We're more than pleased to announce our appointment as the creative agency for Guardian News and Media. After a four stage creative pitch process against some tough competition, the announcement was made by the Guardian that they would be outsourcing the production and delivery of their events marketing, advertising and sales support design and presentation work to 999. The team at the Guardian were impressed with our creativity and the processes we have in place to serve the many internal clients, from various different departments within Guardian News and Media. Adam Freeman, director, consumer media and Guardian News and Media, said: "Partnering with such a creative and innovative design agency as 999 will provide a more flexible and responsive marketing and design service to GNM's internal commercial and marketing teams..."

We've already begun to work with the Guardian on some high profile events so watch this space for more information as it becomes available.

We've climbed up to number 33 in this year's recently announced
Top 100 design consultancy survey.
The survey, organised by Design Week, also featured us at an
impressive number 8 in market share for print based media.
Take a look at some of our recent print work to see how we got
there…

Show me Freeview HD work +
Show me Onitsuka Tiger work +
Show me BBC National Orchestra of Wales work +

The World Luxury Awards honors creative excellence in Luxury Communication, awarding outstanding work in advertising, design and multimedia. Our very smart, flash based website to showcase and raise awareness of Victoria Beckham's new collection of 10 dresses has been awarded a Finalist Certificate in the Fashion and Style category 2009. 

Commissioned by 19 Entertainment, our task was to provide a simple, sophisticated platform to both showcase the collection as well as help cement Victoria's role as a serious fashion designer. So what did we do? Our solution is a slick, highly polished flash based site, which takes the audience on a seamless journey though the collection with fluid transitions and intuitive navigation. We put the dresses at the heart of the site, drawing on numerical graphical imagery based on little black numbers to reflect the classic, sophisticated tailoring of the dresses themselves.

The British-born jeans brand has tasked 999 with refreshing its visual marketing across its European wholesale and international licensing channels.

Initial projects until the end of the year will see the creation of a suite of sales tools - including product look books and trade catalogues - aimed at supporting the sell in of Lee Cooper's core Originals line and its higher fashion Red Diamond Lee Cooper (RDLC) range to prospective retailers and distributors worldwide.

Billed as ‘the single most important Architecture and Design event to take place in Scotland for the past decade’ and enthusiastically supported by design evangelist and environmental crusader Wayne Hemmingway, Scotland’s Housing Expo must be quite an event! So what’s it all about?

Scotland’s Housing Expo is the first of its type in Britain and will showcase 55 architect designed sustainable houses, set in four unique zones, featuring innovative construction and cutting edge sustainable systems plus the very latest in product design, landscaping and interiors. A month long event running in Inverness throughout August 2010, the event hopes to attract many thousands of visitors.

It sounded like a fantastic project to be involved with and we were delighted when we successfully beat off stiff competition to win the business to create the new brand identity and marketing campaign for the event which will run over the next year.

The campaign will include high-profile national advertising, including print, outdoor and online and will target audiences across the UK and Europe. Localised initiatives will encourage the local community to get involved.

www.scotlandshousingexpo.com

Carron Phoenix is probably best known these days as a sink manufacturer but it can trace its roots back to 1759 when The Carron Company was established as an iron foundry in Falkirk. Back then, Carron was a manufacturing power-house driving the industrial revolution in Scotland to a point where it employed 5000 people, operated it's own fleet of steam ships and famously made the Carronade cannons used by Wellington at Waterloo. The company even issued its own currency to enable global trading!

So it was indeed an honour when we were asked to undertake a brand evolution programme for this famous brand. This programme included reviewing existing guidelines, creating a refreshed and expanded colour palette and introducing new typography and grid layouts.

We were also asked to design and produce the Carron Phoenix 2009 Retail and Developer Catalogues to demonstrate our ideas in action. As part of the project we commissioned and art directed a new suite of brand lifestyle photography to enhance the more sterile product photography. The resulting publications were clean, bright, easily navigated and universally well received.

This is the fifth consecutive season, we have been privileged to produce a Look Book for the iconic Japanese footwear and apparel brand Onitsuka Tiger.

Onitsuka Tiger’s products are bright, vivid and energetic. Their rich colours are a feast for the eye and Japan culture itself provides a wealth of inspiration. Using origami paper patterns as our point of reference, we created a stylish kaleidoscope of imagery, prompted by the colours of this year’s collection.

