Well what a busy year Moot has had! A Moot wedding and a Moot honeymoon, and a whole heap of Moot work.
The piece of design work we’ve been most excited about so far this year, has to be our wedding invitation. Gareth took this project on and he loved the totally new type of creative outlet it offered. As it wasn’t going to be a traditional, formal wedding we knew that it shouldn’t be a traditional, formal invitation. Gareth did a lot of research and stumbled across some self-enveloping origami that sparked his imagination. The simple but elegant form of the origami also chimed perfectly with the aim for our wedding weekend, a relaxed celebration but with each element being uncomplicated and stylish. A touch of Fellini, Saul Bass and Mad Men combined with a 17th century hill-top castle in Somerset made for the perfect wedding invitation!
The unfolded invitation
The folded and addressed invitation as each guest received in the post
The opened invitation
After perfecting the folding so that the invitation formed its own envelope, the creases naturally divided the A3 page into a number of sections of different sizes and shapes. We worked with these sections to divide up all of the information our guests needed. We were also conscious of the fact that people often don’t read all the supplementary info that is given alongside traditional wedding invitations and so hoped our unique design with no obvious start point would encourage our guests to read it all. That, alongside the witty and entertaining words! Once each invitation had been folded (by hand!), it was sealed with a sticker that read ‘open with care’ with a dotted line to encourage guests to tear the sticker and not the invitation!
All in all the invitations were a great success and we received a huge amount of positive feedback. Perhaps this should be a new business area for Moot, we certainly loved doing them.
But back to business proper, while we haven’t been tied up with wedding frippery, we have still been working away.
We have continued to do a lot of work this year for Pira International, a company providing high-level business intelligence to the printing, packaging and print industries. We have done a huge amount of work with Pira since the inception of Moot in April 2006, from brochure and advert design, to copy editing, copy writing and book design.
One of the regular jobs we do for Pira is the design and copy editing of brochures advertising their market reports. Here is a quick look at a couple of the recent ones we’ve done.
The front cover from a recent Pira market report brochure. These brochures are self mailers and so the recipient name and address is digitally printed onto each individual brochure at the mailing house. This design has helped to save Pira a huge amount of money in the unnecessary costs of address sheets and polywrapping at the mailing house.
The inside page of the brochure. One of the trickiest parts of designing these brochures has been how to fit in a lot of information in such a way that isn't cluttered and that people will actually read! It's a simple design but definitely satisfies the complications.
We love working with Pira and we think they feel the same way about us. Here are some nice things Pira has said about us recently:
“Gareth is very professional and approachable and has delivered to a consistently high standard over a number of years while doing design and typefacing work for Pira. I would have no hesitation in recommending Gareth and Moot, and I think we will continue our business relationship for many years to come.” Robert Stead, Head of Events at Pira International.
“Sophie is trustworthy, a great communicator and delivers great work on time.” Adam Page, Head of Information, Pira International.
Thanks you guys!
And so what else have we been up to? We have been delighted this year to work with the lovely people at the major global branding agency The Brand Union (TBU), who asked us to help with the relaunch of their website. TBU has 20 offices all over the world, most of which had an input into writing copy for the new website. This meant that inevitably there were all sorts of different language styles (and spelling!) across the different sections of the website. And so TBU came to us. We took all of the copy for the major sections of the website and edited it down to give the website a single, approachable tone of voice that was consistent throughout the whole website. It was a great project and a fascinating insight into such an impressive creative business.
One of lots of case studies that we copy edited for the new Brand Union website
Part of the editing job for the new website was a huge selection of biographies of Brand Union employees. For the main bulk of the website we were implementing a single tone of voice, for the biographies section it was completely the opposite. Just tidy up each employee's own words to remove any spelling or grammatical mistakes, but maintain each individual's own voice. With employees spanning the globe from France to India, South Africa, the UAE and the US, the biographies made for fascinating reading!
Over the last couple of months we have been working with a new client, NHS Alliance. They have published two reports which they asked us to design.
The front cover from one of the NHS Alliance reports we designed
A section-opener page from an NHS Alliance report
We are currently in the process of designing a third report for the nice people at the NHS Alliance.
There have been lots more projects in what has been a busy busy year, but you’ve probably read enough for the moment. But don’t forget, we’re here for any work you might need doing!
