Duke of Delhi on sale at Fortnum & Mason

Over the last year or so I've been working on the rebranding of Duke of Delhi, a fantastic range of Indian inspired snacks.
The Client came to Bright Green Brands with a range of biscuits, and with the name Duke of Delhi, though admitted that the current design wouldn't get him taken seriously by the kind of retailers he was aiming to approach - high end outlets such as Harvey Nichols, Selfridges and Fortnum & Mason.

I instantly fell in love with the name (as well as the biscuits) and saw great potential to help create a unique and distinctive brand.

While pondering on the new identity I wondered who the Duke of Delhi might be: Was he an Englishman in India, or an Indian in England? And how would he travel?
After deciding a horse-drawn royal carriage if in Britain and a royal elephant in India, I decided to put the two together, mixing the eccentricities of both cultures in one simple logo.

The identity was then applied to brightly printed card headers, plus we found a supplier of cellophane bags, a transparent and biodegradable alternative to plastic film.

After the initial rebrand of the biscuit packs, the client wanted to launch a new product - a Delhi Mix (think Bombay mix with a quirky flavour twist), packaged in 'tiffin-style' tins.

Well the good news is that Fortnum & Mason want to stock the Delhi Mix, and is on shelf this week! Very proud to see it go into just about the poshest shop there is!!

All in all a lovely job for a lovely client who appreciates and understands how design can help get you where you where you want to go.

(click images to enlarge)

Logo illustration: Vanessa Wright

Can You Own a Colour?

For my final project at university I asked Pearlfisher (where I was on student placement) to write me a design brief.
They asked me to package Coca Cola for 15 years in the future.

It was a great brief, and I came up with loads of ideas, based on what I believed could happen in the not too distant future.

Back at the end of the last century (was it THAT long ago I was at uni?!!), water shortage was only just becoming a recognised potential global problem, so one idea was to design a concentrated Coca Cola, packaged only in the bottom of a cut-off bottle-shaped can, which you then have to dilute yourself (if you can find water!)

Genetically modifying food was also a new development, so another idea was that Coca Cola would genetically engineer their own fruit, to look like an orange (but red of course) with cola coloured segments that tasted of Coca Cola.

Next was Global warming - such a nuisance when you want a nice cold can of your favourite sugar-based global-domineering soda. The solution? a solar-panelled can that generates energy to cool the contents of course!

OK, so 15 years have passed and none of these have gone into production (thankfully).

However, another idea I had was that Coca Cola would own the rights to the colour red! so no red tomatoes allowed, and no red flowers, ladybirds, buses, post boxes, lipstick, clothes... so the only time you ever saw red it HAD to mean Coca Cola.
For the pack I didn't even need a logo, it was simply a red can with an ® symbol in the corner.
Then I saw this slightly disconcerting story in Design Week yesterday:
http://www.designweek.co.uk/news/cadbury-wins-exclusive-use-of-pantone-2685c-purple/3035336.article

The future it seems may well be orange, but only for Orange™. Surely brand legal departments the world over are now hastily applying for ownership of their particular Pantone colour?
Restricting times ahead for us brand designers I think.

UPDATE: The Nestlé Empire Strikes Back! (thankfully) http://www.designweek.co.uk/news/cadbury-loses-legal-fight-over-rights-to-pantone-2685c-purple/3037307.article?cmptype=Exxon%20and%20FXX%20in%20legal%20row%20over%20interlocking%20Xs,%20Cadbury%20loses%20Pantone%202685c%20purple%20fight,%20Children's%20Illustrated%20Classics%20at%20the%20British%20Library%20and%20more...&cmpid=dwnews_14902

A Christmas stocking-filler for the planet?

Waitrose have been selling clementines in cardboard boxes rather than plastic nets over Christmas - OK the structure and amount of board may be a BIT excessive, but a good start. Surely this can be developed across almost all fruit currently in plastic netting AND hard plastic punnets?? I do hope so.