A photo of the new Tottenham home strip was leaked onto the internet this week. It wasn’t a great shot. Spectral and grainy, it looks like a ghost shirt. But it wasn’t just the quality of the image that gave it an ‘other-wordly’ feeling.

There’s an asymmetric navy epaulet effect in Spurs blue. And there’s the Spurs cockerel over the left breast. It looks strangely dignified. And yet there’s something’s missing. Something that marks out nearly all top flight football teams these days.  What could it possibly be?

Our school in Buikwe. We're getting there

Just a quick note to update you on my trip to Uganda where I am spending a week helping build a school in the village of Buikwe as part of Ogilvy’s Many Hands project.

We arrived Friday am to torrential rain and high winds. Not at all what we expected. Piled wet and soggy into the mini buses and went to change money in Kampala. Men with AK47s on the door of the banks - all quite intimidating.

The first afternoon was spent settling in, playing football with the kids and taking lots of pictures. We had a bit of an explore of the site and the village. Just the most amazing contrast to what we are used to.

Have to say that dormitory sleeping is interesting but by night 3 -last night, I felt I was getting used to it. Night 1 I caught 2 cockroaches! I now have the envious title of chief cockroach catcher. Thank goodness we seem to have scared the rest away.

Shine is our annual student award where we seek to uncover the latest design talent. The 2010 Shine Award ‘Call to Entry’ posters have been gracing the studios of design courses across the country, but we have received a lot of inquiries from students who haven’t seen the posters, requesting details for entering the award. So with this in mind, here’s how you do it:

Simply submit one piece of work that best showcases your talent. Shortlisted candidates are invited to present their portfolios and finalists will be selected to design the poster for next year’s award. The winner receives £3,000 (yes, you read that right) and a three month paid work placement at the agency.

Send your entry by 1st July 2010, including your name, contact details and college to: Shine Awards, Coley Porter Bell, 121-141 Westbourne Terrace, London, W2 6JR

So good luck and I look forward to looking through all your entries next month!

Its always nice to get some feedback on the work we have produced, and it doesn’t get much better than this.  Have a read of this quote from Simon Askew, the fresh food buyer at Harvey Nichols about our work for Inishturkbeg

‘It is important that food not only tastes fantastic but also looks fantastic if it is packaged . Our  customers naturally will shop with their eyes.  The packaging design of Inishturkbeg is for me an exceptional piece of work that manages to cleverly evoke not only a sense of the quality of the product inside, but also of the beauty of the enviroment from which it is sourced.’

Not bad, even if we do say so ourselves!

London Pearls

A year and a half ago, we here at Coley Porter Bell created a new identity for the Museum of London with the aim of bringing its venues and values together, changing perceptions from ‘just a dusty box of old things’ and to pave the way for the opening of the spectacular new £20m Modern Galleries of London. Our identity was based on the idea of an ever-changing city and the marque was created from coloured layers that map out the shape of its past, present and future. London’s very own thumbprint if you will, illustrating the patterns people have left throughout its history. Well the new galleries were officially opened on the evening of Thursday 27th May and we had a ticket.

London Style

The correct way to run a marcoms agency?

Is an agency just a place where ideas can have sex? Are they merely handy locations for concepts to screw around, where notions can have multiple partners and produce large sprawling families of new ideas?

You may think swingers-club-come-love-dungeon is a strange metaphor for a commercial communications organisation. But the conventional take on creativity is that it is the product of solitary and internal processes. Think sociopathic art directors, tortured geniuses in garrets, borderline autistics who break the all rules but come up with brilliant new ideas.

So it’s a bit of a surprise to learn that creativity is in fact a ‘network effect’. According to Matt Ridley writing in the Wall Street Journal, the inventiveness and rate of cultural change (ie creativity) of a population is directly related the amount of interaction between individuals.

Greenpeace activists hoist a flag after climbing on to a balcony at BP headquarters in London.

Full disclosure here: I’m a journalist’s daughter. Actually, I’m a columnist’s daughter, so there goes the impartiality. And yes, this blog post comes straight on the heels of some paternal prose. But I can’t help but think that it’s about time Coley Porter Bell weighed in on the BP brand in the face of the Deepwater disaster.

BP’s rebrand ten years ago has been held up as one of our industry’s biggest success stories: a tired, uninspiring oil company making the leap into the shiny future of renewable energy, going ‘beyond petroleum’. Employees embraced the new ethos, the bottom line flourished, and the company’s reputation as a leader in corporate sustainability efforts was cemented in the public consciousness. BP was sitting pretty.

And then in April, disaster struck.

To be clear: this is a disaster, no doubt about it. The victims of the oil rig explosion are not only the eleven people who lost their lives, but their families, the population of the Gulf Coast, and countless species of animals in the area. We have no idea how the situation will play out, or how much damage will ultimately be done. It’s scary stuff - the sort of fiasco that can relegate a company to the black hole of contempt in people’s minds. And while the BP brand will take a hit, ultimately I believe it will make it through. There are two reasons for that.

First, BP’s longstanding and considerable investment in brand-building will have helped to futureproof them against public relations disasters just like this one. Compared to energy companies with less inspiring brands (ahem, Shell and Exxon), BP seems like the good guy. Instinctively, we tend to believe they’ll right this wrong, and continue on their virtuous path. That’s what it means to have captured the hearts and minds of consumers.

