20 odd years ago, it was the romance of hearing about the then Alfa Romeo Head of Design, Walter Da Silva using his menu to sketch design details of a new car to a journalist in a Milan restaurant that sealed my love for the creative process. It made me want to become a designer and more importantly realise the power of a sketch. Something that has remained with me since.

Anybody that has worked with the loft in recent years will know that the one thing we do is sketch – a lot actually. Thumbnails of details on a post-it note, story-boarding an infographic on the back of an envelope, at times we even provide clients with hand-drawn sketch sheets to present ideas with their proposal.

Why??

Well firstly, it puts the individual back in control of the process. In the days with more and more machine input – we believe in the richness, inspiration and creativity of the individual first and software tools second.

Secondly, it’s just faster. When timelines are getting squeezed – sketches allow you to explore more ideas quicker – taking a few minutes to draw can also save hours of going down a wrong route with the computer.

Thirdly, they are usually more inspirational, more raw and crucially more open to interpretation. This is important at the early stage of the process when you’re wanting to get on the front foot with your ideas without too many restrictions that can kill creativity.

Fourth, they can give an invaluable insight to clients helping them to visualise what you’ll create for them well in advance.

Finally they democratise the process – anybody can have an idea and sketch it. Even if it is a bit rough at first. We’ve had work-experience students, clients, MD’s even accountants all make significant contributions to a creative project with some swipes of a pen on a scrap sheet of paper.

Want to accelerate, strengthen and enrich the creative process? Go back a step and go for a quick sketch.

Benedetto

Benedetto

Benedetto is an ideas-driven Creative Entrepreneur. He is on a mission to unleash the power of creativity to create a better world – for people, business and society. He is the founder of the loft, a design and branding company which operates worldwide helping companies bring their brands to life in the most imaginative and effective ways possible. A real man on a mission. Benedetto likes to make things happen fast and in a big way.

Last week, I was privileged to be asked to speak to the good people of Thrive Networking at The Corinthian in Glasgow. It was a privilege as the person that proceeded me was Roger Green – a phenomenally successful entrepreneur who has built several multi-million pound businesses including his latest . It was a privilege to share a stage with Roger.

Our audience were nearly all people from professional services and I wanted to give as much value as I could. So I started with a little context – nothing will market your business better than happy clients, delighted clients who will talk about the ‘amazing’ service you provided for them – the richness of the experience. What we do, the ‘brand and marketing communications’ are important but are very much the cherry and not the cake. Social Media’s real place is in marketing products or mass-marketing. It has a massively important place in bringing to life – an inanimate object or talking to huge volumes of people at one time.

However, we are in the services business, the people business and people are not inanimate objects – and as such – nothing can replace the emotional impact a human-experience will have on us. So the experience your client has is your best form of marketing & further sales. Where brand, marketing and social media can help is in the nurturing and developing of relationships.

Reputation and relationships are everything to a professional services brand.

Here are 7 tips I shared last week…

– Marketing is all about relationship building with people – whether you are looking to attract new people to your brand or build deeper relationships, it is all about people. The marketing part is really just giving something to strengthen a relationship. If you are marketing a product – it can be using an ad to share something funny, something emotive or educational. It can be giving something away. A professional services brand can give something away, but if you are in professional services, you really should focus on the personal. What can you give away that is personal?

– Leading onto some ideas that you can give away? Knowledge is good, specialised knowledge is very good, properly bespoke information tailored to a clients’s problem is outstanding. On the face of it, our company – the loft always delivers the same thing – a brand, a website, a campaign, etc. But dig a bit deeper and you will see that they are all beautifully personal to the people we serve, who each have their own challenges and issues. Personalisation is where the value is. If you can share something personal to a certain group or individual- they will value you that little bit higher.

– In addition to specialised knowledge, meet-ups are great, think how you can make them more valuable for the people you are looking to serve? We have beautiful, home-made Lasagne with Prosecco in our studio at the end of every month which gives everybody the change to have a bit of a get together and a chat.

