Halloween message and gift

For Halloween 2014 Flipside decided to thank their clients with a sweet halloween treat; candy fangs in a aluminium tin.  A chance to develop a vampire character and create a lovely piece of packaging.

The Halloween message on the front reads "FANGS VERY MUCH… inside underneath reads "...for being a spooktacular client!" Plus on opening the yummy sweet treats, candy fangs of course.

Silent night

For Christmas 2013, Flipside decided to create a short animated piece to celebrate the season, plus it was a chance to do some character development and work with animation partners Fifthstorey.

We love music here at Flipside, and it always evokes a feeling of Christmas whether it’s classic, or pop. Music as a starting point seemed fitting for us too since we’ve enjoyed some fantastic projects within the music industry in the past.

We picked 'Silent Night' and thought the visual pun of ‘silent’ would be a quirky route to develop, so the idea of a silent movie was born. Vintage, still very much on trend, and Victoriana, which has a associated romanticism when it comes to Christmas, were selected as a theme. We also took influence from work of artists such as Steam Punk, Terry Gilliam and Heath Robinson.

We sketched out some storyboards and created characters having done some research into Victorian clothing, vehicles and visual language of the time.

Storyboards, characters and research 

Character Development

After Flipside and Fifthstorey were happy with the storyboard and characters, Sam from Fifthstorey worked his magic. 

Sam from www.fifthstorey.co.uk

To make Adam's wonderful illustrations into working puppets was actually fairly straightforward. First the various limbs and body parts were separated into layers in illustrator and these were then imported into a program called Toon Boom Animate. It works very much like Adobe Flash but has an arguably more animator friendly interface and toolset. 

One of the neat features in the latest pro edition is bone warping. This allows you to create an overlay skeleton of joints which are then bound to the drawings underneath. The deformations are really natural and allow for convincing arm and leg movement without having to cut the limb and pivot it around the a knee or elbow joint which can be a bit mechanical, especially if the drawing has not been designed for this kind of separation. 

Once animated, the characters and background were composited in after effects with some z depth to get some nice parallax motion. Red Giant Particular provided the snow while the cine film effect was mostly provided by a plugin from Video Copilot called 'Twitch'.

My favourite element was the postman. It's always oddly satisfying to do a nice cycle then sit back and watch it loop its thing! And when you throw in a penny farthing you can't go wrong!

Thanks to Sam at Fifthstorey, we look forward to working together soon.

For character development, animations, presentation work, storyboarding please get in touch with flipsidestudio.co.uk for your next motion or animation project.

Soundguard website case study

Soundguard provides a wide range of acoustic consultancy services in the environmental, workplace, building design, planning & development sectors. They were looking for a fresh new site and were keen to work with Flipside.

"When deciding on the type of website we would like, we started to pick websites that we felt conveyed a similar branding to ours. Once we had about 10 websites that we liked the look and feel of we discovered that 2 of them were by Flipside. I phoned up the business owners and asked about their experience with Flipside and they only had good things to say – so we chose Flipside." 

Rob Shaddick Acoustic Consultant & Director Soundguard.co.uk

After a meeting with Rob from Soundguard, we decided on the sort of direction for the site, the rough idea of pages and content. The site would have to have a content management system, so that Soundguard could update content, both text content and the image portfolio for each of their services. Another consideration was the pdf files of relevant information that Soundguard wanted to add for download by their clients coming onto the site. We also advised the site should be responsive (scalable to device environments).

After a few sketches and scratching of heads, we came up with a site map and a few structures we felt would work for Soundguard, which were then agreed with the client. 

We then got to work with putting together some graphic and photographic interpretations of sound and some photography that showed the key services Soundguard provides. A selection is shown below.

Sound influenced graphics

Selection of environments and spaces

i

Sound images and references. (Iconic and cut outs)

It was then time to combine our site structure, site map and concepts with some images 

and graphics to make some tight layouts in Photoshop, and add a bit of graphic cool!

