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!

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:

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.

Bike Specsheets

I'm sure most of you have come across 'infographics' at some point whilst browsing the old interweb. If not, take a minute to have a look at some of the examples here. I'm a big fan of these because they effectively relay simplified information and statistics in a creative and manageable way. I think that the best ones are those that only use 3 or 4 main colours and replace photographic images for custom vectors and symbols. Anyway, these are what I used as the main source of inspiration for the specsheets below.


Specification sheets for motorcycles are one of the best tools for a customer to compare one bike with another. When there is so much choice out there, finding the right bike for you can be difficult enough without this sort of information being hard to come by. When I've been tasked with creating generic specsheets in the past, I tended to stick to a straightforward list of features to make the information easy to read, keeping pictures and graphics to a minimum. Despite the advantages of this, they were a little boring and not many people would take the time to have a look when we attached them to the corresponding bikes at outdoor events. So, a bit of a spruce up was on the cards.

       

I guess the most notable improvement was the inclusion of the icons. I'll admit that they don't actually provide any additional information but hopefully they act as quite a nice visual prompter.

The example on the right was the first one I made and the difference between this and the updated version on the left is quite noticeable. The Street Triple sheet has a much clearer structure and the additional headers makes it a bit more organised. With the Van Van sheet I'd definitely replace the thicker section dividers if I do these again. There are already 2 types of line dividers (thin line and dotted) on the same page and they also unnecessarily take up a bit of space and make it look a little cluttered.

All together, I think we must have had around 20-25 of these to make so the layout and design really did have to be simple and generic to ensure I had enough time to make all of them for the display bikes at racing and charity events.

It's probably worth mentioning at this point that these were made for last years' season of outdoor events and I'm sure that by the time the next batch roll around, I'll want to re-do the design for these specsheets. It just never ends...

Thunderbird Storm Logo

The Triumph Thunderbird Storm is a beast, there's no doubt about it. Now I'm not the most bike-savvy person out there but even I can appreciate what an impressive machine this really is. If you're searching for the type of power that will leave your stomach behind when you open up the throttle, then look no further. At just under 1700cc this is a force to be reckoned with.
It occurred to me that this edition of the standard Thunderbird model didn't have it's own identity and it's not particularly distinguishable from it's slightly less formidable brother. I thought the best way to display the storm's individuality would be to give it its' own logo. 

The colour choice here was pretty straightforward; Triumph corporate colours are blue and white, so job done.
I've always been a fan of stencil logos and single colour icons; they are clean, clear and versatile. I must admit I was influenced here by the shape and layout of football clubs' badges; Middlesbrough and Sochaux come to mind at this point.
The bird image you see in the centre is the official emblem used by Triumph on it's Thunderbird models so it seemed pretty essential to include it. It's been around since the classic Thunderbird model of the 1940's so I imagine is recognisable amongst most bikers.
The curved text you see at the top of the logo was something I was keen to use on this project. I'll admit that I have always associated text-warping like this with word art, finding it pretty visually offensive. However, I recently came across a few examples of curved text effectively used in logo designs and fancied giving it a go myself. It took a bit of tinkering and ultimately a subtle adjustment really does produce the best outcome.


Triumph motorcycles are understandably quite protective of branding and so this project was never intended for public use. Hopefully I'll be able to put this to use as a template or something in the future for similar work.