We have recently had a lecture from designer and business owner, Richard Smith. He is the co-owner of the design company ‘Jannuzi Smith’ a cross-media design consultancy based in London and Lugano. The theme of the lecture was ‘lures and hooks’ thinking about the idea of attracting peoples attention and them captivating them with your designs. Even though their eye has been caught initially based on the look of your design, it needs to have enough behind it to draw them in, and make them want to invest more time/money in whatever you are doing. His company do lot’s of moving images on screen, as well as posters, books etc. He spoke about the importance of setting out a theme in a brand, and then playing on it, making it fun. This is the important bit, as the thing that will excite people about your designs is often the playful-ness.
Jannuzi Smith are a cross media design agency. Most design companies in the industry specialise, whereas they do everything. Richard feels this is important because if different places do different things for a company it doesn’t always fit together properly, because although most designers can work to a certain style, it’s still not the same as the same designer doing it all, clearly that is going to work together the best.
Film Del Festival Locarno
Richard then went onto talk about a couple of different projects that Jannuzi Smith have been working on past and present. One of the big ones he spoke about was the work they have been doing for ‘Festival del film Locarno’, a film festival based in Switzerland. Even though Cannes is the big film festival, Locarno isn’t far behind. People who are more about art than films in general tend to go to Locarno, as it is more just about watching great movies. Another difference between the two festivals is that with Locarno, general people can get tickets to attend rather than the tickets only being available to people in the industry, like with Cannes. The festival takes over the whole city for it’s two week duration, and there is advertising for it everywhere. The city is a largely pedestrianised area, so most of the posters have been designed to be looked at by people walking past, rather than driving. The branding for the festival was created around the theme of a golden leopard, as the leopard is a symbolic animal in Locarno. They were given a pretty good budget for the branding, so were able to hire Tim Flack, arguably the best animal photographer in the world, to work with them on the project. The logo (shown below) really draws your focus to the colours of yellow and black, which have then been the theme for the rest of the festival (e.g. on the chairs, advertising, tickets etc.) The simple typography is easy to read from any distance, and stands out well against the black background. The photographs of the leopard were taken at a private zoo in Kent that rents out animals for films etc. The team went down and set up a studio there, where the images of the leopard were taken. In Richards presentation he showed a few images that had been taken of the leopard and Tim Flack at work, and it was amazing to see! It must have been a strange experience having a leopard in front of you, trying to get it to do the things you need it to do. In one of the images, the leopard was walking on a beam, but apparently he kept jumping off!
Festival del Film Locarno Logo
Main Entrance of Festival del Film Locarno
There are twenty different presentation spaces at the festival, throughout the small city. The main one being the piazza. The Piazza has the biggest screen in Europe, with 8 thousand people being able to view the film showing at the same time. The screen is comparable to the size of an iMax Screen. Being completely outside, the festival hopes for good weather, but people still turn up and have a good time no matter what. When a film is over, people applaud, much like at the theatre. This gives the festival a completely different vibe to the usual cinema experience.
One of the things that Jannuzi Smith were asked to design, was a signifier to show that a film was about to start. It needed to be open enough that it didn’t suggest the genre of the film as they only had enough money in the budget to create one, so it had to work for every style of film. Richard played the final version they’d done, and it was amazing. It was video footage taken when the photographs were taken of the leopard walking across the screen, with the sound being nothing but a huge roar. With this sound playing out throughout the festival, it would make it unmissable that a film is about to begin. The first time that the signifier was played, people applauded it.
The leopard theme was kept across all the advertising for the festival, with a series of posters being designed with leopard photography. Different posters were created for different genres of film, with different emotions being conveyed on the leopards face such as anger and peacefulness. The posters were placed all over the town with five or six different ones going around the city in different locations. After using the same posters for a couple of years, they felt that the theme needed freshening up a bit. They decided to go with ‘Beauty and the Beast’ as the classic was made the same year that Locarno was established and was shown at the opening festival. Still sticking with the theme of yellow and black and the leopard, new posters were created using lines. Although from straight on this series looks slightly unusual, they are actually a really clever design. People are always walking around the town, so will be seeing the posters from all different angles. Keeping this in mind, the series was designed so that from different angles, the images look different.
