Gin night flyers and posters

Scope

We work with Lands Village Hall regularly. We have developed an “in–house” style for their online and printed marketing materials. It was natural for them to come to us for an important project.

The client explained that the project involved a significant investment: they were keen that its marketing was professional and well–⁠executed for two reasons. First, the sponsorship of The Herbal Gin Company was critical to our client. Secondly, this was a flagship evening for the hall since its reopening the previous year. The project’s chief constraint was the budget: the client has limited funds to advertise events because it is a small, local charity.

The Trust was keen to ensure the project aligned well with the sponsor’s branding and identity. They felt that combining their branding with the sponsor’s might be difficult in some contexts because they felt a responsibility to discourage excessive drinking through their healthy living ethos and wanted us to find a suitable method of alignment.

The project’s objective was to market an upcoming event at the hall. The posters and flyers had to be interesting and exciting, meet brand requirements for both the Trust and the sponsor, and tell readers the information they needed to know. The project had to reflect the intention to have an entertaining, sociable evening.

Increasing the Trust’s audience was an ambition of the project. There were obstacles to achieving this aim: perceptions of COVID–19, news stories about the cost of living crisis and inflation, and the event’s proximity to the end of the Platinum Jubilee weekend. Despite these obstacles, the design had to increase general knowledge and awareness of the hall.

Our solution

Initially, we approached the project from the sponsor’s angle. We asked the sponsor for some print–quality photographs and images of their product and logo. The Herbal Gin Company returned six great stills; all were suitable backgrounds for the project.

We chose three of these images to progress and designed alternative flyers based on them. We showed these options to the client for approval and then offered them to The Herbal Gin Company for a final decision on which design they preferred.

Dr Colin Scott from The Herbal Gin Company replied, saying they especially liked the “Lemon Drizzle” design. He said the branding was good, and overall the leaflet was “spot on – [we] love it”. This feedback was great praise and showed that we understood the brief and the brand.

Once we had an accepted design candidate, we went to work to refine and sharpen the detailed design: we tweaked the colours, changed the typesetting and typeface, muted the background slightly to avoid it clashing with overlaid copy, and marginally adjusted many of the fine details until we were happy with the draft.

We revealed the final draft to the client and the sponsor again. Both remained very happy with the design.

So, we moved on to designing the poster. The A1–sized poster had to fit within an A–board with an overhanging frame edge; therefore, the advertisement needed a safety border around it. Additionally, despite the similarity in shape of both A5 and A1 portrait formats, the difference in size caused minor problems with the cropping of the image because the size of the original image was on the edge of its acceptable printable quality in this format. We sent the project to the printers once we completed these format alterations to the design.

Successes

The project was completed on time and on budget and sent to the printers.

Our client and the sponsor, The Herbal Gin Company, expressed their sincere delight with the design. This acknowledgement was all the success we wanted to achieve with our work. Early indications suggest that the flyers, posters and Facebook event have caused a stir: the design has reached a significant section of the local population–much further than the usual audience; so this is encouraging. Many more sections of the local community are aware of the event than is normally the case, and that awareness has filtered much farther afield than the local catchment area.

Challenges

The chief challenge for the project was aligning the branding of two different organisations into one design. We believe we achieved this through simple methods and experience. The responses of the client and the sponsor demonstrate that we overcame this challenge.

The fact that the sponsor provided several marketing images we could use as the basis for the design helped save us some time and gave us a lead on how to meet the brief effectively. While the image we used in the final design was great, it required some work to tone down the backdrop so that the copy remained visible over a busy background.

The project also faced external challenges, including continued hesitancy because of COVID–19; and its proximity of the event to the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee the weekend before this event. While it was beyond our power to change these external factors, we attempted to mitigate them by emphasising the social interaction, fun and friendship the evening offered, which could be considered a continuation of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations at a time that otherwise would be relatively flat.

Impacts of the project

When the client, the sponsor, and a small cohort of independent people we polled all prefer the same design, we know it should work well.

Since we printed the flyer and the client distributed it, the breadth of recognition of the event has been significant: there has been a substantial increase in awareness of the event and the client. This uplift is encouraging because it demonstrates that the client’s message is cutting through and that this project hit the target and met its brief.

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