Smart Citizen Access Redesign

As you would expect when you work from a business centre, you get to meet a great variety of companies and organisations - especially when you have been there for over 11 years. However, even though you may work closely together geographically, there is no obligation for those businesses to work with you, unless of course you can prove yourself to be worthy. One such company is Smart Citizen, a business that provides keyless entry card systems - particularly for the public sector.

As both of us are former residents of Penstraze Business Centre, they were of course aware of Aawen, but also recognised that they needed to select the best agency to help them with their design needs regardless of any loyalty they may feel to past acquaintances. Fortunately, after a meeting with them and of course following their own research, they recognised that we would be the ideal match to help them achieve their design needs.

Our first task was to establish the overall project objectives and then to help determine what specific elements we would need to create to help achieve those objectives.

As with many similar projects, we first scrutinised the clients existing branding to see if it was appropriate for their market and for their ambition moving forward. After agreeing that it needed a overhaul rather than a minor tweak, we began work on creating the company logo. Working through our tried and tested development process, we were able to compile a shortlist of potential logo designs that the client could market test. Once all the data was analysed, we applied the desired modifications to the preferred design which then resulted in the new brand theme for the company (logo, icon, colour and typeface styles).

Quick on the heels of finalising this fundamental branding asset, we set about rolling it out across the breadth of marketing materials the client would need to employ. We worked on signage designs, stationery (particularly a high-specification foil-blocked business card), report covers and report page templates plus of course a customer facing company website.

Whilst each of these different elements requires a different approach, they all must be underpinned with the same icon, colour and type theme - which of course we have now created and which now quickly enabled the marketing materials to gel together in a consistent, appealing and progressive manner.

Now that this phase of development has ended, the client will be able to look back on the results of the process and begin collecting data to measure its impact - has it resulted in more enquiries, or better quality enquiries, has it created greater opportunities in new markets that were difficult to attain previously? I, like Smart Citizen, am keen to see how well this new range of materials perform in the coming months and am confident we shall all be toasting its notable success.