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.
We designed and art directed the new visual identity and brand advertising of UDO —an ambitious company specialising in customisable, multipurpose lighting kits and objects that are made with digital fabrication technology and algorithm based design. The new brand identity is centred around a new custom logotype that experiments with the fundamental parameters of letterforms, and references the brand’s algorithmic design process.
Following the successful brand identity, we also created the brand’s website as well as a spin-off publication conceived as a surreal collection of irrelevant information channelling the random and beautiful nature of algorithmic design and UDO objects.
Marlon Tate has designed and developed the website of Dimand, one of the Greece’s largest real estate developers. Since opening in 2005, Dimand has been specialising in mixed-use urban regeneration projects including the $103.5 million iconic Piraeus Tower regeneration; the impressive Angelicoussis shipping company’s new headquarters; and Karela Office Park, the first LEED®-certified building in the country.
Our creative concept reflects our strategic ambition, which was to position Dimand not only as the most ambitious and resourceful real estate developer in Greece but also as the first inclusive one by creating places for the many, not the few. By staying true to our belief that extraordinary places are the ones designed for everyone, the new Dimand website is the first ever website in the construction/financial industry that is meant to be experienced in two different ways -a corporate and a playful. The user can simply switch on and off the icon at the top right corner and adapt the design in the mode in which they feel more comfortable experiencing its content.
The Local Government Chronicle (LGC) is a British weekly magazine for local government officers covering a broad range of issues including finance, law, management, housing, planning, local elections and social services. In 2015 LGC launched its multi-user license for the first time and commissioned Marlon Tate to write and art direct a marketing campaign encouraging its audience to subscribe to this new service.
In 2015, the UK had recovered in principle from the 2008 financial crisis however it was amid a harsh austerity programme. Between 2010 and 2019 more than £30 billion in spending reductions have been made to welfare payments, housing subsidies and social services. As a result, ordinary peoples’ lives became challenging and everyone had to adjust as in most places around the world.
To market this new product, Marlon Tate created the ‘Don’t Fall’ campaign consisting of a commercial that run on the web and in social media as well as OOH and print ads with a simple strategy: turn something negative into a beautiful experience. When budgets are in free fall, you need support to build the best strategy.