Anabas front cover showing Clear Foil blocking onto Rives Design textured board

The original brief called for a creative and versatile solution that could grow and expand with Anabas. The design team at Better devised a brochure that could be adapted at any time through the course of its life by utilising a bespoke pleated binding solution which allows Anabas to add and remove pages when needed. This system will also allow the marketing team at Anabas to tailor the brochure to specific targets, markets or events through a bespoke internal sheet.

The Anabas brochure showing the special fold technique used on the cover

We are over the moon with the finished result and are looking forward to working on more creative projects like with this one with Doug and the team at Anabas.

Appreciate all the hard work and effort from the team and I’m delighted with the end result.  Getting some good “ooo’s” and “ah’s” from people in the office too.

Doug Bacon, Head of Sales & Marketing at Anabas.

Anabas brochure internal pages

Featured DPS showing transparent screen printed inserts

The images below show some of the work that went into the design and production of the new Anabas brochure including client meetings, initial presentation and the first print runs.

For more work we have done with this client click to see their case study.

Stories are art, crafted to take the reader on a journey designed by the author to deliver a meaningful emotional experience. This seminar, and I recommend you seek out one of Robert’s London seminars if you have the chance, provided me with a rich learning experience that helps me in my desire to understand better the correlation between our emotions and values and the brands we buy.

I believe brands need to be storytellers. Using craft and structure to reveal the complex associations of values, benefits and features to their audiences using language they intrinsically understand and connect with. Their stories must tell the simple truth of their existence, helping their audience to see clearly their value, design and importantly create a platform for long term engagement.

It is in the storytelling therefore that some brands fail. They offer the same quality of service or product as successful brands, and yet they don’t translate this into their own success. They fail to capture the imagination of their audience and we must ask ourselves why?

In tough market conditions many brand owners are forced to treat their brands as commodities, pressured by the demand for sales and a focus from the boardroom on buying short term brand loyalty. This has two long term implications for the brand. Firstly it can turn a premium brand in to a value brand that is traded (which isn’t sustainable) rather than positioned, and secondly it makes the brand compete with other brands in the wallet and not in the minds of the audience.

Whilst audiences want brands to recognise and reward loyalty, we as brand owners need to inspire them too. If all we do is reflect and remind them that money is always the key driver in their life, we’re letting them down. The brand owner must focus beyond the effective management of their marketing budgets and simply trying to buy customer loyalty.

We must convince audiences that when value in the economy is shaky the values of the brand remain constant, offer tangible benefits and give them something to believe in and sometimes aspire towards having.

“But the majority of brands have to deal or die” is the answer from many brand owners but this simply isn’t true. Some brands, with very little money, have managed to engage their audience and developed deep emotional relationships that inform, entertain and differentiate.

They have become storytellers, that enable their audience to connect with the values of the brand and absorb meaning through the craft of their brand story.

So what are the components of an effective story:

1) Unlike stories that are fiction brands must tell the truth of their existence. Why do they exist in the world, to serve what purpose for their audience? Here the reason is all important. We want to create (A) because (B) needs it to enable them to do (C). A brand story, in its telling, should smoothly transport the audience from A to C, be utterly transparent and feel right. You know when your been strung a line, you feel it. It you don’t believe it, you can be sure your audience wont either!

2) Frame your story to reflect accurately (without dwelling on it) the pain in your audience’s life you wish to remove with your brand. I use the analogy of people reading horoscopes. Those people that believe them look for themselves in the writing of the horoscope.

If they recognise themselves or a character trait or a situation they are experiencing they instantly develop a deep bonds of trust with the writer because “They get me!” It shows your audience that you understand them intimately. Adversely, if you simply scratch the surface of understanding your audience how can you hope to translate learning into meaningful products or services?

3) Craft your message using all your learning about your audience to be instantly recognisable and understandable. You must speak the same language as your audience or risk them missing the point of your brand.

4) Take your audience with you on a journey that has a clear destination in mind. The characters of a story are all moving toward some desired outcome, every action either positive or negative will move them toward it. So too must your brand story, it must help your audience towards a deeper understanding of the values, benefits and features of your brand and not simply make un-connected statements regardless of them being true.

5) Entertain if possible but at the very least inform your audience so they can differentiate your brand from others. The example I always refer too is Blendtec. Their blender may not be a sexy brand but that didn’t stop them thinking about and translating the values and benefit of their blender into something that is both fun, entertaining and informative.

“Will it Blend” started life as a campaign and has grown into a community where the owner of the company asks the simple question, “Will it Blend?”. It being everything from industrial magnets to hockey pucks! Delivered through YouTube, short video’s of them attempting to blend a whole raft of objects entertains but subtly re-enforces the benefits of the brand that being that Blendtec blenders are very robust, dependable blenders.

Reflecting on the great depression of the 20s and 30s, audiences going to the movies actually grew. People found the money and went to the movies to escape the harsh reality of living and for the 90 minutes telling of a story found a world crafted for them by screenwriters, authors and play writers.

Audience’s today don’t want the constant reminder of the frugality’s of living. They need value of course but they also want to be told a story and believe in something. They want to know we care about them and not just the pound they carry around in their pocket.

Onyx Group, the North East’s leading internet service provider, has commissioned Better Brand Agency to support them in recent graphic design and print projects. Projects included Onyx Group’s festive campaign and preparation for a launch event in Edinburgh to support its programme of acquisitions across the UK.

