DESIGN SOLUTIONS

We help creatives, brands and organisations to develop their ideas and to design solutions that communicate these ideas to their chosen audiences. We have produced solutions for fashion houses, film, galleries, tech and sports giants through to tv channels and national museums.

TYPICAL SOLUTIONS

Identity Systems

We work with creatives, companies and organisations to develop unique, fit-for-purpose identities for their brands. We ask questions until the point where we fully understand the scope of activity your identity will be involved in, where it fits within the market and what it needs to say or imply. An identity should be a kitbag for success. It should be a structure that is identifiable across all the ranges of you activity. Identity systems can be quite humble in nature or cover a broad scope of activity and interaction including visual, audio and tactile qualities.

Brand Development

Where do you want to go? What do you want to achieve? We work with brands to align them with their target audience. We can offer business advice and development of the brand along the path you have chosen.

Heritage Projects

We are always interested in context. If we look at history as a series of dynamic changes that created the world that we live in today, it encourages us to see how history could flow through into the future. We are interested in developing progressive solutions that seek to create a link between the past and the future. Less cobwebs, more meaning and more engagement!

Media Projects

When we want to communicate ideas in new ways we’ll often collaborate with others to develop new platforms for engagement. We have developed an augmented reality app that is more affordable than the competition for creatives that encompasses technology for iOS and Android and is now available to be white lab-led for client projects.

THE PERFECT TEAM

One of Institute’s strengths is it’s ability to collaborate with the right people at the right time, to solve creative problems. We collaborate with a host of local talent from across the disciplines of arts, design and technology. Access to this expertise, and a diversity of knowledge, ensures that our projects are future-facing and that the solutions we provide keep brands relevant.

BENEFITS OF COLLABORATION

Teamwork

We put together teams so that you don’t have to.

Financing the Future

Your Fees Matter. You fees go towards the team working on projects as well as supporting the Institute infrastructure. You are helping to support the local creative talent pool.

Developing Talent

Institute provides a framework for outstanding young creatives to develop their professional practice within established industry frameworks.

Agility

Through agile project management, experience and a talent pool of the best local creatives, clients can benefit from sophisticated projects that are delivered quickly and often at less cost than from traditional, full service agencies.

A Safe Pair of Hands

Institute is a collaborative framework that is underpinned by Graffio Arts. Graffio Arts have extensive experience in delivering creative projects for a host of international clients.

OUR PROJECT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

Discover

What is the problem that you’d like to solve? We work with you to understand where you are and where you want to go. The more we know about you and your goals, the more likely that we can produce a solution that’s fit for purpose, that empowers you to achieve your ambitions.

Define

With knowledge of how you work and what you’d like to achieve, we work with you to define the kind of solution that ticks all of the required boxes. This is the chance to double check initial perceptions of the problem at hand. It could be that with more understanding of your situation and with our experience of solving these kind of problems, we can suggest alternative strategies. This stage functions to ensure that our perceptions are aligned before moving forward.

Design

With the brief now defined we work through to a solution. We follow a tried and tested design methodology often encapsulated by a guiding principle called form follows function. We ask what function(s) does this solution have to perform? The form (the look, the shape) has to meet this functionality to succeed. Because we’ve worked with you to define a robust brief, we are then free to design the most original and dynamic solution that time and budget allows.

OUR DESIGN METHOD

We believe in the maxim, Form follows function. The solutions that we produce should look, feel and essentially, be, the answer to your problem. Each problem requires a unique solution that emerges out of the design process.

By going through the discovery stage to define the core problems to solve, we are then free to develop a solution that solves these unique problems and is fit for your purpose.

This is a formula for success. It encourages clarity in the way we think about the project objectives. That aids communication with each other. This clarity allows us to get from A to B in an understandable way but allows us the freedom to produce dynamic solutions.

FUTURE BRANDS

We are interested in the ways that ideas are communicated to remote audiences and the media that is used to accomplish this. Every brand idea starts in one persons consciousness and ends up in front of their audiences’ senses. We tend to rely heavily on the visual, sometimes on the tactile, on the sonic where necessary, but what about our sense of taste or our sense of space? We work across disciplines to examine new ways to communicate ideas. This may be the development of new media platforms, new ways to identify brands, new types of interactions or new kinds of deliverables.

The future starts today…

EXPERIENCE

Over the last 25 years, the founders of Institute, have worked on thousands of projects that includes work for the following brands:

Adidas, Barclays, BBC, Bench, The Body Shop, Boots, The British Museum, The Carphone Warehouse, Cartoon Network, Cath Kidston, Clarins, Conde Naste, Daks, The Design Museum, Diesel, Disney Stores, EMI, Esquire Sport Magazine, Exposure, Fate Face, Fred Perry, Givenchy, Gieves & Hawkes, Godiva, Habitat, Halifax, Haribo, Harrods, House of Fraser, Hedkayse, HMV, The Independent, Kookai, Levis, Marks & Spencer, MGA, National Gallery, Procter and Gamble, Royal Court Theatre, Selfridges, Schuh, Sony, Superdry, TATE Enterprises, Ted Baker, Three Mobile, Tower Records, TKMaxx, UNIQLO, United International Pictures, Virgin, Vodaphone and Zoological Society of London.

We bring this experience of the design and delivery of a huge diversity of projects to Institute. The gallery below shows a tiny selection of the projects that we have previously been part of.