As part of the brand development of Shared Interest and the Shared Interest Foundation, Provokateur was asked to redesign their quarterly magazine – usefully called Quarterly Return. First issue now out. Hope you like.
And be sure to check out the folk at Shared Interest. They invest your money in fair trade projects and support some great work.
Initiated by Action Aid, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and bringing together fifteen European health NGOs, Action for Global Health is a newly launched campaigning and advocacy group. Targeting national governments and EU institutions, they will be working to make sure the world makes good on their promises on health as part of the Millennium Develpment Goals.
This has been an ace project for a great client, working on the name, brand identity and messaging for the campaign. Intelectually, quite a challenging one to get inside given the complexity of the issues involved, but the final brand looks great and Provokateur is working on reports, publications and lashings more. Just the kind of client we like. Interesting, ambitious and committed to making a real difference. Oh, and the fact that it all had to work in five languages just added to the fun.
We’re proud to launch the first in Provokateur’s t-shirt range. Taken from our Acme Campaign Kit, you can now buy a rather glorious Save the Planet t-shirt. We’ll release details of stockists shortly, but we’re over the moon with this new avenue for Provokateur. Get in touch if you want to get your grubby paws on one – a mere £10. Damn bargain, we reckon.
The problem with looking for the *right* quotation is that, in the process, you come across so many other great lines. Not quite ‘what you’re after’, but amazing nonetheless. So, following from the previous post, here’s a fantastic quotation from Martin Luther King JR.
“When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love.”
Perhaps quotations should become a regular feature of the blog. We’ve already demonstrated our ‘quote junky’ commitment on the main site (check out the Heroes bit in the Provokations section) – but it wouldn’t hurt to start a thread here.
While working on a nice project for the civil liberties organisation Liberty, we turned up a rather brilliant Gandhi quotation. We share it here for no other reason than that it’s great.
There are seven sins in the world: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice and politics without principle.
Crikey that’s good!
Not content with pushing out the boundaries of fair lending and opening up even more branches, Fair Finance has just produced their ‘goodie bag’ to help spread the word. With help from Provokateur, the nice folk of East London will be receiving advice cards to help them manage their finances, a natty Fair Finance calculator and some other pretty cool items to help them sort their accounts and keep the loansharks at bay.
As ever, Fair Finance is going where the big banks and dodgy lenders fear to tread. Hooray for them.
Provokateur is recruiting.
Yup. We now have so much work that we are on the hunt for remarkable, fresh, exciting, brilliant, unique, passionate, one-of-a-kind, super ambitious, dedicated, lovely designers to join the team.
You’ll have to be someone pretty special though, since Provokateur is committed to going above and beyond in our quest to create fantasticness. Think that might be you? Drop us a line at gimmeajob@provokateur.com.
And spread the word!
Early days, but just finished the branding of Adventure Ecology’s new ‘waste’ campaign. Provokateur was getting its hands dirty on the concept, naming and design, and this is a first peak. Watch this space cos there’s going to be a lot of exciting stuff coming our of 4R:Planet – and we’ll be doing our provokative best to make this campaign really make its mark. Just so you know, a Pacific-crossing in a boat made from plastic bottles is already on the cards. You have been warned.
In the meantime, check out Adventure Ecology – http://www.adventureecology.com/
Exciting news for us. Provokateur has just been appointed Great Ormond Street Hospital’s design agency.
It’s a great opportunity to work with a world-class charity with big ambitions for the future.
Watch this space!
Exciting news.
Having been featured in the Evening Standard and with stacks of folk getting in touch to find out how they could get hold of the Acme Campaign Kit (Global Warming Edition), we kind of ran out. Which is nice. But when something is this good, you can’t just call it a day. With a fresh lick of paint, we’ve redesigned the Kit and it will very soon be available in shops and online. And of course, you can always just buy a pack direct from us. 4 sheets of tip top stickers designed to spread the word and get people thinking about the biggest issue there is. Give us a shout if you’re interested – info@provokateur.com
Introducing the new brand for the Crisis Urban Village.
The housing charity Crisis asked Provokateur to create a brand for their pioneering housing initiative, Urban Village. This is about as exciting as it gets. A brilliant, mixed use housing development that will create a vibrant buzzing community, first in Shoreditch (it is hoped!) and then rolled out in other developments around the country.
This isn’t a homeless project, it’s about housing. Good quality, well designed, community-centred, creatively buzzing. The brand needed to express all the energy and optimism of the project and to communicate a sense of the aspiration Urban Village represents. We hope it does so nicely, and continue to work with Crisis on helping bring their communications to life.
The aviation industry seems to be getting away with a bit of a PR coup at the moment, conning politicians and the public that aviation emissions are ever so wee, and scarcely worth worrying about.
Working with GreenSkies, Airport Watch and Enough’sEnough, Provokateur was asked to help get the facts right. Because, you see, aviation emissions are not quite so diddy when taken as a proportion of Britain’s total CO2 emissions. And then, of course, you’ve got to account for the additional damage that emissions at high altitude creates. Long and the short, aviation accounts for a fairly chunky slice of our CO2. And it’s time the industry was held to account for the TRUE figures.
