Gecko

We have been working with Gecko since May 2022.

Our work began with brand immersion, where we looked at all their marketing, design and social media collateral to date. Gecko had a brand strategy in place but no clear design guidelines. We began by creating a simple brand book detailing, colours, typefaces and guidelines for how the brand should be applied to create a consistent look and feel across all their communications. This enabled us to clearly define Gecko visually leveraging their existing assets more consistently and interestingly. To understand what Gecko is about, we fully immersed ourselves in their world, meeting the team, photographing behind the scenes,  observing rehearsals, and talking to everyone involved to understand the themes, process and culture. 

Social strategy

We started with a full audit. The purpose of this was to examine the health and history of their account. It helped us understand their current social efforts and highlighted the best way to improve their communications and results. We did this by conducting our research and analysing their analytics to gain insights and an understanding of their current online community. We analysed companies like them and presented our thoughts and recommendations. We created a series of templates which were based on a grid with guidelines for positioning and layout. We continue to work with Gecko, alongside their in-house team, on social strategies across all their platforms while also supporting them with design and photography.

Show brand identity for Kin

We began working on the identity for their new show, Kin in June 2022. We created a style guide which worked within the Gecko brand guidelines. This style guide was then used to inform the creation of any materials associated with the show, from poster templates, digital resources, film titles, digital advertising, press packs, emails etc which we create and Gecko use internally to support their marketing as well as sharing assets with venues. 

The concept

The concept represents the show’s multiple nationality ensemble and the many dialects spoken. We always begin with a mood board which explores the themes and concepts of the show. This inspires colour, typography and concept for the creative idea. 

The typography was key, we wanted it to feel functional rather than emotional in tone, instructional and internationally familiar; as you see in airports. Each letter was chosen to be legible, but also to feel different – to attract people with different dialects and suggest something unusual. A graphic style which suggested drive and direction, echoing the movement of people, change and emigration. 

When is a ‘K’ not a ‘K’?
The Latin alphabet we use is made up of 26 different characters. The forms of the letters are in the most part borrowed, developed or adapted from other alphabets throughout history and globally.

Each letter is legible as Kin, but characters are from a mix of dialects:

ķ (k-cedilla) is the 17th letter of the Latvian alphabet

Ī is a vowel is a Brahmic script, also known as Indic script

n is the 14th letter of the Latin alphabet.

Photography credit: Richard Haughton