Branding, Print, Digital
Woods Bagot is a global architectural practice with a network of 17 studios across the world, employing over 800 people. Having gone through an overall rebrand a few years beforehand, and whilst the firm’s core identity continued to be contemporary, the remaining brand assets and systems were in need of a deep strategic reorganisation and an overall graphic refinement.
Working together with the firm’s communications leadership team, we took a deep dive into the performance of the brand, audited all its applications, collated feedback from leaders and users across the globe, analysed workflows and studied specific regional needs. This provided the foundations to take the brand to the next level, and develop relevant designs informed by the real needs of the business.
Beyond what would be usually considered in a design refresh, the work involved revising typographic treatment to enhance hierarchy of information, legibility and clarity of message; standardisation of document and media formats; creation of solutions to support regional specificities like different measurement units, paper sizes or languages; ensuring optimisation and integration of materials and workflows with Adobe software, the firm’s intranet and image library platforms; and training marketing and business development teams, in all offices.
The final outcome was a functional, flexible and well-considered collateral system, supported by a comprehensive set of brand guidelines. The quality of external communications was significantly improved. Internally, the simple but carefully-crafted designs and streamlined production processes enabled the various teams, from Marketing and Business Development to the architects themselves, to create and share their best work in a much faster and more efficient way.
The collateral system was designed and set up to work as a practical kit-of-parts, allowing the seamless merging of layouts and typography, ultimately enabling significant production efficiencies.
Carefully-planned elements, their placement and format, were kept the same between templates, allowing different documents to be merged, or their contents quickly re-shuffled, with minimal to no graphic adjustments.
All the printed and digital templates were pre-populated with frequently used content, usability tips and short instructions regarding the nature, style and syntax of contents to speed up production. Several layout variations were also made available for the user to pick and chose whichever best fits what's needed, with minimum to no formatting adaptation necessary.
Imagery © Woods Bagot
