2. Don’t be afraid of being unique.
The fear of being different can sometimes cause unnecessary distraction from the main goal of brand development — to stand apart from your competitors. You need to fully explore the possibility that your brand can create its own space within the market, to be a leader and not a follower.

3. You have a brand whether you like it or not.
It is impossible to not brand yourself. Everything that you and your business does when presenting itself to the market goes towards building the perception of your business in the minds of the consumer. You have a brand image simply by being in business and you need to make sure that it sends the right message to the right people.

4. Learn the art of being Not Lost.
For brands, the ultimate goal is to become Not Lost. A wine label needs to be Not Lost on the shelves of the bottle shop, a company needs to be Not Lost in search results for their services, a shop sign needs to be Not Lost amongst the other signage and advertising in its vicinity. In fact branding is *all* about becoming Not Lost in the market place. Your business needs a compass to show the way.

5. Your brand is your business.
If you’re in business, you’re in the business of brand communication. Everything you do, every message that you send, every person that you hire needs to reflect your brand’s ethos. The value of a brand is directly related to the investment made into it. How valuable is your brand?

6. Business loves brands.
Brands help us navigate the world we live in by accelerating our decisions. We no longer just purchase products or services, we buy into an idea, a promise of an experience that is offered by a brand. Whether that promise is excellence or affordability, each brand has its own niche offering to the market. Businesses, like people, love choosing brands that reflect their own values and ideals.

7. Visible brands make money.
We’re all in business to make money and a brand that speaks in the the right tone is a surefire way to increase your presence in the market. You don’t have to be a genius to work out that an increased presence translates to more customers, more revenue, and ultimately more profits. Good design is good business.

My answer was that they needed to become “Not Lost”.

While ‘found’ is the antonym of ‘lost’, being Not Lost is not the same as being found. While this may sound a bit like Douglas Adams’ ‘knack of flying’, it is actually a sound idea. Being Not Lost implies deliberate and constant effort into being seen and heard. Not just an accident of luck.

When you are Not Lost, you are; highly visible and followed by many; have a rare focus on where you are going and have a clear understanding of the best way to get there. Not Lost is a constant state of being in view and of having others aware of who you are and what you stand for.

To take this a step further, for brands the ultimate goal is to be Not Lost. A wine label needs to be Not Lost on the shelves of the bottle shop, a company needs to be Not Lost in search results for their services, a shop sign needs to be Not Lost amongst the other signage and advertising in its vicinity. You could say that branding and marketing is all about becoming Not Lost in the market place.

We help our clients develop campaigns that enable them to be Not Lost. Through a considered process and distinctive graphic design and image making, we enhance the visibility of brands and make them stick in the mind of the consumer.

How do you ensure that your brand is Not Lost?

We specialise in delivering high impact visual identities for our clients. We make them look good and we make them stand out from the crowd and we’ve been doing it for over a decade.

Our goal is to lift the visibility of a business within its market space, making it stand out from the competition. We have helped to define the stories that make our clients’ businesses unique and have crafted an arrary of visual languages to convey these stories to the market.

Ultimately, this translates into specific applications such as logos, naming, stationery, communication collateral, signage, websites etc but not before the overall blueprint for the visual identity has been devised and honed.

This is a crucial factor of our process: we think before we do. We engage with our clients to gain a deep understanding of their business and the market that they operate in before we begin the graphic design process.

While there is a heavy element of cheese in this Rugby themed in-flight safety video, the balance between frivolous fun and the important message is very well handled.

Well shot and superbly written, the combined stories of Rugby, NZ culture and aircraft safety are entwined in such an engaging way that it is hard not to watch to the end.

There aren’t too many brands that could pull off a Grandma nudie-run in their presentation to the market either.

Talking Heads, Remain in Light was the first tape in and for the past two weeks, it hasn’t been taken out. Apart from being such a great album, I’ve been reminded of the notion of listening to albums rather than relying on the randomness of shuffle to select the music I listen to. It’s a beautiful thing. Each track moves into the next with a short second of silence and you are forced, in a good way, to listen to the tracks in the order that the artist intended.

I also found that the order of the tracks triggered very strong memories of listening to the same cassette as a teenager some 20 years ago. What I found most interesting about this is that I’ve listened to these same tracks on CD or iPod regularly but have not had the same level of nostalgic memory recall as I have when hearing these songs in the album order. It is the sequence that has stuck in my mind all these years; deep memory recall, reaching back two decades, triggered by a defined sequence of sounds.

It raises interesting questions about the effect of technology on our experiences. Are we losing our connection to our past through the manner in which we now interact with our media? Will my sons ever know the wonder of listening to a complete album and deep-linking their memories while doing so? I think yes is the answer to the former and hopefully I can counter the latter through persuasion.

Here’s to the lost art of listening to albums and the best method for recording our lives in our heads.

Browsing through the various ideas of Australian-ness is a wonderful insight into the attitude of our national psyche. Irreverence, humour, anti-authority, social inclusion, wry observations, personal nostalgia, wimsy and more make up the collection and give the viewer a deep and rich understanding of the nature of the Australian spirit.

My submission, Life is but a dream…, is shown here and is an image of my father and my son in a rowing boat while celebrating Australia Day, representing the multiple generations of Australians who are able to enjoy the good life in a land made hospitable by the long forgotten exiles of our historical past.

For an insight into the project and to view other submissions, visit the Australia Project website.

A selection of photos from our collection to show various visual markers that help us navigate the real world, tied together with a simple typographic representation of the key concept, Not Lost. There is a simple animation with soundtrack also being developed.

Very simple idea for a video clip using synchronised face muscle stimulation in time to the electronic sounds.

An essential part of any employees induction is learning how to make the bosses coffee. We find that this video helps to show the importance of such a crucial task.

The reduction of information down to the essential elements without the confusion of adding pictures of buildings and other structures, creates a simple and easy to understand guidance map.

Overall the map has been very well received with one European visitor stating that, in his opinion, it is “the easiest to read trail map I’ve seen anywhere in the world.”