Second, BP has done more than simply building a brand, they’ve built a culture. The open, honest, optimism that’s core to their brand has come through in their response to the oil spill. Sure, there were some hiccups at the start, but ultimately, they’ve raised their game. BP leadership is truly living their brand, reinforcing their positioning with every press conference, every shared internal document, every apology. The BP brand, it seems, is more than just a cheery logo.

We’ll have to wait and see how this all nets out, but this blogger’s money is on a triumphant BP brand re-emerging. Eventually.

The new London bus

Ask three designers a question and you’ll get four opinions, one sulk and a hissy fit.  So it’s a sign of just how good it is that the design for London Transport’s new bus has drawn nearly unanimous rave reviews from the massed aesthetes at Coley Porter Bell.

The Wrightbus styled by Thomas Heatherwick is the successor to the much loved design classic, the Routemaster, and a replacement for the much hated bendy bus. In design terms at least, it has brilliantly struck a balance between making the bus modern and relevant to contemporary needs on the one hand, while on the other retaining enough of the character of the original Routemaster to make it recogniseably the same family.

As a company that makes a living from refreshing brands we know just how hard that is.

One of our planners summed up the general feeling when he said: “I love it for its retro chic. It takes what is great about London and embodies it in a bus - tradition mixed with progress. So much better than those bender buses.”

He’s right. How typically, quintessentially English to want progress liberally seasoned with references to the past. Think Tudorbethan semis, Roberts radios and anything by Kath Kidston.

People love the curved sweep of the back. People love the subtle rounding at the front and the slightly asymmetric line of the front window which picks up on the hood of the original Routemaster. People love the way that glass is used to emphasis key features like the stairs. And most of all people love the open platform at the back of the bus, which will allow them to hop-on and hop-off. Just like they did in the old days before health and safety went mad.

That’s not to say everyone loves it uncritically. There is a definite school of thought which says that the retro styling is not integral to its function which means that the resemblances to the original Routemaster are just cosmetic.

Its only when you start examining functionality that the wheels start to come off Heatherwick’s design. Like other double deckers currently on service it carries 87 people. But according one driver the much maligned bendy bus can easily carry 150 people. “It’s supposed to be 135 but at rush hour you can just keep on squeezing them on,” he said.

So London Transport’ll need two new buses for every bendy bus it replaces. What’s more because every new bus will need a conductor of some sort to police the open platform, one driver will need to be replaced by two drivers and two conductors.

The conflict between heart and pocket, between beauty and lucre is also a familiar issue at Coley Porter Bell. Let us just hope that in this case, beauty wins.

Coley Porter Bell has given the bar of the exclusive Martinez Hotel in Cannes, a Chivas Regal-branded make over for this year’s film and design festivals.

The premium whisky brand has signed a two year sponsorship deal with the £5,000 a night hotel to promote its luxury credentials.

It has revamped the bar which is frequented by many of the most famous film stars and celebrities in the world, with Chivas Regal brand icons. The redesign employs elements from the ‘Brand World’ that CPB and Chivas have developed. (‘Brand World’ is part of an ongoing drive to ensure the Chivas brand’s positioning is brought to life visually and consistently throughout the world).

CPB has created muted but glamorous branding and wall coverings in black on black using elements of the Chivas brand. The company also enhanced the lighting in the bar using amber coloured accent lights around the bar itself, the bar shelving and the walls of the bar.

In addition the product will be displayed as a focal point behind the bar and plinths either side of the bar will display Chivas Regal 25 and the limited edition bottle designed by Christian Lacroix. Chivas images are displayed on the walls of the bar in luxurious gold frames.

“This is a fantastic opportunity for Chivas to build and extend its glamorous reputation in such exclusive surroundings”, said Ana Claudia Saba, global senior brand manager at Chivas Brothers.

“Although in many ways it was a dream brief for CPB, it was a challenging design problem requiring the agency to strike a delicate balance between the need for branding and discrete luxury”, said Simon Adamson design director at Coley Porter Bell who also acts as global creative director at Chivas Brothers. “The brand’s positioning is cool, sophisticated and luxurious. We had to capture this spirit and ensure that it feels part of the glitterati life style.”

http://www.creativematch.com/directory/coley-porter-bell/

I’ve never been a fan of PMT.

I can also, without doubt, say my family and friends share this opinion, when month after month it tantrums its way around the kitchen, into the biscuit tin and sulks its way into a dark corner of the house, having slammed all doors in its path.

So it’s a little shocking that I find myself wanting to write about it now - really excited and preparing to be pretty gushing (sorry) over a subject I’d otherwise rather not mention.

This radical change in me has been brought about by discovering an Aussie brand called Moxie. Whilst browsing my parents local Waitrose (a better sort of Waitrose apparently), shopping for the necessities in life, I came across this fab looking brand, a beautiful vision amongst all those other horrendous sanitary products with purple and teal wings etc etc.

I’m not embarrassed to say I squealed (a bit) at the shelf when I realized for the same sum of money I could buy my tampons in a pretty little tin which would match my handbag. Well, I do work in design. Never before has a san pro brand ever moved me to check them out on the internet, so I was equally delighted to find their website also lives up to their philosophy of ‘living beautifully’. I’m actually looking forward the next one (mood swings depending).