Financial Times
World leading Business News
The Challenge
Tony Davis was approached to explore the possibility of creating designs using the Financial Times (FT) brand. The brand already had logo-stamped products for sale on demand. The company wanted to create the possibility of designs which has the same resonance as the Penguin Designs project. The main challenges were in identifying a ‘more-than-just-logo’ approach which had life beyond one-off, short-run, commissioned products. The FT is owned by Pearson.
About Financial Times: For more about FT look here.
Project Overview & Solutions
Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants - Epictetus
There were a number of meetings about design approaches with John Ridding and Caroline Halliwell (Director of Brand and B2B Marketing). Colour, Logo, typography were all unique potentials for designed ranges. It was less clear whether the actual published output (stories, headlines etc – which tended to be quite serious) could be adapted even though this was a rich source of material. The main focus for prototyping was in typography, quotes on subject matter (economics, money etc) and layout designs for simple, stylish objects.
Whilst the project was only consultative it was nonetheless an exercise in exploring a challenging subject area via one of the world’s global brands whilst still maintaining a fitness-for-purpose ethos.
Website: N/A
Distribution: None
Availability: None of the designs were adopted or produced.
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Design Ideas which stayed as protoypes
If you are truly innovating, you don't have a prototype you can refer to - Jonathan Ive
Other Projects
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better - Ralph Waldo Emerson