This ad, printed in The Independent and The Times is just the start.
Anyone taking a train out of Paddington, especially those merry Heathrow Express travellers, will be in for a wee surprise from Monday.
Provokateur is proud to unveil Sir Montgomery Cecil, Chairman of Spurt Aviation, in full billboard glory, proclaiming : Screw Global Warming – Let’s Fly!
With the Climate Bill announced this week, and with international aviation EXCLUDED from Britain’s CO2 emission targets, you could just as well put Gordon Brown in the picture instead of Sir Monty.
Talking of which, be sure to check out the Independent on Tuesday. Readers are promised a pre-Budget warmer to remind the Iron Chancellor that talking the talk on climate change is not enough. Watch this space.
A cheeky little campaign for those brilliant people at Global Witness, highlighting corporate hypocrisy and double dealing.
HSBC, the World’s Local Bank, is so proud of their environmental credentials that they are holding a ‘Green Sale’. Marketing materials are replete with pandas, paw prints and other schmaltzy crap.
Imagine the surprise when it was discovered that the self same bank was also managing the business affairs of Samling, one of the world’s most disreputable logging companies. And that’s up against some pretty stiff competition.
Presumably, then, the ‘Green Sale’ refers to the price at which HSBC is prepared to sell tropical forests down the swanny.
Global Witness being Global Witness, they wanted to make sure that no bad deed goes unnoticed. And as ever, Provokateur was glad to help out.
(For those who are interested, HSBC’s ‘Green Sale’ benefits from a little scrutiny. Those lovely bankers are planting a virtual forest, full of virtual trees, to help save our virtual environment. Well actually, what they’re really doing is planting a virtual tree for every customer who chooses to take their statements online. For every 20 virtual trees, they plant an honest-to-goodness real one (up to a maximum of 20,000 trees). Given that each sapling is sold at around £0.07p per tree, 20,000 trees costs around £1,400. Total tree planting spend per customer? £0.0035p. HSBC’s 2006 profits? £11bn. Smacks of a bank that virtually cares.)
Time that Provokateur stopped harking on about itself and used the power of Blog for the forces of good, evil and general mischief.
Where better to start than by ensuring that David Cameron’s happy days at the Bullingdon Club are fondly remembered by all. Aaaah, those were the days. £1,200 tails, buckets of champagne and a rather fine sneer known only to the Ruling Class. If you listen closely, you can just about hear their braying ‘haw haws’.
Be afraid! One of these men could be the next Prime Minister. God help us.
Oh, and if are interested, here’s the names of this bunch of splendid chinless wonders.
1) Sebastian Grigg
2) David Cameron
3) Ralph Perry Robinson
4) Ewen Fergusson
5) Matthew Benson
6) Sebastian James
7) Jonathan Ford
Boris Johnson
9) Harry Eastwood
Can’t see any of this lot wanting to ‘hug a hoodie’.
Just a quickie project for the folk at Fair Finance. Here are just a few of the new promotional stickers we’ve done for them. We particularly like ’sharks not welcome’, which looks like it might form the new identity for their anti-loan shark campaign. Which is nice to know.
Across double page spreads in The Times, Independent and Daily Telegraph, the now legendary Sir Montgomery Cecil takes the stage again, advancing his own inimitable case for flying. This time, however, he is faced by a feisty penguin, equally determined to explain, “from one flightless species to another”, just how flying could be the death of us.
Yup – it’s another Enough’s Enough spectacular. It’s so exciting to be working with an organisation who has the energy and passion to really get their campaigns out there. This is the biggest campaign issue there is, and Enough’s Enough is one of the few organisations trying to take the bull by the horns and really get the debate moving. Today, aviation. Tomorrow, the world. Great stuff! Hope you like.
Climate change is sadly one of those issues that attracts warm words but scant action. For evidence, regard Tony Blair’s comments this week that he would be unlikely to cut back on his long haul flights, preferring instead to cross his fingers and hope that Science somehow comes to the rescue. Hmmm… not quite the leadership many hope to see from the Prime Minister.
Enough’s Enough were itching to get a public response up and asked Provokateur to come up with some creative scullduggery to do the job. The result was British Blairways… “fuelled by wishful thinking” and using “revolutionary ‘Spin’ technology”.
Sadly, the ad got pulled at the last minute when it became apparent that the story had gone rather ‘cold’ - but we post it here because, well, we like it!
Provokateur has got 2007 off with a bang with their Acme Campaign Kit (Global Warming Edition).
It’s time to get the message out on the single biggest issue we face – climate change. And Provokateur wanted to do its bit – in its own unique fashion. The Acme Campaign Kit was produced for Provokateur’s friends and contains four sheets of stickers… all different… all unique.
Interested? Get in touch. It’s feisty stuff and we want to see it travel far and wide.