Beauty and the Beast themed poster
The most recent advertising series is ‘The Leopard in You’. People around the town had their photo taken for the opportunity to be featured on the next poster. The use of a special light when taking the images means that freckles and imperfections on peoples faces are shown up, making them have markings similar to a leopard. (example image below). Jannuzi Smith also designed an app that allowed people to take selfies of their own faces with the leopard effect.
The Leopard in You Poster series
When stars arrive at the event, the red carpet were the photographs get taken is placed in front of some form of advertising for the festival, usually the logo, which means that they are getting a huge amount of essentially free advertising from when the photographs of the stars are featured in the press, as the logo is being shown behind them.
Red Carpet with Advertising in Background
Big bank, UBS, sponsor the public prize. All the people in the piazza get the chance to vote for their favourite film, this gives the public their chance to vote for a film they think deserves to win. Being the biggest sponsorship in the world, it’s important that people see that UBS are sponsoring them. Jannuzi Smith wanted to design a logo that is a cross between the bank and the festival to advertising the Prix Du Public. Before Jannuzi Smith started doing the festivals design work, public already had a chance to vote but nobody cared about it, because it wasn’t seen as being a big thing, and was a boring process that people couldn’t be bothered to do. UBS said that they were going to start taking away money from the sponsorship if they didn’t redesign how the voting worked, and encourage people to start voting more. One way that Jannuzi Smith did this was by creating a series of short videos that were played on screen at the festival, of past winners of the award thanking the pubic for voting for them. Each video was taken in a random setting (woods, field etc.) and each person was sat on either a yellow or black chair whist they were talking. At the end of the video the stars explain how you vote, and encourage people to do so. The soundtrack at the end of the video is the sound of people clapping. A card is put on each seat in the piazza, which you can vote from, but you also have the option to vote on your phone, but you will only be able to do so if you are inside the piazza; this stop outsiders from being able to vote when they haven’t seen the film. Voting from your phone is good as it allows the festival to gain data from people such as email addresses (if people decide to give them). On mobile voting, people are not able to vote before the film is over. If they decide to go onto the site before this, there is a quiz on there you can do while you’re waiting/ Jannuzi Smith designed poster series ‘You are The Jury’ to go around the town, making everyone aware that the public vote is now becoming a big, exciting thing. When voting, you decide how many stars to give the film, so all the advertising and promotional material has the theme of stars.
You Are The Jury - Prix Du Public UBS Poster
Proctor and Matthews Architects
Another company that Jannuzi Smith have recently been working for is Proctor and Matthews Architects. They are currently upper B level, and have realistic expectations of how to bring themselves up to that top A bracket, with the help of Jannuzi Smith. The Architects are currently winning lots of awards and contracts, but not any of the big ones. Richard and his team are trying to help the company get through the doors, with the use of design to boost their company. Richard noticed that in presentation, Proctor and Matthews talk a lot about journeys through architecture, but realised that they weren’t communicating this in any way through their design. Along with a rebrand, Jannuzi Smith put moving images onto their website to help to show ‘journeys through architecture’. One of the things that Richard feels is important in branding, is to keep it simple. Expression can be shown in the pieces created rather than in the branding itself. Its much better to have a really simple logo that is easily recognisable, on an exciting and expressive poster or advertising campaign. All moving images on the website were created without any audio, as the target audience is people in offices, who probably won’t want sound going off when they go onto the website. Audio actually cost a lot of money, so this was also a great way to save. The type that is featured in the videos and moving images on the site is actually completely separate and just placed on top, which means that it can be edited without having to edit the whole thing. If you like one of the moving images you can click on it to bring up more content about whatever it is. The pages have been designed to work on mobile format as well as on a laptop or computer, this is called responsive design. Jannuzi Smith have also created leaflets and business cards for the company, all replicating the style of the website so everything links together. Calvert font was used, and they designed an ampersand to use of the front which represents the corporate identity of the brand. Instead of creating booklets for brochures, broadsheets were designed, each one specialising in a different area. Richard spoke about how giving a business card is now much more of a formal ritual now, rather than just handing across a card with information on it. The business cards were produced in different colours for the different people that worked at the company. This didn’t end up costing much more because instead of using different ink to create the colours, they decided to print onto coloured card, using white foil text.
This lecture from Richard Smith was interesting, helpful and inspiring and i look forward to him coming in again in a couple of weeks to talk to us some more. His final words of wisdom were: get peoples attention, keep it consistent, and use playful games to hold attention.
