On the occasion of RIBA’s new publishing chapter, Marlon Tate was commissioned to design and art direct the cover of the second edition of ‘Designed to Perform’, a book illustrating practical ways of delivering better energy performance in all types of new build homes.
Written by Sustainability guru and Partner at London architecture powerhouse, Pollard Thomas Edwards, the book introduces readers to the concept of the performance gap and highlights clear issues and solutions to help architects improve their detailing at design stage.
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.
Pollard Thomas Edwards has been working with Countryside Properties and Newlon on the regeneration of the 1960s Alma Estate in Ponders End, Enfield. In collaboration with the architects, Marlon Tate created tile-based murals for the Ponders End Youth Centre by drawing upon old PC pixelated video games and early 2000s street art.
Led by our creative director Nikos Georgopoulos, who also heads up the graphics team at PTE, the concept for the tiled lower-half of the façade was to illustrate the range of activities offered inside in a way that would culturally resonate with the new community. The tile-based mural represents sport figures like tennis players, dancers, drummers and boxers as well as aspirational typographic messages.
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
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.
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.