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Virgin Trains / magazine

When Virgin Trains put out their employee engagement publication to  tender they were looking for a solution that would not be perceived as another bland, run-of-the-mill corporate mouthpiece. Virgin as a brand was known for its bold, disruptive approach to its advertising, which up until that point was not reflected in the manner in which they communicated with their own staff. I wanted their internal publication to be as playful, subversive and irreverent as their customer campaigns, and to speak with the same voice. The new approach was not only a successful pitch, but achieved a measurable increase in the levels of trust and engagement with staff at a crucial time for the business, as it prepared its own pitch to retain the East Coast rail franchise.

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When I initially took over the account covers were unadorned portraits shot in a staid, typically corporate style. As I built a relationship with the client, and a level of trust, I was able to have a discussion with them about being more adventurous and pushing them to be more irreverent, in line with their customer-facing brand. That relationship was key to getting their buy-in and in getting them to commit more budget to realise the idea.

client brief / pitch presentation / creative strategy / editorial design / magazine launch / relationship management

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The client had a relatively modest image budget available for each issue. An important aspect of the pitch was demonstrating that I could get the most from it and, where it wouldn't stretch to, make judicious use of stock and font libraries in a manner that maintained the quality throughout.

client brief / pitch presentation / creative strategy / editorial design / magazine launch / relationship management

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A selection of spreads from the magazine.

client brief / pitch presentation / creative strategy / editorial design / magazine launch / relationship management

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Key to winning over the client was the successful way in which the magazine approached the presentation of complex and somewhat technical information with a warm, light-hearted touch that made it more accessible to the reader.

client brief / pitch presentation / creative strategy / editorial design / magazine launch / relationship management

bonmarche / xxxxxx

The research for the pitch to highstreet retailer Bonmarché, to reimagine their customer communications, indicated that the predominantly older demography of their customers were fashion-conscious but felt alienated by newsstand fashion magazines and brands. Too busy. Too brash. Too chaotic. Just some of the comments that came back. The company was also looking to move away from being perceived as a 'value' brand. The creative for their customer magazine and associated in-store items looked to address these concerns while maintaining traditional content themes. Ultimately, this was one pitch that wasn't successful. The overall cost being the defining issue.

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Customer surveys from the pitch research indicated that the slightly older demographic of the average Bonmarché customer felt put-off by conventional fashion magazines, in particular by what was felt to be their excessively-busy layouts. The creative approach to the pitch addressed these concerned with a more restrained approach.

client brief / creative strategy / editorial design / brand design

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The research also revealed that customers, aware that Bonmarché was considered a 'budget' brand, would feel self-conscious enough hide their logo-adorned carrier  bags inside of others. These reimagined bags instead foreground a positive brand slogan, creating an attractive bag that showcases seasonal patterns, and that customers want to be seen with.

client brief / creative strategy / product design / brand design

gatwick airport / magazine

Your Magazine (named as such following a company-wide poll) is the employee publication distributed to Gatwick Airport's 3,000-plus-strong workforce. I was the creative lead on a successful competitive pitch to take over the account – refreshing and relaunching the title in the process. After presenting the proposition to both the communication department and the senior leadership team, I worked closely with the in-house team to oversee a seamless handover from the incumbent agency and went through the process being security-cleared to work airside at the airport.

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An important objective within the brief was to humanise the senior leadership team, presenting them as people while at the same time communicating their key business goals. Photography was designed to appear informal and off-the-cuff, with subjects always actively engaged with a person or a task.

client brief / pitch presentation / creative strategy / editorial design / magazine launch / relationship management

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The magazine played around with an expanded and slightly oddly-matched group of fonts, from the classic and decorously expressive to the modern and digitised. This quirky mix – not quite business, not exactly lifestyle – fitted the brief's analysis of Gatwick's mixed identity as a travel hub, and represented its self-perception as experimental and slightly avant-garde within its sector.

client brief / pitch presentation / creative strategy / editorial design / magazine launch / relationship management

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A selection of spreads from the magazine.

client brief / pitch presentation / creative strategy / editorial design / magazine launch / relationship management

discover Tv / supplement

Discover TV was a new launch in response to the rise and importance of streaming services and the abundance of content that they now produce. Radio Times readers are very much traditional viewers of linear television and would have seen the encroachment of digital-only shows into the features run as a reduction in the content that they were used to. The magazine couldn't ignore such a large, predominantly younger, viewership, though. So by launching a separate supplement devoted to the streamers it could open up content to new readers while reassuring long-term readers that it provided added-value to the existing product.

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Not technically a conventional competitive pitch but the process of launching the supplement was in many ways very similar. The editor essentially set a writer and I a brief to see if we could create a product that would work as both a bound in supplement and a separate stand-alone product. We would cloister ourselves off and come back and pitch ideas and designs to him, until we'd...

internal brief / pitch presentation / creative strategy / editorial design / magazine launch

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A selection of pages from the magazine.

internal brief / pitch presentation / creative strategy / editorial design / magazine launch

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