Concept 1: Home page

Concept 1: Content page

Concept 2: Home page

Concept 2: Content page

Concept 3: Home page

Concept 3: Content page

We presented these ideas to Soundguard, they felt that concept 2 was the most appropriate and the circle graphic sat well with the existing logo.

We made a few structural tweaks, then the main templates were ready to send to the developer as Photoshop files. We then continued working in tandem to refine the other pages and putting together the slider photography and graphics. Once the sliders were agreed by the client, these were supplied to the developer, replacing the placement 

images and visuals.

Once the site structure was complete the client could then start populating it with their photography and text through the easy to use CMS system. We ironed out a couple of design elements once the content was added. After some SEO work the site was ready to go live.

"I love the clarity of design from Flipside. The website ideas always look modern and up to date whilst also retaining a funky professional approach and easy to navigate page systems. There was good understanding of the brief which was for a clean clear website that provided the idea of quiet, calm and professionalism from our Acoustics consultancy. I enjoyed the visual briefs and ideas, especially those that were a bit different from the norm but we did in the end opt for something a little more mainstream. The sliders are a great addition and convey a bit of movement to the website to make it stand out from the crowd."

Rob Shaddick Acoustic Consultant & Director Soundguard.co.uk

 The chosen concept

Rob from Soundguard comments on the process of working with Flipside

"Everything was laid out and easy to do, the timescales were met and Adam was very accommodating with the build up and changes to the design. The whole process from start to finish was very fluid and we felt that we could express our opinion or change the direction of an idea at any stage of the process"

Rob Shaddick Acoustic Consultant & Director Soundguard.co.uk

And the finished design www.soundguard.co.uk

"We love the finished product, it is an amalgamation of our vision and Adam’s design input. We are happy with the end product, the on-going support, the value for money and would highly recommend Flipside"

Rob Shaddick Acoustic Consultant & Director Soundguard.co.uk

If you would lke to have chat about your website project, please get in touch we'd love to hear from you email: adam@flipsidestudio.co.uk

Branding identity: Gold Saffron jewellery

Below is a brief overview of a recent branding identity for Gold Saffron; a new distinctive, contemporary, Eastern style, high end jewellery company. This project was very much about creating a marque, the main focal point of a brand, rather than the complete brand. 

We put together a small selection of the visual research, some of the visual references 
were discussed and supplied by the client.

First stage ideas 

After a few sketches we move on and produce some ideas digitally, here's a small selection of the initial identity designs. In this case, after discussion with the client, they were particularly keen to look at uppercase fonts.

Identity development

After presenting a selection of ideas to the client, we moved on to creating colour variations of the logos.

The final identity

The client was keen on a couple of the ideas, but finally decided on the identity below. We hope to develop the identity and brand across stationary, jewellery packaging, promotional literature and a digital presence.

Get some character

I have a love of character design, whether it's Asian inspired, urban, retro or faux vintage. Being a creative that has had experience in packaging design, I have a particular interest in character design to sell products.

I've selected a few I found to be inspiring, putting aside the more traditionally humanised animal characters and monsters that were and still are used to sell children's cereals and sweets. Not that I don't like Tony the tiger!

But there is a popular and fun trend to sell adult's consumer goods (anything from wine, beer to beauty products) with an array of characters. Whether it's a stereotype used as a reference to a country of origin, a retro nostalgic nod to a romanticised time of old, a quirky cute and likeable blob, or a cheeky endorsement by a curvy pin up! It's a fun and entertaining way to give your product personality and add all important character.

www.flipsidestudio.co.uk

www.flipsidestudio.co.uk

If you are interested in character development for your next packaging project or branding exercise please get in touch, we'd love to have some some fun creating it! www.flipsidestudio.co.uk

The work shown is from various sources I've noted which is our work, if a piece of work shown is yours I'm happy to credit.