Located at the gateway to the Athenian Riviera, in the heart of Europe’s largest passenger port, Piraeus Tower was originally built in 1972. It was designed to become a landmark in a rapidly evolving area that was transforming into an international hub for shipping and transportation. However, the project was abandoned in 1982, and the Tower remained empty for nearly 50 years.
In 2020, real estate company Dimand, in collaboration with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and Prodea Investments, secured a 99-year concession from the Municipality of Piraeus with a vision to restore the Tower to its intended status as a landmark.
The Joint Venture appointed Marlon Tate as the creative agency to lead the creative direction and brand strategy for Piraeus Tower. Marlon Tate designed and art directed the official website, successfully attracting the attention of investors, political stakeholders, and the local community. In addition, we wrote all website content and developed a fully responsive, modern digital experience, including custom maps and interactive infographics that reflected the visual language created specifically for this landmark project.
Once an industrial hub and the home to the biggest Kodak Factory outside the US (55 acres) for 125 years, this exciting new area in Harrow is London’s most exciting regeneration story. Named after George Eastman, the co-founder of Kodak in 1888, Eastman Village will be a vibrant new destination that will provide 2,000 homes, in addition to planned restaurants, cafés, shops and offices set around a landscaped park creating a new leisure, business and residential destination. The area will benefit from a new school, 3,000 new jobs and fast transport links to central London.
As part of the £1.75bn regeneration programme, Marlon Tate was invited to clarify, define and express the vision of this new area by creating a brand narrative, identity, and launch campaign. Our strategy was informed by the fact that during its peak, the Factory housed 6,000 workers who produced the famous Kodak film strips. Once the place that enabled us to capture our memories, now the place that will enable us to create our own. The new brand is anchored around a custom brandmark which references the original alignment guides on Kodak’s 35mm filmstrips. Central to the launch campaign was our slogan ‘making memories in Eastman Village’. We also designed the external wayfinding programme and we are anticipating its planning approval.
Marlon Tate art directed the record cover and marketing campaign for indi pop star Leon of Athens’ third studio album (EMI). The album, titled’ Xenos’ (greek for ‘foreigner’), features 11 songs echoing the feeling of being a foreigner, a stranger to a new country as well as to yourself. This eclectic spirit was important to convey visually in the artwork, as well as portraying a strong sense of the artist’s personality. The fragmented nature of the market makes it essential that the concept engages across a wide range of formats – print to digital – to create an integrated release and a holistic visual universe.
Our creative concept was inspired Skype and long-distance relationships referencing the need for communication with our external as well as our internal worlds. The album packaging consisted of a sleeve with a die-cut set of multiple Skype windows through which one can see the inner cover of the cd-case with the artist’s face. The campaign included a city-wide out of home roll-out and a website in order to set the conceptual and visual tone, teasing each single through a Skype window.
Marlon Tate designed and art directed the cyberpunk experimental five-track ‘Baby Blues’ EP by Athens-based producer Konstantinos Gkoumas.
Through a blend of buzzing oscillations, blue-collar rhythms, and backwoods synth progressions, the artist’s original intention was to create a Blues record. Instead, he managed to create an EP that redefines the aesthetics of the experimental genre with an amalgam of puzzling downtempo and dark ambient transforming reckless cowboys into knights in shining armour. To dramatise the album’s unapologetic creative recklessness, we created a visual language that’s meant to look like we made it in paint.
To promote the release we expanded our tongue-in-cheek art direction into a series of posters and billboards featuring our MS paint-written scrawl.
In 2013, Nikos Georgopoulos—Marlon Tate’s Creative Director and design press favourite often called a “pop star art director”—dropped Mataroa, an electro-pop album-musical with a story as big as its sound. The project takes its name from the New Zealand ship that, in 1945, carried 200 young Greek intellectuals from Athens to Paris, escaping the looming Greek Civil War. Mataroa dives into the theme of salvation, connecting the moment of disembarkation to the redemptive state one can reach through an inner journey of self-discovery. Independently produced, the album went viral, grabbing attention for its emotional lyrics and infectious mix of pop, indie, and electronic sounds—a perfect example of bold creative direction for music. To amplify the release, Nikos co-directed a 2-minute short film with film director Manolis Mavris. Shot in London, the surreal piece fuses Greek and French voiceovers and references ferry safety videos, flipping everyday gestures into cinematic poetry. This short film became a key piece of the album release marketing, showing how music, visuals, and storytelling can collide in fresh, unexpected ways.
Dress For Our Time, by artist and designer Helen Storey, is a public art installation project that uses the power of fashion, science and wonder to communicate some of the world’s most complex issues of our time.
The dress itself is made from a tent (which is no longer in useable condition), gifted to the project by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In giving the tent a second life, it gives this public art installation an unbreakable bond to humanity and represents the importance of nurturing and protecting all people and safeguarding generations to come. As the gateway to Paris – the city hosting the United Nations Climate Change conference COP 21 – many of the delegates that passed through the station came face to face with the world’s first digital couture dress dedicated to exploring climate change and its human impact.
‘By interpreting the station’s setting as a conceptual border between Britain and France, Nikos Georgopoulos created a polyglot responsive identity that reads the name of the project in English, French and Chinese referencing boarder crossing signs.’
–Art Directors’ Club Journal
As part of our visual identity and advertising for the MA Show at London College of Fashion, we art directed the exhibition of the MA Fashion Photography. The art images of the students are printed on a spread on a newsprint.
Our collaboration with London College of Fashion continued when the Institution commissioned us to develop a visual identity and advertising campaign for the exhibition LCFMA16, which featured work by the graduating students around fashion and surrounding disciplines. Revisiting the legacy of education as an interactive and dynamic process while also reflecting the influence of technology, our exhibition catalogue for MA Fashion Photography is designed in a way that featured students’ work is intertwined with each other, thus creating a never ending series of new compositions and all possible futures.
The Architecture Foundation in partnership with Brockton Capital has launched one of its most ambitious projects to date – a free app guide to the architecture of London incorporating over 1,100 of the city’s most remarkable buildings from Roman times to the present day. The app is based on the book, The Guide to the Architecture of London, by acclaimed architectural writers, Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward with an expanded set of entries, photography, walking directions and events listings.
Creative Director Nikos Georgopoulos was commissioned by the Architecture Foundation in London to create a promotional campaign targeting architecture students with a view to raise awareness about the app. The design illustrates the notion of easily flicking through thousands of historic buildings across London while referencing the concept of Atlas as an alternative means for structuring content within the potential infinity of electronic space.
Benjamin John Hall, Fashion Space Gallery’s first design resident, drew inspiration from current geopolitical issues and espionage. His starting point and continued focus of interest is the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko. The title of this exhibition: Laboratory 12. One name for the KGB’s secret poison laboratory tasked with developing colourless, tasteless, odourless poisons. One such poison, Polonium, was identified as Litvinenko’s cause of death.
Through a collection of highly engineered footwear, Hall explores the extent to which governments potentially could, or already are, securing their best interests in a current global political and economic environment that is marked by uncertainty. All eight pairs of shoes on display in this exhibition are unique. Each highlights a specific notion or concept unearthed through his extensive research into documented tactics used by various security agencies worldwide. These range from subtle psychological warfare, to concealed recording devices.
We crafted the graphic identity, the exhibition graphics, the invitation and the marketing items for the exhibition at the Fashion Space Gallery. Central to the concept of the identity was our modified version of the typeface ‘Balkan Sans’. We selected this font as the only identity tool for the promotion and visual manifestation of the exhibition. Our intention: to reference the notion of encryption — a tactic used by spies and politically motivated (secret) organisations, according to Hall’s research.