– People, people, people. On the website, in the pictures, on the screen as videos. If people can feel that they like and trust you before they have met you, they are more likely to want to meet you when they are looking for somebody to carry through a task for them. A little peppering os personal stories helps too…

– You can never have too many case studies and testimonials. The most useful document we have made in recent months is not our client portfolio but a simple 3-page A4 showing all of the different clients we have worked with and two pages worth of testimonials. it gives us instant credibility and trust when begin asked to work with new clients.

– Case studies, images and videos should all have the human element to it. Many times, we will provide the same service as our competitors, but it is less about what you do but how you have done it. The personalised bit here is really important and demonstrates your value.

– “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care” A lovely quote from Colin Robertson of Alexander Dennis but one that further emphasises the personal aspect to your communications.

As I said it was a privilege to have been asked to speak and I hope the little tips above are useful too…

Benedetto

Benedetto is a designer and founder of the loft – a specialist design studio based in Glasgow.

The loft takes the true essence of what organisations do and with his team brings those stories to life with a coherence, simplicity and delightfulness that helps companies to create outstanding brand communications.

‘Design with Soul’ is more than a company tag-line to Benedetto, it is a way of life.

His journey has taken him from a career in car design through to his current role. He is honoured to manage a great team, work with great clients and have a lot of fun mixing with so many great people in business.

Continuing to explore the question, ‘Are Scottish whisky companies staying too conservative with how they are branding in an already saturated market?’ I’ve been looking at a hell of a lot of whisky and very few have made such an impression as the feature of today’s blog.

One distillery that takes the idea of my question and flips it on it’s head is Islay’s own Bruichladdich distillery. One word that is at the heart of this Hebridean distillery’s ethos…’Progressive.’

“We are proudly non-conformist, as has always been the way in these Western Isles – Oirthir Gaidheal, the Coast of the Gaels, the land of the outsider…we believe in innovation and progress, with constantly striving to produce a more characterful spirit, one with more integrity and provenance, one that is more expressive of this wonderful island we are lucky to live on. A spirit to put a smile on your face wherever you are, and to help you close your eyes and quietly dream of Islay.

We are progressive, Hebridean distillers.”

This ethos is delightfully expressed in the company’s branding solutions and packaging designs. Choosing to express a non-conformist image, in a market classically branded with romantic aspects of the Scottish landscape, is a bold, forward thinking ideal that works in positioning Bruichladdich as one of the most distinguishable brands on the market.

Further to the absence of graphics and photography, favouring modern san-serif typographic solutions—one aspect of the distillery’s branding that allows it to occupy this rare position in the market is it’s bold use of colour. It’s not just colour for colour’s sake, it’s a well thought out method in engaging with customers and communicating an important aspect of where the whisky comes from;

“Our blue/green colour – we call it “aqua” – is quite simply the colour of the sea outside the distillery on a bright spring day – we see it a thousand times a day when we look out of the window, and we have never seen the same colour twice. It really is wonderfully enigmatic and fleeting, and we confess to having spent many tens of thousands of pounds in proofing our tins over the years to try and capture that particular shade of aqua exactly – an evocative representation of that capricious light and sea that is such a feature of these Western Isles.”

Singling out just one of Bruichladdich’s packaging solutions to comment on—regarding how they’re using progressive design and print techniques to help them stand out—is difficult as they are all impressive, but there is one that stands out for me. ‘The Classic Laddie’

INSERT IMAGE FOR ‘THE LADDIE’

The aqua colour has been used as the main feature in this design, giving the bottle some serious shelf presence. A technique very rarely seen in the drinks industry—the bottle itself has been dipped in a lovely matte coating of the distillery’s famous colour, the rich ‘aqua’ paint adhering to the glass to give it a smooth feel in the hand which emotes luxury. Added to this feeling of luxury is the silver foil used to seal in the bottles cork, a nice contrast of materials. The matte finish of the bottle opposes the shelf norm of shiny glass, helping it stand out in the customer’s periphery.

Furthering this distinctive bottle treatment, the well considered typography has been printed in a matte white spot uv, bold but not over-powering. The type provides a different texture providing a nice contrast to the smooth bottle finish.

