Jack Morton brand identity guidelines

Putting together succinct guidelines can sometimes be a hard job. Less is more. Especially on those pages that show what cannot be done with the logo – let's face it, that could go on ad infinitum!

I worked closely with the brand designer on this one and we spent a lot of time on the naming and collating of the various master logo files, so as to (hopefully) avoid any confusion, and make these guidelines as easy as possible to follow and adhere to.

Earlier JM brand identities that I have worked on can be found here.

Stationery evolution

I have produced the artwork for the stationery for this company for over 12 years through 3 different name changes and 5 different identities. It comprises not just the usual letterhead, comp slip and business cards, but also a long list of labels, stickers and inserts for items such as CD cases, presentation documents and wallets, VHS and Beta tapes and cases, document covers, even carrier bags.
Shown here are the four early identities. Guidelines for the current one can be found here.
Please note the lovely thank you letter addressed to me which reads:

"Dear Jane... The brand launch, without doubt, was our best ever... An enormous amount of credit for the success goes to you, because without your hard work and professionalism it would not have been possible.... [we] found working with you very reassuring. Yours is certainly a job where patience and unflappability are a bonus and you have it in abundance...."

Nokia

Shown here is a design for a 4pp magazine insert, and some small pocket brochures. Nokia, as with most large well-established companies, already has a strong identity and strict corporate guidelines, so it's always a challenge coming up with new ideas and thinking within the box, to make each new item have an identity of its own

Jack Morton marketing

At JM they call these 'Snapshots'. Each 2-sided card is about one aspect of the company's strengths, or for one event or project.

My task when designing and artworking them, was to set up a loose template and then, depending on the images available for each one, choose the most intriguing or arresting image for the front of each card. For some of the more generic cards, a whole new image might need to be sourced or created from scratch.

On the reverse of each card a small selection images were chosen to accompany the text describing briefly the project from brief to completion.

There are 100s of these.

Royal Mail Group, print items for the Chairman's Excellence Awards

Every year The Royal Mail Group invites its staff to nominate a fellow employee for an award. The 2008 event was designed to look like a house with, for instance, themed wallpaper and carpet, a really large front door and over-sized electrical sockets.

Shown here are my initial designs for the various print items which continued the same idea – the posters featured everyday treats and rewards; the nomination form had a door on the front; the invitation had keys; the ticket had a welcome mat; the event programme featured things such as a reminder post-it on the fridge, a branded tablecloth with plates and menu, a coat stand on the prizes page, lights and lampshades for the nominees (luminaries!), and dining chairs for the judges.

Sadly, for me, a lot of these ideas were watered down by the time the job was finally artworked. The client was keen on the brown and gold stars image on the front of the programme and wanted this to be repeated wherever possible, in particular the posters, the nomination form and the ticket.

Re the internal pages of the programme, only the fridge and and the plates made it through to the final cut. I still say they could have used children's fridge magnet letters for the A-Z nominations. Ah well, what do I know?!

HP Technology@Work event guides

Three years running I have set up the templates and produced the artwork for these A5 event guides. They are full of seminar listings, company overviews and speaker biogs etc following HP's strict company style guidelines. It's "Style Sheet City". Strange as that may sound, messing about with type and forms is something I really enjoy as I find a great sense of satisfaction when it all fits in well, looks good and is easy for the user to understand and navigate.

Athens 2004 opening and closing ceremonies

Jack Morton created and produced the opening and closing ceremonies for the Olympic Games 2004 in Athens. 1000s of photographs were taken and a selection was was put into a 220pp book called 'Ceremony' which told the story of the making of these events.

I picture edited, designed and created the layouts and artwork, based on a rough template that had already been set up. I also went to the printers to do a press pass etc.

I am really pleased final printed book, and it was hard choosing just 8 spreads to show here.

I also designed an invitation for the book launch; my idea being a 6pp concertina leaflet that could be torn along perforations to make individual postcards, one being the reply paid card acceptance card. Sad to report that the printer used perforations that were too close together and thus the things just fell apart once opened. I was SO disappointed!

Other landscape format postcards were also designed.

IBM Bangalore invitation

I was really getting into this and then the event was cancelled. Hence, these are working designs. I wanted each of the 16 A4 pages to depict some of the sumptuous colours and textures of Banaglore.

An earlier design for an event at St Andrews is here.

MOD – Falklands 25 years commemoration ceremony handbook

A prestigious event and what a lovely job to work on.
The design had already been created and approved. I was brought in to streamline it, pull the artwork together and oversee the print, which was almost a disaster, the printer having omitted to buy in the correct cream paper stock. But in the end we got them to flood the pages with 7% yellow and the same effect was achieved.
I watched the flypast from The Mall on the day and it was great to see so many people clutching their copies as souvenirs of the day.

BT pitch

Squares again. Even the document, designed to look more like a brochure, is twice as high as it is wide; i.e 2 squares.

Bertelsman pitch

This was an A3 document designed and created to explain to the client the timeline of a 9 minute film. I constructed a grid with an orange line at the top which showed the timeframe being outlined in the image at the centre. Text in columns at either side further explained what was happening at that time; Music, Dance, Screen, Lighting. I understand it was a big success and a template that was used again.

London in Beijing pitch document

Keep it simple they said. So I did. A basic grid of 6x4 squares. I do like squares! Using JM fonts and colours.

IBM St Andrews invitation

A 16pp A4 landscape invitational brochure to a prestigious golfing weekend at St Andrews hosted by IBM for its executives. (The images shown here are from early working artworks, not the finished product.)

I really enjoyed working on this one; the brief was to use 'traditional' yet 'uncheesy' imagery, which proved tough to source, but no-one agreed with me that it would have been a good idea if I'd gone up there and taken some photos for myself. Ah well.

I began designs on for a second event in Bangalore, India, but sadly that event was cancelled.

Jack Magazine

An over-sized in-house marketing magazine for Jack Morton. I must admit the design and general look of it must go to the wonderfully talented Matt Hoare (that's his hand on the front), but I helped to pull the artwork together, re-jig and tweak a lot of the layouts, streamline the type, style sheets etc. A lovely job. I worked on the subsequent one too, but unfortunately I have no ref of that.

Philips pitch

The guys at JM had come up with the idea that at this motivational event the delegates would all be adding to a painting to make one big image. So all I had to do was create a document which hinted at that idea but didn't give the idea away too quickly...

MOD pitch document

We were all so disappointed that this pitch was rejected as we had really put a lot of work into it, confident that JM would get the job. Ah well. You usually can't beat a bit of Impact and Helvetica Neue.