Getting the chance to work alongside contemporary designers from different disciplines is always a treat for us. So we were thrilled when emerging furniture designer Alexena Cayless asked us to lend our expertise with her commercial identity and online store.

The look and feel needed to reflected her love of form, process and craft, so we made use of the isometric pad from which all her designs are born.
www.alexenacayless.co.uk

There are some yuletide rituals the 25th December just wouldn’t be the same without. So this year we decided to celebrate them, and put some order to the festive family mayhem in this limited run poster for all our friends and family.

To get into the festive spirit we asked over sixty children to share their letters to Father Christmas with us before posting them with high-hopes to the North Pole. By short-listing some of our favourites we made a final selection of 26 letters to feature in this characterful Christmas book.

Remembering that not every child’s Christmas is a happy one we also made a donation to the NSPCC while crossing our fingers that 2012 brings everyone what they wish for.

Completing our new website gave us the perfect platform to share some of our latest projects and highlights. To announce its launch we celebrated our namesake and sent our friends a screen printed alphabet – but we couldn’t help adding a little of our own character to it first.

It’s always nice to receive a letter in the post, especially at Christmas; so we decided to send one to each and every one of our friends along with our warmest wishes for the new year.

Archeology Alive is a new organisation which provides practical archaeology sessions for young people.
They needed an identity that expressed their belief that everyone should have the chance to explore the historic environment in a hands-on way.

An invitation by D&AD to host a workshop for the New Blood festival gave us a rare opportunity to give something back to the institution that helped introduce us to the design industry.

Rather than simply sharing our recent work with the graduates we decided to put the collective experience of our studio to better use. We set about compiling this A-Z directory bursting with practical tips and advice along with helpful insights from other design professionals to help the graduates as they journey from the classroom to the studio.

Read the complete book online here

Designers in Residence is the annual residency programme, run by the Design Museum, which celebrates new and emerging British design talent. The residency supports the selected designers at an early stage of their career, allowing them to build on their current design practice. For the exhibition each designer was asked to create a new piece of work responding to the idea of ‘Imperfection’.

We were delighted to be chosen to create the show’s identity and exhibition graphics. We thought it would be interesting to build upon the idea of ‘imperfection’ by giving each designer their own individual colour and typestyle to create a subtly inconsistent and ever changing face to the exhibition.

As a compendium to the Designers in Residence show at the Design Museum we followed up the exhibition with a catalogue profiling each designer and the process they went through to create their exhibits. Following the show’s theme, we designed an ‘imperfect’ booklet featuring dynamic page shapes. These shapes create unique sections each with their own typeface and colour to reflect the four individual designers.

It was our privilege to accept the creative lead on a new education programme by the Design Museum called ‘Get into Design’ which aims to inspire young people to develop an interest in design through workshops with industry professionals.

In our session as industry mentors we invited the volunteers into the studio to demonstrate how we generated the creative solution for the ‘Get into Design’ programme identity itself – showing how the identity adapts to include all the design disciplines featured on the programme from Fashion and Product Design to Architecture.

‘Plan A’ is Marks & Spencer’s environmental commitment to reduce waste whilst using sustainable and ethically resourced materials. This presented us with a great creative challenge when asked to design the packaging for a new series of nationwide training films for M&S staff. Our solution was to create a set of rigid colour coded inserts to house each film, made entirely from 100% post consumer waste.

Non Zero are a world-class film production company specialising in live music events, documentaries and promos with their visually distinct style earning them wide acclaim within the industry. Capturing those amazing once-in-a-lifetime moments forms the basis of the identity which invites the viewer behind the camera.

As a production company leading the field in animation, visual effects and direction for film, television and online – Penny Royal Films invited us to spend time creating an identity heralding them as the leading production house for high-end film making.

Inspired from the humble penny piece we created a priceless monogram logo in copper foil which appeared at the same size as a penny coin across all applications including business cards, stationery, showreel packaging, marketing announcements and online at www.pennyroyal.tv

Brands don’t come much bigger than Santa, so we jumped at the chance to design the *Santa* Brand Book. Written by brand language consultancy Quietroom, the concept was the basis for their 2010 Xmas card, a 16 page set of guidelines covering everything from brand essence, language, and of course the correct tone of red.

The online version has already had more than a million hits, have a look for yourself here:
www.quietroom.co.uk