Bigpipe Press & Outdoor Collateral Grid

Hiyas.

First, thank you very much @Jen Hadfield for the invite.

For my first shot, I thought I'd share some of the madness that's made it into a new brand that is officially getting re-launched tomorrow. I've been fortunate enough to lead the redesign of a new 'naked broadband' service called Bigpipe — a standalone brand by Telecom Digital Ventures, of Telecom NZ.

The brand's promise and tagline is now 'Nothing but broadband' and the brand elements were intentionally designed to feel engineered, rather than ornately designed. There's nothing inherently pretty about it to the casual observer: heaps of negative space, a slightly vintage colour palette of dark blue and orange (with some accents for depth) and the gorgeously strange & awkward Replica typeface (at one point, the client wanted to know why a font that was 'cut off' at the edges was so expensive, bless).

For all of the press and outdoor collateral — I've taken inspiration from Van de Graaf's canon on page construction and set the 9x9 grid as the default for every piece, going further to divide each of the nine rows into five to form a sort of 'baseline grid' (this point really set the actual print designers on edge) that the copy rested on inside of the allocated 6x6 block (the faint orange bit).

The rule was pretty simple: place the logo two columns wide in the bottom left while maintaining the 'height of B x2' rule from the bottom. Now space the copy lines along the remaining lines in the block. And this is where it got interesting; some executions had two rows free between each line of copy, and some only one. It created a beautifully awkwardness, but because of how intentionally everything was placed (even the pipe grid on the last frame lines up perfectly to the logo) the designs still looked properly 'engineered'. As a whole, the brand is really beautiful (I can't share more until it launches officially tomorrow) and I'm super thrilled that the clients just left me to it and trusted us to create them something less than expected in a very crowded space.