The Autumn/Winter collection again features the wonderful Zodiac Collection with creations by celebrated Japanese illustrators and designers. The collection is inspired by the animals and creatures of the legend of the Zodiac Race. We decided to shoot the products in the wild and our models were shot against moody backdrops of forests and rivers, creating the perfect platform to present the collection.

The Look Book neatly pulling the two collections together into a delightfully produced little pocket sized publication is accompanied by a beautiful poster.

Warburtons has set out to lead the bakery industry with a straight talking and groundbreaking approach to its corporate and social responsibility policy.

We were tasked with creating a distinctive CSR (Corporate and Social Responsibility) campaign which would retain the Warburton brand's 'family' ethos while communicating its honest, transparent and straight talking approach to environmental issues.

First we created the creative theme 'Building success responsibly'. We then brought the theme to life with beautiful illustrations, painstakingly crafted layouts and typography and enlightening copy which was light and friendly but straight talking with a serious message to convey.

We set about creating the CSR report and decided on a 'no frills' approach. Our response would be simple, energy efficient and cost effective. We ditched the normally employed glossy, multicolour printing techniques in favour of an environmentally efficient, two colour, mini-booklet printed on eco-friendly recycled paper. This meant less paper, less ink, less production time and overall less energy used in its creation.  

The creative look and feel of the publication featured in a full and wide campaign of internal and outward facing communications both off and online.

"We wanted to tell our story of CSR at Warburtons in a unique and different way, reflecting the family values and our honest and open approach. 999 answered
this with a truly distinctive book for us to share with our employees and our customers."

Sarah Miskell,
Warburtons - CR Director

Based on the success of our last site for Victoria Beckham's first ever dress collection, we were commissioned by 19 Entertainment to produce a new site to showcase the ever increasing portfolio of Victoria’s fashion ventures including her most recent denim collection.

The task was to create a HTML site that could be content managed by our client, 19 Entertainment, yet retain some of the elegant and sophisticated touches we created in the original flash based site.

We developed a simple, stylish design to produce a more confident, flexible platform which will allow each collection to shine and help maintain Victoria Beckham's success as a leading fashion designer.

Our previous website for Victoria picked up a World Luxury Brand 2009 finalist award. We hope to go one better this time.

We’ve been working with the Help Scheme to deliver practical advice to hard to reach audiences such as the elderly and registered disabled who may find it difficult to switch to digital TV.

Through a range of communications designed with accessibility in mind, our materials aim to make sure that nobody gets left without TV after the digital switchover.

Our Community Flyers motivate people such as postmen, carers and other members of the community, that have regular contact with eligible groups to
make them aware of the Help Scheme, ensuring the message can be passed on by a familiar face. We’ve also worked with the Help Scheme and charities like Age Concern in developing tactical items including bookmarks, counter-top dispensers, tote bags and give-aways such as coasters to spread the message to this hard to reach audience.

Following our successful 2008/09 seasonal campaign, we were reappointed by this internationally renowned orchestra to develop an overarching campaign for their new 2009/10 concert season, that would excite both new and existing audiences.

Putting the very essence of the various composers at the heart of the campaign, our designs conveyed the unique character and diversity of this season’s musical programme. Using colour, illustration and expressive typography to communicate the unique personality of each concert or concert series we attempted to appeal on an emotional level with the viewer, creating a striking and unique visual approach.

We created an engaging two month digital marketing campaign to raise awareness and drive Arts Professionals to the new Arts Council England website.

The campaign created a real buzz in the Arts sector, announcing the new website as a fresh, exciting and compelling arts 'must see' with new features, tools and content as the 'stars of the show'.

Alongside a range of digital tools including targeted html emails, animated banners and buttons, we levered a specially commissioned digital arts film to create a viral video trailer which was then seeded on targeted arts websites and blogs as an integral part of the campaign. Viewers were encouraged to click through to the website to view the full film and experience the new website.

We've now worked with Highland Spring for a number of years, packaging the UK's leading bottled spring water, so when they asked us to create new packaging for Gleneagles Natural Mineral Water, their elite mineral water product sold exclusively in the UK's best hotels and restaurants, we thought we'd dive in. Gleneagles Water already has a distinctive, award winning and elegant glass bottle, so we set out to create quietly understated but complementary branding. And it had to be premium. The result was a beautifully simple lowercase 'g', it's tail gently reflecting in the water. Wonderfully understated type underscored the new brand mark. The result a beautiful and timelessly elegant classic. Thirsty for more?

