Archive for May, 2007

Royal opening for Shetland

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

shetland_charles

The new Shetland Museum and Archives was opened today by the Prince of Wales, his wife Camilla and Queen Sonja of Norway.

The state of the art £11.6 million development will now serve the local community, and act as a hub for tourism on the islands.

Sumo became involved in the project in 2005, when we were appointed to develop the branding for the Museum and Archives. It is fantastic to see the plans for the museum that we first saw at our initial meeting in Lerwick two years ago come so gloriously to life.

Grafik 150

Friday, May 25th, 2007

150

Yesterday saw the launch of the book 150 at the Cobden Club in London, published by leading British design magazine Grafik. The book features 150 pieces of inspiration picked by 150 designers.

I was really pleased to be one of those asked to contribute to the book, an invitation made that much sweeter by the large number of my personal design heroes who have also contributed to 150 (Angus Hyland, Daniel Eatock, Experimental Jetset, Jeremy Tankard, Mark Farrow, Michael C Place, Michael Johnson, Milton Glaser, Neville Brody, Paul Smith, Stefan Sagmeister, Vince Frost and Wim Crouwel).

For my own contribution I chose the Brighton Royal Pavilion, an incredibly inspirational building which we are currently rebranding.

Talking branding

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

This afternoon I delivered a seminar on branding at the Museums and Heritage Show in London. Over the past few years we have worked on a lot of branding projects for Museums, so I was glad to be invited to share our experience.

The seminar brought to mind something I heard at a conference I attended last year. The speaker said “If you want to be sure that you know your stuff, talk at a conference, because you won’t want to stand up in front of an audience unless you’re sure that you’re not going to look like a fool”.

I talk about branding museums every week, but having to put together a formal presentation on the subject really made me take stock of our experience to date and think about how we should explain the process to clients in future. On the day, the seminar was well received and several kind people came up to me afterwards to say they had enjoyed the presentation. This was very satisfying, but best of all was the relief that I hadn’t looked like a fool!