Over the last 12 years Onyx Group has established itself as the North East’s, leading internet service provider, but there’s so much more to Onyx than the provision of Internet Access. Following a programme of acquisition and organic growth, the Onyx Group of today is fully resourced to provide an extensive range of ICT related services to organisations, whatever their size or the nature of their operations.

Project Details.

Product Brand Development, Creative Design, Graphic Design, Print Design, Marketing Campaign Development.

More Screenshots.

+ View All Latest Client Projects +

So, with a few hours of scratching his head and getting acquainted with Adobe After Effects here’s what he came up with. We don’t think it’s too bad for his first go?

Better Brand Agency is a brand agency offering brand, graphic design, marketing, social media and social networking, web and digital services based in Tees Valley, North East and North Yorkshire.

Well we’ve been up and running for a few months now and it seems silly that we haven’t really shown anyone what we can do. We’ve simply been that busy we haven’t had time to add any pics of our work.

To remedy this I thought I’d quickly take some snaps of a publication we’ve been commissioned to design and produce on a monthly basis for the University Of Northumbria Students’ Union. nuLife is a brand new monthly Students’ Union publication, created for the growing student population around Newcastle and is described as being “the must have mag for every Northumbria student.”

The magazine was created from scratch by ourselves having been asked by Northumbria Students’ Union to provide them with a professional student publication that would capture the attention of the potential readers. Full of exciting stuff taking place at the Students’ Union, complimented by informative and interesting articles, the magazine has been a roaring success with more and more positive feedback from every issue. In fact the publications success has been so great that both the quantity of pages and the number of magazines produced has already increased.

Better Brand Agency are proud to support Northumbria University Students Union and look forward to helping nuLife further it’s success throughout the coming year.

Better Brand Agency is a brand agency offering brand, graphic design, marketing, social media and social networking, web and digital services based in Tees Valley, North East and North Yorkshire.

Located on Stokesley Industrial Park, just off the B1257 on the outskirts of the market town of Stokesley, North Yorkshire, the centre welcomes new and young businesses in the high tech, creative and knowledge based sectors. These sectors include; Digital Media, Creative Marketing, Research & Development Graphic design, e-business and e-learning.

Hambleton is a prosperous and vibrant part of North Yorkshire that combines a stunning environment and an exceptional quality of life with excellent facilities for business and enterprise. To further enhance and develop its existing business infrastructure, the Economic Development Team undertake a rolling programme of regeneration projects, often in partnership with other organisations, to hopefully stimulate yet more entrepreneurship, innovation and economic activity. For further information on what the Economic Development Team do and deliver visit the Business & Economy pages.

In 2004 Hambleton District Council commenced the 2.4million managed workspace development – the Springboard Business Centre, which is located on Stokesley Business Park. The development offered a chance for the District Council to build a sustainable building whilst creating a state of the art business incubator that offers 20 individual office suites set around a central atrium with the benefit of meeting facilities, staffed reception, a resident Business Adviser and landscaped gardens.

Better Brand Agency Office - Springboard Business Centre, Stokesley Business Park

The prime aspect of the building for which it can claim sustainability is its environmental engineering. As far as realistically able materials were sourced locally. The concrete blocks, timber and aluminium windows were all manufactured in Yorkshire. The aluminium solar screen material was produced in Hartlepool and panels were fabricated in Teesside.

If you would like to contact us please use the details below:

→ office: Springboard Centre, Ellerbeck Way, Stokesley Business Park, Stokesley, North Yorkshire, TS9 5JZ

→ telephone: 01642 715314
→ fax: 01642 715374
→ email: talk[at]betterbrandagency.com

For more information please visit www.springboardbusinesscentre.co.uk

You want a logo that will say a few things about you, what you do – hey – maybe even where you’re going in these crazy times. So, what does the cyan and white sphere above say? Unequivocally, it says: I am another company with a hollowed-out spherical logo…

New Barclaycard Logo

The latest in a long line of rebranded financial corporations is Barclaycard which, as of yesterday, officially sports a new identity courtesy of Brand Union. In the last decade or so, countless large corporations have smoothed off their edges and sanded down their corners via a rebrand. “Look how soft and round and approachable we are,” seems to run the thinking.

Indeed, according to the designers, the new Barclaycard identity aims to convey a calm, confident exterior while being warm and vibrant on the inside… and that the globe motif represents a “chip” being released from the constraints of the plastic card and welcomed in by new, exciting methods of payment.

The logo cost £600k (part of a £1.5m identity makeover) and while we don’t need to go down the path of bemoaning the fee, what does the new identity actually say apart from what we already know: that many companies are now global businesses (hence the globe shape) and that they’re highly networked organisations (hence the curly bits that wrap the sphere).

Perhaps more worryingly, it says far less about what differentiates the company from its competitors (it happens to be Barclaycard, it could be any number of brands) and more about how achingly similar corporate logos have become. In trying to say they’re about the new, the modern, the global, they’re in fact revealing a willingness to simply blend in with everyone else.

Here are some other familiar spherical jobs. It really is one world out there isn’t it?

[svgallery name="Post Logos"]

Top to bottom: Sony Ericsson, BT, AT&T

Original Article - http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/an-ordinary-world/