American Express Business Travel – Earls Court 2011

Those blue blurry lines again. But this time with no background image and the whole effect looked a lot cleaner and neater. I managed to find time to go to the show and take some photos of the finished product. Happy to say I was really pleased with the quality and finish of the graphics.

Amex Pacesetters 2010

Every year Amex put on a 'thank you' event for their best-performing employees, and in 2010 the theme was 'magic'.

Shown here is a very small selection of some of the items of collateral and event graphics I created which included elements for an Alice In Wonderland courtroom complete with 'wooden' walls and desk (a pic of the finished thing is shown bottom left).

American Express London Skyline panels

As previously mentioned, Amex has a really strong identity for Business Travel which involves a fair bit of Photoshop work. Once an image is sourced, either from Amex's database of images or from a picture library, the general layout/design has to be agreed before blurred movement lines are added in specific shades of blue. In this instance I needed to find a suitable image that would be OK to use at 8 metres wide and really lucky to find the one below on Flickr. A mobile of logos and other Amex images hung above it. I understand it was well-received.

NP Aerospace product cards

These product cards were created for use at the Excel 09 event using the same colours for the 7 sectors, but an overall grid/graph background was added to denote technical design.

NP Aerospace event graphics and identity redesign

NP Aerospace wanted a more modern, clean, coherent identity. And they wanted this to start from the Excel 09 event where they had a large stand.

Time was of the essence, so, retaining the roundel version of the logo, I designed a template that could be adapted for use on each of the 7 sectors, giving each of the 1.5m triptychs a dirty pastel backround colour, utilising a red thread to hold together the 'story' of how their products are manufactured from start to finish.

This design was then adapted for use on the individual product cards using the colours as an overall grid background.

The same idea was also applied to the 3 panels for the IST toblerone, part of the same stand, shown here bottom right.

American Express exhibition timeline panels

I designed and created the arwork for lots of these large (1.2m high) panels for various Amex events worldwide. They illustrate Amex's history and achievements since 1850. Once a basic template was designed, the trick was to always vary the layouts as, despite them always appearing in chronological order, not always all of them were used. So I had to be aware that two boards might end up sitting side-by-side and should not look too similar. Images also had to be given different treatments for the same reason.

American Express Business Travel

Amex's style guide was already set in stone. These show how I managed to apply the design to a few items. The strict guidelines comprise a few awkward elements, such as blurred and distorted motion lines, graduated filigree backgrounds, specific linear blends, etc., and trying to get all of these parts to work together within a specific area, taking into consideration the joins or gaps, can be quite a big ask. And then, in most cases, the Photoshop work for the motion lines has to be created from scratch for each item. A lengthy process but they do look good in the end.