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!

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.

 

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:

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...

Vespa GTS 125

Recently scooter promotions and posters have been pretty uninspiring to say the least. I find there has been a distinct overuse of arrows, ink blots, circles and rainbow shapes to make these motorcycles 'funky' and appeal to younger people. Don't do that.
There has also been a reliance on imitating the MOD style of the 1960's with union jacks and targets. This isn't such a bad thing because it's probably one of the first things people associate with scooters and its a pretty natural link, so we'll forgive that for now.
I agree that retro is definitely the right direction for scooter endorsement, only it should be a different kind of retro. In fact, i'm talking vintage.

I'm talking the kind of sepia-toned class you'll see in a stella artois advert and the nonchalant suavity of Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can. Well that was my intention for this anyway. (If you need any more examples, look no further than my facebook profile).
I decided pretty early on to use cream and brown tones to achieve that old-timey feel and took inspiration from, amongst other styles, art-deco and film-noir movie posters.
The orange was a late addition as I thought the poster needed something bold to give it a bit of a visual punch. In the end I decided it would be most effectively used on the header and footer as its one of those colours that looks clear on both light and dark backgrounds.
Admittedly, this style isn't particularly original for scooters. Vespa, for one, have a rich heritage of advertisements that really do capture the spirit of riding these delightfully exciting machines. I didn't realise before I started this project just how beautiful some their classic adverts really are and I would recommend having a browse through the archive if you're into vintage posters. They would certainly be a great starting point for similar work in the future. I'm by no means an art expert, so wouldn't really know how to define some of these styles, but I can appreciate what they represent and the type of lifestyle they are trying to convey to onlookers.


As well as the above poster for the specific Vespa model, I used most of the graphics for another in-store sign (below). The only change was the background cityscape; The Eiffel tower is a clichéd but sound indicator of French sophistication. I think the relaxing, leisurely mood of the top image contrasts quite effectively with the fast pace and slickness of the sport section.

By chance, we found an old poster frame in the back of the shop which has an LED panel underneath. When we put this poster over it and plugged it in, it really enhanced the creams and whites and makes for an eye-catching promotion behind the scooters in the showroom.