Triumph Purchase Options

A simple enough promotion: 3 great offers on the table and the customer picks their preferred option.

We planned to promote the offer on as many different platforms as possible...

• Website banner & news story
• Facebook cover photo
• Email 
• In-store posters
• Bike labels
• MCN (Motorcycle News) advert

...so the look had to be easily recognizable to reinforce the message. I needed something that I could repeat on all these platforms and was adaptable to fit the different shapes and sizes of each. This is where the Union Jack came into play.

The Union Jack:

As Britain's leading motorcycle brand, Triumph often use the Union Jack and other icons of British culture to promote the brand in a patriotic way.

Flags are something you see a lot of in the marketing of companies and their products. Just the other day my brother was telling me that the most popular custom paint scheme on a Harley-Davidson is the Captain America / Stars & Stripes theme. It is one of the best ways to fuel a brand or product identity by tapping into people's preconceived notions about a particular culture. Italian brands probably utilize this more than any other by reinforcing the idea that Italian products are naturally classy and of a high quality. Look no further than the the AGV logo, or Ducati's Panigale Tricolore, for examples of this in motorcycling.

So, Triumph=Britain. However, it sadly isn't as simple as just plonking the first result of a google image search onto a poster to convey this. Otherwise you'll look no better than a slightly questionable ebay seller that feels the need to tell you how fast his UK delivery service is on every product picture.

For the design of my Union Jack, it was important for me not to be restricted by where I could place it on posters/adverts/banners etc. Therefore, I would need to adapt it so it didn't have such rigid outer borders (a.k.a. so it wasn't a rectangle). To achieve this, I looked to create a paint splat / stamp / destroyed / torn version of the flag so that it would merge nicely with any other images. One of the main sources of inspiration for this was the Silverstone logo.

Web Banner:

MCN Advert:

In-Store:

A whole A1 poster for each choice, now that's a little extravagant!

Maidstone Harley-Davidson 1000 Likes

One of the shops I work for, Maidstone Harley Davidson, recently hit a milestone on their Facebook page. The page has now exceeded 1000 likes and they wanted a little design to herald such a momentous occasion.

At first I only had one circular ring and the text, and as you can imagine it looked a little boring and empty. The Facebook thumbs up came next as it clearly ties in with the reason behind the design; I took a vector image I had of the "like" icon and constructed a silhouette out of it before overlaying the grunge effect. The Harley-Davidson bar and shield logo outline you see at the bottom was done in much the same way, as were the three stars.

Without blowing my own trumpet, I like how it turned out. The black & white destroyed/concrete effect is uncomplicated but interesting and bold enough to catch your eye.


Font: Clarendon (Harley-Davidson corporate font)

A lot of pages, even those for larger companies, don't tend to take much care when uploading photos to their walls. Facebook pages have a set size for cropping photos and when one is uploaded that doesn't match these dimensions, it ends up looking messy. Paying just a little bit of attention can really make the difference. This is why I produce graphics that fit the space perfectly, it helps to tidy things up and gives the page a much more professional look.

By the way, the dimensions are: 403px x 403px for anyone who's interested.

Muc-Off Web Banner and Shop Artwork

Muc-Off certainly have one of the most distinct brand images in the motorcycle trade and it's pretty much down to one thing: pink. I'm sure it comes as no surprise to anyone that pink isn't exactly embraced by the  motorcycling world. Without being too judgmental or sweeping, biking is predominantly a masculine recreation, and human convention dictates that pink is a visual indicator for the exact opposite of this. The only time you'll really see pink used is on ladies branding/clothing and even this is often met with a fair amount  of resistance from female riders as they understandably don't like to be stereotyped in this way.

Most parts departments (including our own) in bike dealerships are a real Aladdin's cave of hundreds of different products. It is only the strongest and boldest brands that are able to stand out from the competition. Muc-Off have proven that this reluctance to use pink has been a real oversight.

As Muc-Off are cleaning and protection products, it makes sense that bubbles have been used as the main design point on artwork for the brand. This, coupled with the pink colours mentioned above is all that really went into making the banner you see here. I then replicated this for use as a footer on other marketing material for Muc-Off in store.

 

Maidstone Honda Website Design

In just a matter of weeks, Maidstone will be graced with the presence of a brand new Honda motorcycle dealership just outside the town, next door to the Maidstone Harley-Davidson shop.

The dealership will be focused exclusively on the Honda brand and therefore it will have a dedicated website, facebook page, twitter profile etc.

I was asked to come up with a preliminary design for the website that the developers could use to start building it. It was made entirely in illustrator which means that all the components you see in the image below are vector images and won't lose resolution.

I also made a design that showed how the page should interact when each part was hovered over and clicked; including embossed buttons, colour changes and transparency effects.

