a series of events exploring the crossover between photography, filmmaking and CG

Filmmakers are discovering the freedom of low-cost, high-quality methods of realising their ideas with equipment more routinely associated with stills photography – SLR-sized cameras, prime and zoom lenses and a highly-mobile mentality.

We recently worked on the identity for ‘Converge’, a series of events exploring this emerging crossover between photography, filmmaking and CG. It was an unusual project for us in the sense that we only developed and delivered the central mark – a converging, dynamic RGB arrangement that can be seen as either a 2D graphic or 3D ‘cubes’ – and suggestion for accompanying typography – before the outcome left our studio and influence.

We don’t like to send our offspring away from home and out to work before they’re completely equipped for life. Hopefully, they’ve left us well-dressed and, perhaps, they’ll come back home to visit us in the future for a bit more TLC.

Besides their presence on the highstreets of London and Brighton, TRAID extend their mission to educate on the subjects of world poverty and the environment to secondary schools. The sessions, delivered in person by TRAID, have proven very popular and help to get young people to think about the impact of their fashion and recycling choices on the world at large. However, with over 3200 secondary schools in the UK, it’s impossible for TRAID to attend every classroom. To meet the demand for their lessons and activities, we’ve helped them create ‘Behind the Seams’, an education pack which provides the information and structure to enable teachers to deliver the same insights and messages of sustainability.

The pack, produced almost entirely with recycled and/or sustainably-sourced materials (right down to the Cellogreen, a compostable gloss, silk and matt laminate) and features, amongst other things consciousness-raising posters, lesson plans, DVD and a current TRAIDremade collection – a great way of demonstrating that recycled, environmentally friendly fashion can be contemporary and as beautifully shot and presented as any other.

Hopefully, the materials and lessons they support will make young people think about their role in the fashion industry, either as a direct participant or – almost unavoidably – as a consumer. One of the posters features a boy similar to the young people they’re intended for, except he was ‘bought’ for £80 and sews cheap garments for the west in conditions that make the average school look magnificent. Hopefully, the delivery of messages like this will move even the most reluctant student to be grateful for an opportunity to be in class today.

We’re believers in the positive impact of becoming ‘close’ to our clients – not in a sinister, stalking manner – but in the sense of developing personal concern for their well–being as an organisation or business. It’s one thing to care about the success of your work for them, but more important to be able to care about how well they perform. Having a genuine investment of that kind is reflected in the creative work you deliver for your client as a designer. It helps if the client in question does good work for good causes, of course.

Zerofee has been working with TRAID in various guises since their inception ten years ago. They’ve flown by, because we’ve always had fun with them. Something we’ve been longing to tackle for a number of years is a ‘refurbishment’ of their identity; the original had been very popular but, after a decade, was looking tired and in need of an overhaul. Retaining the central idea, visual language and well-recognised colour palette (with a subtle tweak to address some previous CMYK weakness) were fundamental requirements and the result sees its first major outing in the launch of TRAID’s new Camden shop – appropriately, their tenth in their tenth birthday year.

We think the new identity retains all the positive characteristics of the original while visually simplifying, strengthening and modernising it for another decade. It’s been a fantastic challenge to implement the new identity in this retail environment; projecting signs, window displays, swing tags, posters and mass of other less visible, but no less important manifestations. We’re looking forward to seeing it put into effect at other locations soon and, by all accounts, the Camden shop is already doing well.

Zerofee is also involved in an ongoing programme of work that sees the identity roll out across a range of requirements (including a suite of materials for TRAID’s educational program) that test its flexibility and, without any hesitation, we can say we’re enjoying every minute of it. We’re really proud to be associated with a group of people who have been at the forefront of an effort to raise the profile of the environmental and social impact of the fashion industry and have worked incredibly hard to give London (and Brighton) an opportunity to shop sustainably and look incredible. Our relationship with TRAID is a perfect example of what we love to do – challenging, progressive and ethically sound work for an organisation that we feel close to and makes us feel like we’re part of their team.

The photos in this post are shot by the wonderful Caroline Purday (except where indicated) and the TRAID Camden shop architectural design was undertaken by Burogloo, with signage and vinyl work produced by AJ Darling & Sons.