IMAGE OF TIN

Progressive print techniques have also been utilised on the tin that houses the bottle. They’ve embossed the tin to make a feature of the bold typography—which becomes tangible in the customer’s hand, instilling a feeling of luxury and craft. Other nice touches are they clear spot uv logo emblem—hinting at the distillery’s heritage—which catches light at differing angles. Lastly, the silver foil used for some of the body type—again, providing that hint of class and luxury.

In relation to the question of Scottish distilleries being too conservative, for Bruichladdich, the word ‘conservative’ is obviously absent from their vocabulary. Their story and ethos that leads their bold design choices have truly set them apart from the vast majority of whiskies on the market and I, for one, applaud the results.

Hi folks,

Apologies its been a little while since I last posted a blog. Its been an incredibly busy time at Loft HQ. This week we talk about how the creativity of our designers should be put to good use in areas other than simply branding/graphic/web design. And we also discuss some of the other issues of the day…

Lets put creativity at the heart of business

When working on things, I believe we should always consult the bigger picture. Most of the time in design projects I consider the business case for the type of brand communication we offer. We must be honest with ourselves, as designers we are not artists, we are there to commercially enhance the value of our clients. There is a very artistic slant to what we do but the place of design must always be hand in hand with good business. And what has occured to me more recently is that in 90% of design projects, we designers are being asked to work the wrong way round. As designers our role usually comes to the fore once the product or the offering has been shaped and decided upon. Our creativity simply being used to decorate the product once most of the major decisions have been made.

However, there is increasing evidence that the more prominence given to design by companies, the greater the potential for commercial gain. Put simply, design should be given a role at the heart of decision making. Now this isnt long-winded fanfare for the importance of my own industry. The reasons are stronger. Now this is where it can get complicated. Design like Art is about finding and communicating the truth. Really great design work tends to be the result of a central vision which touches every aspect of the business process. This vision is usually led by a passion for the cause and not an obsession with the final result. If you look at great products such as the I-Pad, the actual graphical style of the product is only a small cog of a huge central vision. The creativity, passion and motives of most real designers are attributes that can only enhance organisations large and small. The ideas generated can inspire organisations and lead them to great things. If you look at some great organisations such as Ferrari, the design and engineering excellence of modern Ferraris give the workers at Maranello absolute passion and pride in the work they do. Why? Because their is a central vision that is clear to everybody at Ferrari about what the company is about. Similarly, Google’s recent premise that their central vision is Google’s mission is “to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Once that vision is clear

We build visual identities, not websites

I have often told people that the Loft does design websites but we are not web-designers, sometime to much puzzlement. What does this mean? How can it be? Well, your average web design company tend to be technically driven joomla specialists or the like. Client gives them brief, they very efficiently use the software that they are most comfortable with and build you a website. The results tend not to be too spectacular.

The Loft does not adhere to this approach. Dont get me wrong, website design is our most popular service, but we take a different approach. Designing a website is necessary task but if it is not underpinned with the correct brand message, it is a completely pointless task. That also applies to those brochures and any other material that does not chime with your brand values. It is like the general of an army sending his troops to go fight in a battle. It matters not how prepared, well trained and equipped the army is. If the general does not send them in the right direction. It becomes a completely futile excercise. And when it comes to brands, consistency is king. All the great brands understand this. Bigger ones such as Audi and Apple, slightly less well known ones such as Innocent who make Smoothies and even smaller companies like Freelance World, Aberdeen who I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. All businesses have a culture, but what the great brands I mentioned do is take this one step further.

For starters, they all have super-consistent visual identities. Website, marketing material, logo, business card are all designed in accordance to the brand guidelines. But what all the companies I have mentioned do is ingrain their culture into new activities and excercises that further strengthen their brands.

Audi are a company that prides itself on being a forward looking company that embraces technological innovation. They are involved in activities such as the ‘Audi design foundation’ and more recently the Audi Urban Future Award. It goes one step further in harnessing a brand image.

However, this great brand building activities like this are not the sole propriety of larger companies. Freelance World of Aberdeen are very pro-active in promoting their ‘Jelly’ which further enhances their young energetic brand.

At the Loft, we see no point in building a website if the underlying brand is weak and inconsistent. It is our role to find creative ways to accentuate a brand. To help build that culture, to build that culture. Building websites is part of this, and we do it very well, but