To fill the gap before the website goes live, it was decided that we needed a single "Coming Soon" page that linked users to social networks and the forthcoming newsletter. As word gets out that there will be a new Honda dealership in Maidstone, it is important that people can connect with us ahead of the opening date so we have a good amount of leads and get the ball rolling as soon as the doors open.

It was important to keep it simple so people are aware that a bigger and better site is under construction, but interesting enough that they don't navigate away and forget all about it.
I thought it would be a nice touch to have a gallery of the shop build to document the progress and keep people up to date.

Facebook Profile Picture & Cover Photo

Autoglym Offer

So I was looking through some artwork of mine from last year (pretty much to see if I could reuse old material on similar events this year) and came across this promotion from Autoglym that finished just a few weeks ago. It has definitely been one of my favourite posters on the parts & accessories counter over the past few months and thought it deserved a bit of attention on here.

As far as packaging and branding goes, Autoglym have it spot on in my opinion. They are primarily concerned with cleaning products so their appearance has to suggest that to customers. The simplicity of the grey text on plain white background immediately achieves this, but another thing I was interested in was the font they had started using. As soon as I saw it I got a feeling of reassurance and quality, much like the branding from the likes of Waitrose and John Lewis.

The offer was a free item, of which customers had a choice of two, upon purchase of the main polish. Therefore I thought it would be best to give it the feel of a flow chart and make the process as logical as possible.

I wanted to replicate the simplicity of the Autoglym branding as much as possible and started off with a white background but that didn't work at all well with the two bottles being white. So then flipping the two colours (grey and white) seemed the best way to go. When I had done that it still looked a little too plain so I added in the the circles around the three products and made the arrows a bit more prominent. The finishing touch was to put a bit of a gradient on the background and add some little diagonal lines. Voila.

Triumph Rocket Voucher

There isn't really much of a background with this project as the offer was manufacturer-led, so I'll just get straight into the design process.

I had a firm idea from the start of what I hoped this poster would look like. Earlier in the year I had gathered together a nice set of promotional photos of the Rocket so I knew one of these would form the basis of the background.

If you saw more of my work in the showroom you would have noticed a recent trend. I have become fond of the type of layout that has the motorcycle on location at the foot of the page, with a tall skyline that you can comfortably lay your text over without images getting muddled with the text.

Unfortunately, most promotional photos are cropped just above the top of the bike, so I have to do a bit of work on the image to add this in. The first part of this process is to cut out the existing background so you can start with somewhat of a blank canvas (I find this is a better technique than replicating and transforming parts of the existing sky to make it cover a larger area). Most of the time, a simple two-tone gradient will do the job, with white (or a very pale tone) being the preferable colour at the bottom of the page.




Primary Font: American Captain
Secondary Font: Delta Jaeger Light

When it came to the font, I was keen for it to represent the nature of the machine it was advertising. The Rocket has a 2294cc engine, which is the largest displacement engine of any mass-production motorcycle in the world. So no mistake, it's a beast. Therefore, the font had to be big, bold and be able to dominate the page.

As you may have guessed "American Captain" is a replica of the font used for the recent Captain America film. I see this as nothing but a good thing.

Technically, I probably shouldn't have used this font as it doesn't follow the corporate guidelines set out by triumph. To date, there have been no complaints, and I believe the promotion has now finished. (I'll be honest, this slyness/craftiness makes me feel like a prohibition-era gangster. Take that, Eliot Ness!)


Web Banner:

Yamaha YZF-R125 Customised

Background:

Quite often, we will choose one of the popular models in the showroom and add some parts and accessories such as exhaust end cans, mirrors, rear sets, indicators etc, to dress it up a bit. The main reason for this isn't actually to sell it as a complete package, but rather to get people's imaginations flowing by providing a visual example of how these aftermarket add-ons can change the look of a bike.

For many bikers, the most interesting aspect of motorcycling is customization. Whether it be a completely bespoke build, or simply adding a few catalogue accessories, recreating a bike to make it original to the owner's individual taste can be very rewarding.

The Poster:

One simple little trick I use all the time is to increase the tracking (space between letters) to give a more polished result. I thought about it for a while but I have to admit I couldn't honestly tell you why doing this has that effect. As you can see on the image above, "YAMAHA" and "LAGUNA SPECIAL" have much greater spacing between each letter than all the other text on the page. Maybe it helps to break the text up a bit for greater clarity. Then again, maybe it just reminds me of expanding movie titles.

Another thing you'll see a lot of in professional print and web design is variation between light, regular, and bold versions of the same font. It maintains consistency of all the text on the page but also offers slight contrasts so that all the text isn't an overwhelming blur of letters and numbers.

