Raising the Bar

Lovely work from illustrator Noma Bar, this time for the Dutch Museum for Communication’s exhibition about privacy


View more of his work here

Not just food...

Marks & Spencer have released a range called 'Simply M&S' in an attempt to encourage people to do every day shopping at the store, this must have been a delicate branding exercise. There is a definite heritage and prestige to M&S products which they obviously have to protect whilst not alienating their loyal shoppers yet encouraging new ones. At first glance the breakfast packaging looks subtle enough, though for some reason the torn notepad and handwriting reminds me of something Asda have done.


According to Marks & Spencer, the packaging is ‘easy to identify’, using a mostly transparent design to showcase the product. It uses a notepaper graphic and is‘themed around shopping list style labeling’.

Footie designs

Hi all, fresh from the excitement of the final games of the premier league season yesterday. Such an exciting season, my team Arsenal have had their ups and downs but managed to squeeze into 3rd place. As a season ticket holder of the Arsenal since they moved to the new ground at the Emirates Stadium, I have seen the ground change quite drastically over the last few years, you may think that sounds odd as it was a brand new stadium. But the club have been creating a process called Arsenalisation. This has meant creating a feeling of Arsenal heritage and tradition around the ground. It has included giant images of players from from the past and present, graphics detailing players and fans stories, statues of legends alive and dead. This process continues to grow and last year they renamed the four quadrants of the ground the same as the four terraces at the old ground Highbury. The North Bank, East stand, west stand and the Clock End. They even re hang the famous clock from Highbury at the clock end.

Also we have seen more traditional kit designs, the previous year was my fav, plain red with white sleeves, this years (below) is similar but has a couple of strips around the sleeves. I understand the need to change kits as it creates revenue, but this one isn't as nice as it could be. However that is not to say I will not be purchasing…

Czech him out

Paul has just come back from a few days in the Czech Republic, it's a fascinating country for so many reasons. Digging deeper into it's Design history, I came across the work of Ladislav Sutnar (9 November 1897 – 13 November 1976). 
Borrowing from the principles of De Stijl, Sutnar's work had a reduction to primary colors, straight lines, and an overall harmony of irregular text alignment. His strong use of diagonal elements, typography and imagery more strongly conveys his design style to be classified as Constructivism. Space is divided into white and black areas and consist of elements with symbolism. Similar to Jan Tschichold's work and modern typography, his style was limited to type and color within strict layouts. More strongly, his work connected with the Bauhaus fundamentals. His work is simple but suggests motion with vivid colors and directional patterns.

Chisels out!

Hi all, just thought I would share these fanatstic architectural models. Mostly of art deco buildings, we couldnt help fall in love with the beautiful facade of Arsenal's old ground Highbury. Ours is now sitting proudly on the shelves at home. More available from here.

Sharp shooting...

Caught a programme by Channel 4 last night on the building of The Shard.


Love it or hate it, (I love it) The Shard is destined to become one of London's most dominant landmarks. The film lifted the lid on the challenges and achievements of an enormous engineering project in a densely populated area of London.


Filmed over four years, The Tallest Tower: Building the Shard provided exclusive behind-the-scenes access to this architectural journey, and the story of one man's desire to leave a lasting mark on the capital.


The demanding construction schedule required builders to add a new floor every seven days, and has used 100,000 tonnes of concrete, 11,468 glass panels, a spire made of 500 tonnes of steel and the UK's tallest crane.

Catch it here:

The Tallest Tower: Building the Shard

Happy and Glorious

Whilst it does seem that the world and his wife are jumping on the Union Jack based bandwagon for the Olympics and Diamond Jubilee, we rather enjoyed these two bits of packaging for Tate & Lyle's Golden Syrup (The 19th-century brand, which was founded under Queen Victoria’s reign carries a royal warrant) and Marmite or 'Ma'amite' as it will display. Love the line 'Toasting the Queen's Diamond Jubilee' too.

My eyes my eyes!

Check these out, some really cool iPhone and iPad covers.

Available from Big Pixel

Office graphics

Hi all, we moved into our studio in December and we have finally got around to putting stuff up on the wall. We set ourselves a brief, we had to create it and it had to be a little bit corporate, but also had to be quite personal. We settled on producing a series of photographs about our journey home where we come across yellow horizontal lines that remind us of our logo, the photos had to include our Converse trainers we created last year in the corporate colours. Also we decided to illustrate a famous scene from our favourite films. Anyway below is the results. I hope you like!

Day 1

Welcome to our first post. We are a graphic design agency based in London. We are interested in all sorts of design and communication. We will be adding content to this blog that we like from the the design world also other things of interest, things that inspire us, things that we like, things that we dislike. No topic is out of bounds, art, music, film, sport, Arsenal…you might see a bit of everything here. Hopefully interesting stuff. Lets see where it takes us.