The design featured first below is the new brand identity that the The English Group has recently completed for the Fritton Lake estate.
However, when first engaging with a new branding project our creative process is to sketch ideas around a diverse mix of possible solutions so that we might explore which design space feels most right for the task in hand. As is the case here, these differing approaches might illustrate ideas that aresomething purely typographic, then might explore the addition of a logo symbol, or possibly even something altogether leftfield in its approach which we think might be right for this or that client.
The goal is to provoke a dialogue with the client with a view to ascertaining what type of approach they think most appropriate to their needs, or to illustrate at an early stage the direction we recommend that they should take.
In this case though, the design process was especially rewarding and it’s fair to say that we would have been happy if any of our initial design sketches had be preferred.
Fritton Lakes’ old brand identity was a badly drawn illustration of a pike and one request was that we keep some reference to this in our new design. You will note that there is indeed a pike within the roundel of illustrative elements that the client has proceeded with. Another of the early designs set aside was built around a suite of distinctive illustrations of wildlife common around (or living in) Fritton Lake. Other approaches were based on letterforms which were themselves constructed from riparian flora elements. The final sequence of designs featured herewas altogether more playful in its approach and an approach such as this is often included so that, in part, the agency is able to illustarte both its capacity to go further than all those other more obvious expectations, and also to see if there’s a willingness within the client’s own wishes to end up with a brand identity altogether unlike its competitors.
Examples of all of these other possible approaches are featured below. None of these design works are going to be further progressed for Fritton Lake and have been filed away (alongside volumes of other early days sketches that we have created over the years for the diverse mix of clients we have been engaged by). It is interesting however to be able to use this forum to consider afresh the breadth of creative work that was part-and-parcel of this particular commission and typical of others that we have worked on over the years.