   

The colour choice was quite an easy one as it made sense to follow the paint scheme of the bike. The subtle tone of the gold/bronze wheels certainly adds a bit of class and suggests that this bike is somewhat unique.

The white background was decided upon for three reasons:

1: It costs less to print

2: The picture of the bike was on a white background, so saves me cutting it out. I was on a tight deadline (which actually means I was just being lazy).

3: Importantly though, the poster was going to be A3, not the largest size in such a big showroom, so the text and the parts boxes really did have to stand out from the background.

The shape of the boxes containing each accessory was a conscious decision, based more than anything, on the style of the bike. The contours of the YZF-R125 are very angular and sharp, so it didn't make sense to use rounded corners or even circular shapes for any of the design.

The blue and gold gradients were also based on how the light reflects off the surface of the bike. I have to say, I'm not usually a fan of colour gradients as they are so often misused. In my opinion, they really only work with two shades of the same colour.

Font: Chantilly Medium & Chantilly Light

When I had printed off the poster, one of my colleagues came to me and said "It's nice, but it's a bit simple." Now I'm sure that he expected me to take offense to this, but actually, this couldn't have been a better reaction. Making something look professional and stylish, but keeping it clean and simple, is actually one of the more difficult things graphic designers are faced with. When there is so much information outlined in a brief, deciding the layout can be fairly troublesome. I could litter the page with lots of flourishes and decoration, and yes, it would look pretty, but it would also likely be a distraction to more important content.  When it comes down to it, the purpose of my work is to relay information to customers in the clearest possible fashion, so "simple" really is a good thing.

I explained all that to my colleague with the smuggest expression I could muster, then I hit him with the poster for his ignorance.

Learn to Ride

The eagle-eyed among you may notice that this is my first post for about 5 months, which is quite frankly, far too big a gap. I'm sorry, university got in the way.

Its back to business now though and I'm going to kick things off with one of the more punchy promotions we've had in the store recently - the 'Learn to Ride' campaign...

The company I work for, Laguna Motorcycles, recently teamed up with a local bike training school called Dexterity Training. To make the process more enjoyable for enthusiastic amateur riders, we organised a fleet of bikes that would not usually be an option for learning on.

The best aspect of this is that it gives learners the opportunity to try out the type of bike, or even the specific model, that they would be looking to purchase after their test.

The three models chosen were the Ducati Monster 696, the Triumph Street Triple, and the Harley-Davidson 883. They are great entry-level bikes that are steady and comfortable, but with enough oomph to grab your attention.

As far as the design was concerned, I have to hold my hands up and admit that I had no idea it would end up looking like this when I started. I didn't have a gameplan and most of the process was done on a trial and error basis. I'm never one to blow my own trumpet, but I think it actually turned out pretty nice in the end.

However, from the start I did know that including L-plates was not gonna be happening. I'm not sure why, but I find that its a cheap look and thought that the safety cones would be just as effective.

At the moment I don't think there's a colour scheme with as much instant visual impact as dark grey and orange (and in this case, an earthy tone to set a subtle background). It is so important to draw attention to the main parts of the poster with a bold colour and even from a fair distance away, a customer will instantly know what this banner is about. Then if they want to know more, the phone number is also highlighted as a call to action.

The three images shown above were eventually printed on large vinyl pull up banners and have a great impact in the store.

DISASTER!

Unfortunately, before I had the chance to write this up, the banners were taken up to Brands Hatch for the British Superbikes and whilst stored in the gazebo, "someone broke in, tried to grab it and ended up tearing it". I haven't decided if I'm going to believe this story yet, seems a tad far-fetched.

Anyway, I'm hoping a bit of TLC and maybe some sticky tape will patch her up nicely.

Rukka Arma S

When it comes to motorcycle clothing, it doesn't get more premium than Rukka. It may be expensive, but you certainly get your money's worth, as this poster so helpfully demonstrates. Look at all the noteworthy features! Sarcasm aside though, this really is quality stuff.


So, when I was thinking about the style of the poster, I looked towards the high-end of the market, right up to bespoke tailors. And one thing kept popping up: visible stitching. This type of thing suggests class and an investment in quality and higher levels of comfort and safety. You'll notice that each of the feature circles have a double stitch outline to reflect this.

The fluorescent coloured stripes down the side are an obvious connection to the high-vis panels on the jacket. The background colour was chosen to emphasise the luminosity of these panels.


Had to do a bit of a cut out job on the model to put him on the dark background. This is not something I am particularly keen on because it is very difficult to get a clean finish, especially around the hair. This isn't much of an issue when it comes to web content and small prints. However, on anything larger than A4, your leftover pixels are gonna be about as inconspicuous as the honey monster riding the Northern line to Waterloo. Nonetheless, I gave it a good go and hopefully the finished article does the jacket a bit of justice.

