8 October 2012 - 8:35pm | posted by Jennifer Faull | 0 comments

What happens when you invite 12 rival design agencies to do posters for each other: Brilliant Path and Howdy

This week we will be revealing to our online community what happened when we asked 12 rival design firms to create ad posters for each other as part of The Drum’s Truce Commission project. What is the Truce Commission you ask? Well we invited 12 rival design consultancies to do posters for each other. Why not? They always advise clients not to attempt their own creative work on the grounds they might be too close to certain issues to be objective. And it proved particularly timely as a way of marking the international day of peace – September 21.

Yesterday we revealed the posters that SEA and The Brand Union came up with when they were given each other’s design briefs, both taking the humorous route as explained in the lead designers rationales. So next up we have Howdy and Brilliant path, whose work you can find below.

The Truce Commission has proved so successful that The Drum is continuing to invite agencies out there to get involved. Find out more here.

Howdy's brief for Brilliant Path

Despite our name conjuring colourful western imagery we don’t think that promoting ourselves as ‘cowboy’ designers would be a particularly smart business move. So avoid any mention of injuns, guns, posses, gulches…

Background:
Howdy was formed in 1999 by Neil Smith and Sharon Clampin, both formerly of GIANT, who between them have over 50 years of experience. We’re currently working for lots of nice people in charities and not-for-profi ts. We also have a good track record with small to medium sized businesses and start-ups and we would like to continue to attract this type of client. This is our target audience. Branding is our thing, but we also design websites, annual reports, and printed communications.

Culture:
In real life we are a pair of grumpy gits (we also employ two young designers who are marginally less grumpy), but to our clients we are friendly, approachable, hard working, negotiable, dedicated, literate, honest, intelligent(ish) and helpful - hence the warm, upbeat name. We think that producing beautiful and effective design is often about stripping away the unnecessary fl uff and keeping things uncomplicated. We try to avoid bull and management speak - you won’t hear us talk of ‘going forward’ or discussing ‘brand worlds’.

Mandatories:
Like a lot of design groups who preach the importance of consistent branding to their clients our ‘design guidelines’ only exist in our heads and are regularly abused. As a rule we use DIN for all our printed communications, although I’m a bit bored with it to be honest so use whatever you feel is appropriate (not Playbill, remember). We don’t have a colour palette, and we never use our logo in colour. Black only please, or reverse white out. We have two logos – our standard one and our tenth anniversary ‘1999’ logo which we introduced three years ago which I kind of like.

So, in summary – we’re a small, very talented, experienced and friendly design group specialising in the branding of charities, small to medium sized businesses and start-ups. That’s it really.

Creative Review:

Brilliant Path's poster for Howdy

The Rationale from James Henderson, founder and creative director, Brilliant Path
The founders jokingly described themselves as “grumpy gits” who employ young “less grumpy” designers. We interpreted this as the fact that the two founders are the extremely experienced ‘heads’ of the company, and their young designers are ‘the shoulders’ who produce much of their cutting-edge creative. Execution-wise, we share the view with
Howdy that good design is more about what you take away than what you add.

Brilliant Path's brief for Howdy

What would you like your poster to say about you?
A brand is a story. Using beautiful design we tell bloody good stories – with lots of pretty pictures.

Who should your poster be aimed at?
Indirect clients Other larger brand communication agencies that could use us (like a trustworthy little brother) for their smaller clients. Direct clients Unknown brands that want to be the one, not another one of those and who have an inspiring organisation, product or service. And established brands that need creative help to speak to the people that use them.

What do they currently think of your agency?
That we’re little, but punch well above our weight.

What would you like them to think of your agency after seeing the poster?
Confident, objective, challenging, inspiring and instinctive.

Howdy's poster for Brilliant Path

The Rationale from Neil Smith, founder, Howdy
Our first objective was to not make our rival agency look too good. And I think (with respect) the Ronnie Corbett reference helps achieve this. We’ve also forgotten to include any contact details on the poster. The ‘headline’ copy was lifted verbatim from the brief, so the ‘idea’ seemed quite obvious to us. I don’t know the Brilliant Path guys, and they’re pretty anonymous on their website, but I can only hope that at least one of them is ‘horn-rimmed’, and quite small. So at least we won’t get beaten up when we meet them