Engage Mutual, final YCM submission boards

The final boards I designed with Mille's illustrations. The tag-line I finally came up with fits quite well I think, its just a shame I didnt have this sooner. The 'You and Us' tagline we worked really didn't explain anything so I changed to using 'Together on lifes journey' Not perfect, but at least it hints at mutuality and also ties in with the life assurance and children's bonds the company sells. Its a positive message and I think it does fit well with Engage's brand values and the way they wish to promote the company.

board 1

boards 2+3

Remember to show your workings out...

Ah.... this brief gave a fair few headaches. I don't normally post much rough work and brainstorms but for the way this brief was solved, it was integral. I accidentally stumbled into the world of advertising and copy-writing, this was a sharp learning curve for me and defiantly demonstrated the skill in this work which I have unfairly overlooked in the past. Ideas and slogans can be simple, but forcing one out to meet a challenging brief certainly isn't. As Mille was doing the illustratery side of this brief, it was my task to sort out the concepts and ideas and to get the right slogan to tie everything together.

Ok so here are some scans from my workings out, together with some of Mille's illustrations which may demonstrate the difficulty we had in honing the concept.

Tug of war idea, to show working together/mutuality

tug or war test illustration,

Serving Idea, to show the company exists only to benefit customers

Serving, test illustration

Giant fat cat/Giant pie idea. To distance the company from other, more greedy institutions

Fat cat test illustration

Our first concept defined, and shot down in the first crit. 

After this we had to go back and start again as none of ideas we had up to this point were positively received in the crit session.

'You and Us' idea, to try to get across the idea of the company working for the mutual benefit of everyone.

'You and Us' advert, test double page spread.

Our early concepts and ideas

These are the ideas Mille and myself took the the first crit. We idea we had was to make some web based animations to explain that the company (Engage) is a mutual and how this can benefit customers. We worked together for to make these, I came up with the concepts and tag lines and Mille did all the illustrations.


[pics to go here]



We were actually quite pleased with the start we had made, but the feedback from the crit was unfortunately not very positive. I felt I didn't present our ideas well and the main criticisms were that we hadn't clearly defined the customer that we were aiming these at, and the animations didnt explain 'mutuality' at all. This is disappointing in a way as we now have to take a step back to re-look at how to tackle this brief. Also the colours were quite heavily criticised, we just used the colours straight from the engage logo but this is something we clearly need to think more about.