Miranda Barham Branding

We first met our client over 10 years ago whilst presenting our portfolio to the APX Group, a lead provider of power exchange and clearing services for the European wholesale energy market. The then marketing manager of said group was impressed with our approach to design and this was to be the start of a valued relationship between Miranda and ourselves.

Moving into this new sector called for a different tone and approach to our design, but with our tried & tested working relationship a big impression was made. As is often the case,
we cannot claim to know everyone’s market inside out, but with an insightful brief, solid background research and a generous sprinkling of good quality design, our creative solutions transcend all industry sectors.

Going it alone

In 2010 Miranda took the brave move of setting up her own venture with a PR & Marketing Consultancy. Naturally she turned to Hatch for assistance in creating a new identity, stationery and company website.

Throughout the noughties we worked on a variety of projects, from advertising to branding the Energy Traders Masked Ball in the Netherlands. Miranda has always been a pleasure to work with. Her briefs are clear, concise and her strategies innovative.

As Ms Barham’s preferred agency of choice it was par for the course that we be introduced to her new employer with an advance in her career. Continuing our journey with the APX Group and Miranda’s predecessor we set up a new account with Bfinance, a financial services firm providing advice to companies & institutional investors globally.

Our first treatment for the self-titled company was to explore a variety of alternative colour palettes that would offer a fresh and current feel. We finally settled on a simple two-colour combination of Lime Green and Black with a cool Grey as an auxiliary option to call upon. This would later pay dividends by keeping under budget when it came to printing stationery.

Above are four first stage visuals of the proposed logo identity worked up and put forward in an early iteration.

When creating the logo identity we needed to encapsulate the services offered by Miranda, whilst adding a tone and personality that would suit her field of expertise, that being Public Relations.

Looking at the above selection of early design submissions put forward, they really show how a variety of typeface and icon options set a different look and feel. These interchangeable elements helped our client to Pick’n’Mix her preferred final solution seen below.

OPT 1 A clever solution that lifts the letters ‘bar’ in the clients surname from the typographical baseline. This is further realised with the addition of a drop-mirror shadow which grounds the remainder of the name whilst highlighting the word ‘bar’ by dropping its’ shadow by an equal amount. This unusual treatment brings a ‘smile in the mind’ with the detached strap-line ‘raising the bar in PR’ which relates to Miranda’s general approach to business.

OPT 2 A traditional serif typeface lends itself to an established and conservative approach. The tagline ‘Strategic Communications’ umbrellas the vast area of disciplines covered in the services offered. A lime-green target icon has connotations of aiming or hitting the mark & focusing on the clients objectives.

OPT 3 A more fluid option which uses a cool, modern, italicised typeface, again with the preferred Strategic Communications strap-line. The ‘quote bubble’ has a traditional phone icon within the negative white space, reiterating the communications aspect of the business.

OPT 4 The fourth submission has a fashionable, rounded typeface which presents a softer more approachable look and feel. The Lime roundall icon has a double-take aspect built into it’s structure. By rotating the negative ‘m’ by 45 degrees, the white space can be viewed as an uppercase ‘B’ thus presenting the clients initials.

The final elements

Following the submission of the designs above, Miranda and the Hatch team got together to brainstorm the final solutions.

To the right, the results are an amalgamation of the initial design concepts, bringing preferred elements together. Both developments A and B, use the serif based typeface from idea 2 combined with the raised ‘bar’ in the name. Also preferred for both solutions was the lime roundall from design 4 which uses the negative white space to optically beguile, forcing a subliminal stamp on the mind. This combination became a real winner, clever and simple but very memorable.

Solution A also uses a drop shadow to ‘ground’ the type to the baseline, the shadow of the raised ‘bar’ reciprocating the movement of the text. Solution B includes the tagline ‘Strategic Communications’ which covers the multitude of disciplines and expertise Miranda can offer.

Further to this, we took the strapline from design A ‘Raising the bar in PR’ and evolved it (bottom right). To feature at the foot of a webpage and on the reverse of the business card as a summary, an encapsulation of everything Miranda’s company is about and an explanation of the logo. The idea was to keep it simple and very memorable – ‘raise the bar’ says it all. The optical roundall, completes the strapline, enabling it to work well in any environment as well as in isolation.