The Brief:
Intalok homes wanted a refresh of their identity, marketing and sales collateral. They needed to communicate a New Zealand story that captured and communicated the benefits of living in an Intalok home.

Intalok is a company that has built a solid reputation for delivering solid timber homes for homebuyers and developers alike. They have vast experience in building Intalok buildings in a range of climates and conditions. These range from the Cocoa Beach Resort in the Maldives to chalets built on frosty mountainsides. Since the 1970s, Intalok has built over 1600 homes and buildings in 11 different countries.

The Result:
Workshops were undertaken with people who currently owned (and lived in) Intalok homes and also with members of the Intalok staff. The goal was to find out why these people fell in love with solid timber homes.

These workshops were invaluable, and through them and our internal brainstorms we were able to start to craft a brand story. The first key idea was that an Intalok is a home (not a house), a place where real people live and raise their families. This was the opposite of the competitors positioning, so gave us a real point of difference. The second was that an Intalok is a natural place to live, inside and out. For us to start to tell the Intalok story, we then creatively used the brand essence of imagination across all communication.

The Intalok brand has been trusted for over 30 years, so the logo needed to be an evolution rather than a complete redesign, and this consideration helped us shape the unique look and feel. Once our story was set, it drove the design. Imagination was used to represent the link between the Intalok homes and the New Zealand grown Radiata Pine trees they are made out of. This idea was consistently used across a host of design aspects. The simple ‘tree-housed-in-a-home-backbone-graphic’ was used as a device to step you through the story. It also graphically represented our idea that the ‘backbone’ of an Intalok is the natural attributes they possess. We developed the backbone graphic into a seamless pattern used throughout all material.

To communicate key benefits we always aimed to trigger the reader to “imagine” what it would be like if they actually lived in an Intalok. This was done by a combination of comparing an Intalok homes properties versus a regular GIB-walled home, and by graphically illustrating the positive benefits that make an Intalok a standout performer. All of the content was crafted to align with our brand story and further consolidate our message.

To further push the idea of imagination, we created a photography series to complement these graphic devices. Solid timber homes are made out of living, breathing natural material, so we wanted to represent the host of attributes that the original trees pass on to the Intalok home.

We shot on location at actual Intalok homes that were located locally. By fusing these raw images with the four key benefits of our story, we created four easy to comprehend surreal images that capture the similarities between the natural material and the finished product.

The Brief:
Cook Islands News came to us looking for a refresh of their identity and a complete redesign of the layout and general design of their daily Newspaper.

The national daily newspaper of the Cook Islands is the country’s primary source of local news: relevant, factual and honest journalism with topics relevant to the people it caters for. These people include a combination of local readers (14,000), and visitors (5000 at any one time) to the Cook Islands. We developed an extensive brand strategy based on our communications and correspondence with the Newspaper’s managing editor, to discover where and how far we were going to take the new brand.

Our idea:
A true reflection of the People, Culture, Lifestyle and Islands; as solid as the islands we stand for.

The Cook Islands comprises of a large group of 15 islands with an assortment of media and publications. Cook Islands News prides itself on being accurate, honest and trustworthy, and on being a real voice for the people. They were a true reflection of the People, Culture, Lifestyle and Islands, but they were still feisty and uncompromising in their approach. With this all in mind, we set about implementing a design scheme to reflect this.

The Cook Islands, like all Pacific nations and cultures, has a rich history of traditional motifs, patterns and stories which are woven into the fibre and being of the whole community. We met with local master carver Mike Tavioni, an authoritative figure respected on the islands for his knowledge of Cook Islands art, culture and design. He brought us up to speed on the many different designs and also what was culturally sensitive or inappropriate. He encouraged us and gave his blessing to incorporate these traditional designs into our overall design.

To represent the People we used a variation of the pattern “Ni’ o Mango”, which symbolises strength, cunning, fearlessness, endurance and aggression. To represent Culture ‘Tikitiki Tangata’ was used. It symbolises the people of the Cook Islands united together through language, beliefs, religion and history. To convey the beauty of the Cook Islands lifestyle, the pattern ‘Ngaru’ was used. Traditionally it represents strength and peace. ‘Manu Tai’ symbolises safe journeys, bringing the Cook Islands together as one, and we used this to represent the Islands themselves.

A combination of these elements was crafted together into the final identity and rolled out across all the stationery and signage. We then redesigned the layout of every section – from the hierarchy of fonts, to the point size, kerning and leading of the body copy, right down to the weather icons. The result was that the entire look and feel of the newspaper came together into a bold new identity.

A special challenge of the exercise was to engage key staff (from a total of 19) in the process of redesign and to implement the new scheme without disrupting daily/nightly production of the newspaper. This required a parallel set-up, carefully timed cutover from old software (Pagemaker) to Creative Suite, introduction of a standard sixth column, new typography and new templates. To achieve this, we sent two designers to work on site with the client for several weeks.