We created the lead imagery and messaging for the 100% Design campaign (2013) around the theme “Creative Balance” in collaboration with the show designers Thomas Matthews. This theme informed the year-long marketing communications and became a curatorial framework for the show content and onsite design. Kicking off with the advertising, we created a set of bold images, which communicate the scale, variety, and diversity of the show in a captivating but friendly, quirky way.

Working with photographer Sara Morris and stylist Sandy Suffield, we set ourselves a challenge to source products that worked together and to shoot everything in camera, built ‘for real’! We wanted to avoid stark product shots and introduced a new colourful palette – reflected in the photos and incorporated into all marketing and onsite expression. The images alternated in different touch points across the campaign for variety and freshness.

Our approach to the 100% Design campaign copy and typography with the advertising and email newsletters was to keep it very simple in order to create a deliberately quietly confident message, avoiding long descriptive paragraphs and clumsy strap lines often prevalent in events and exhibition promotion.

The Product Guide – an exclusive gift to visitors of the show – took the form of a long concertina with wrap-around jacket. Immense attention to detail was taken with the choice of stock and print liaison to achieve a ‘weighty’, beautifully printed interactive object. The Product Guide features key products to watch out for at the event as selected by key interior journalists, is colour-coded to coincide with the event’s onsite zones and concertina’s outwards to create a long landscape overview.

See results of the campaign and response from the client below.