The largest domestic recycling campaign ever created by Tower Hamlets Council launched across the East London borough, with a visual identity and comms materials produced by us here at 999.

Rubbish you might say, but the ‘We Can Recycle More’ campaign, aims to achieve one of the greatest increases in recycling volume over a one year period of any UK local authority. It’s all about raising awareness and educating the local community on how to use the borough’s recycling services. Local wag, Mrs Simmons, was so impressed she starred in our campaign

Tower Hamlets Council insisted the idea must be flexible enough to work across multiple initiatives, so we came up with the core ‘We Can’ message, which can be adapted to embrace related issues, such as keeping healthy, keeping safe and keeping the environment clean.

We visited local community projects to identify real life recycling champions whose faces now appear on hundreds of billboards and buses throughout the borough proudly stating ‘If we can recycle more, so can you’

We’ve also developed a through-the-line media programme which features banners for schools and parks, advertising on both council vehicles and in the press, direct mail and various promotional material.

We don’t mind getting our hands dirty.

This effective campaign to increase recycling in the local community has recently won a 2009 DBA Effectiveness award.

The Trinidadian rum-maker, famous for its aromatic bitters, appointed 999 to develop and deliver its 2009 Trade Education Programme, which is aimed at communicating the spirit and quality of the Angostura portfolio to the on and off trade throughout Europe.

The campaign will run throughout the year across a range of markets including Spain, Italy, France, UK, Germany and the Baltics.

The activity supports the launch of three new rums into the European market in 2008. These unique, three, five and seven year-old rums, blended in Trinidad and Tobago, are in addition to the company's already successful 1824 and 1919 sipping rums.

Angostura is undertaking a £15 million investment programme in these new rums, signalling the intent to fuel rapid growth of the rum category. As part of this activity 999 was commissioned to produce a complete brand education programme that reflects the history of the Angostura brand and its origins.

The theme adopted is 'Welcome to the World of Angostura', which explores the manufacturing methods of Angostura's rum and bitters, the art of mixing and the 'melting pot' culture of the company's Caribbean backdrop.

A multi-layer campaign, 999 has created a 28-page 'trademark storybook', which contains comprehensive tasting notes for all products, new cocktail recipes and a seven-minute DVD shot on location in Trinidad and Tobago that brings to life the carnival heritage of the brand.

Other items include a bespoke sensory kit that contains raw ingredients to promote Angostura's unique production and blending processes.

Since 1998, Radley has brought its colourful design flair and quirky British sense of fun to the accessories market, winning a place in the heart of women all across the world.

We were delighted to be asked to develop a website for the US market which would reflect the quality and originality of the brand online. Building on the success of our developments for Radley's sister brand Tula, we have developed a clean, unfussy site which offers a simple intuitive interface allowing users to browse through the collections and view the full range of colours available.

Created on a tight timescale, the content managed site was launched in conjunction with an email campaign. We will continue to expand the site’s offering as new collections come on stream throughout the year.

Arts Council England (ACE) has launched a scheme that will give away more than half a million free theatre tickets to young people over the next two years .

'A Night Less Ordinary' is Arts Council England's exciting new scheme aimed at encouraging greater interest in live theatre among young people in England aged 16-26.

It was launched at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden by 'Spooks' star Rupert Penry-Jones and Sheridan Smith, of 'Two Pints of Lager' fame, alongside ACE chief executive Alan Davey.

999 was one of 11 UK consultancies appointed to Arts Council England's £1.5m design roster in January to work specifically on marketing communications projects over the next three years.

Over the coming weeks, 999 will be responsible for the implementation of a two-tier approach to the campaign, which will combine high-profile national advertising, in print and online, through media partner Metro with localised initiatives at some of the 200 arts venues across England taking part in the scheme. Raising awareness of the initiative and broadening the scope of Arts Council England's target audience.

In addition, a website, through which you can browse listings of participating theatres, and unearth the latest news and competitions, has been launched at www.anightlessordinary.org.uk.

To further drive young people to the website, the campaign will be advertised on Microsoft's popular real-time chat service MSN Messenger.

Elizabeth Vessey, national marketing officer for Arts Council England, said: 'This is the first time the Arts Council has worked with 999 and we originally selected them based on their integrated approach to the campaign and the strong visual identity concepts they presented.'

"The design work and marketing planning they have since produced has been of a really high standard and we are hugely excited to be launching A Night Less Ordinary with an identity that represents the brand strategy so well."