Swap Shop

Out with the old, in with the new (sort of). Swap shops are all about recycling/reusing and the style of the poster had to reiterate that. It was part of a 'Go Green Week' on campus and so the earthy colour scheme of green and brown seemed a natural choice.

The inspiration for the swap shop logo was the 3 arrow recycling symbol. I decided it would be better to go with only 2 arrows to suggest the give and take nature of the event.

A lot of the time I use quite plain fonts for advertising (helvetica, arial etc). Straight lines and sharp edges convey a slick operation and almost a guarantee of quality. I felt that was the wrong message for this particular event as nothing was being sold and it was more of a fun, chilled-out type of affair. The font used is 'Komika Axis' and I think it has quite an inviting look.

Cardboard, more than most other products, is closely linked to recycling. The items that were likely to appear on the day had to feature in some form on the poster and simplifying them into cardboard shapes was an appealing concept.


Lastly, the background has the sort of grainy texture that you would find on recycled paper and there is a faint pattern of interlocking arrows, lovely.

Please visit my friend's blog if you would like to hear more about the Swap Shop (warning: she is a bit of a tree hugging eco-weirdo).

Yamaha 50 Year Anniversary: A Look Back

To coincide with last year's 50th anniversary of Yamaha Racing, Laguna Motorcycles offered a number of special prices on Yamaha models for a single weekend.
Below is the poster I created to advertise the deals on offer...



A lot of information in this one. 11 Bikes on one A4 page; not the kind of brief I generally like to receive. I tried but there simply wasn't enough space to have an image of each bike on offer, not in any size that would be worthwhile anyway. What this poster needed was a bit of prioritizing, a few ruthless decisions to trim the fat and set the balance... I chose the 4 best offers and decided to make a bit of a showcase with them on the right hand side of the page. For the remaining ones, I decided that a simple info box would probably fulfill the purpose and a customer with a particular bike in mind would certainly be able to find it without the aid of a picture.


It's sometimes quite easy to forget the primary purpose of a project and get bogged down in details or aesthetics. Always keep in mind exactly what the aim of a poster is and the audience that you're targeting, it can save a lot of time and unnecessary effort. Going over the top can also be detrimental to a promotion when the message is lost amongst lots of pretty pictures and graphics. 


It's quite useful sometimes to look back on previous work and critique it yourself once you've developed a bit more. This particular poster was done around 8 months ago and I remember being quite pleased with it at the time, so it seemed like a good candidate to look at retrospectively. Firstly, the brief asked for a lot of information on a relatively small space and I think I achieved that without making it too cluttered. One drawback however, is that it doesn't explicitly shout "HEY, YOU, LOOK AT THESE RIDICULOUS OFFERS!" It looks less like a promotion and more like a regular fact sheet. It resembles almost every advert that you'll find in every edition of motorcycle news because bike dealers are very keen to show just how many great deals they can offer the average punter. I sometimes think that maybe the more offers there are, the more diluted the impact becomes.


The large faded logo in the background is something I haven't done in a while and if I'm being honest I still don't know if works well or not. I just feel that having too much going on in a background, especially under text, can distort the information and make it difficult to read, which defeats the point of putting it in there in the first place.


Lastly, why did I go to the effort of putting those two stripes in the bottom left hand corner? They serve no purpose and are in the foreground, overlapping the box and date. I guess even jeniuses make mistakes...

Chromeo

Now here's a musical duo who are insanely cool. Not only that but Chromeo's brand of electro-funk is nothing short of genius. I would say that it's a throwback to the electro of the 80s, but that would simply be an insult. This is far better.

I was lucky enough to see them live in London last November and it was the most entertaining gig I've ever been to. Honestly. if you ever get the chance, don't hesitate. Heck, I'll come with you.

These lads know what it means to be performers; their energy and skill on a stage is like nothing I've seen before. They also know what it means to be cool, and it's not in your face or over the top. It's a chilled out and slick operation, and that is what I wanted to come across in this piece.

Now I've finished spouting off about my crush on these guys I'll get down to the design...

As you may have noticed with most of my other designs, I like to keep things simple and uncluttered. 
My initial intention was to make everything with straight lines but this just didn't work for the sunglasses. Their shape looked a little bit too abstract for this design and so I had to concede a few curves. That wasn't too much of a problem because the glasses were meant to be quite a pronounced feature and this probably enhances that. I often have a bit of difficulty with lighting and shadows, and this design proved no different. The nose was a particularly troublesome area and I must have gone through about a dozen different shadow styles before I was happy with the look. For most of the design I made each part on one half, duplicated it, flipped it horizontally and then put it in place on the opposite side for the symmetrical look.

If I get a bit of time I'll start working on a similar thing for P-Thugg (the other, shorter one).