Design for charities: our work for the Shine School Media Awards 2018

Every summer at Stationers’ Hall in the centre of London, there’s a day of creative celebration. The Shine School Media Awards rewards the talent of secondary school students around the UK who are working, sometimes entirely outside their schooldays, to better themselves and forge the path to their future career. We’ve been a contributor to the Awards programme now for five years, giving our time to this fantastic endeavour. It’s a great portfolio example of our work when we design for charities.

The creative side of Shine is one that is both rewarding personally and creatively. For us this involves managing and evolving the brand, designing as well as updating the website. Then each summer we work on creating an innovative piece of print – a brochure-format annual focussing on the winners. This project gets more and more rewarding every year. Perhaps because the inventiveness of young people seems to only perpetuate and move into new areas over time, we never tire of it. In fact it challenges us to go further, try new things and measure up to their creativity.

The foiled cover of the Shine School Media Awards winners book 2018

Winners hold their prizes – and the Shine School Media Awards winners book in front of our colourful ‘step and repeat’ board, a nifty way of branding social media photos of the event and very useful in design for charities

TIME TO SHINE… FOR REAL

I remember thinking after last year’s winners brochure (which featured die-cutting on the cover) that sooner or later I’d really like to try using foils on the project. However this wasn’t as straightforward as it sounds. Foiling is a costly process and needs applying carefully. It also became clear that specifying a rather complex process was an education. It was a great diversion from our everyday work – in truth not that many of our more corporate clients would ever have cause to brief us on a project where using iridescent foil in large areas would be necessary!

So… we made a few enquiries and after an initial somewhat anxious wait, it turned out using foils would be possible after all. But with certain restrictions. We quickly discovered that foiling the very large areas we had in our original design that ran the risk of the foil not ‘holding’ across the entire shape. Then there was the added complication that we only got to foil in our winners brochure – and we also had to somehow make ‘a shiny thing’ appear on projections, inner pages, a digitally printed programme… We needed a combination solution that would work in many different media.

It turns out that these sort of limitations caused us to think on our feet.

Pretty soon we had devised a new way of using the logo and got inspired to create a multi-colour gradient version of the iridescent pattern which you see on the foil in different lights. This could appear in places we couldn’t apply the foil. In fact this graphic device ended up being an unexpectedly flexible motif for the entire look of the awards this summer.

The day programme of the Shine School Media Awards 2018

Internal spreads of the Shine School Media Awards winners book

INTERESTED IN DESIGN FOR CHARITIES?

We have a wide range of experience in this sector and would be delighted to speak with charity marketing teams about working with them. Please give us a call on 020 7351 4083.

Quick links to key pages associated with our work on the Shine Awards and design for charities:

Visit our Shine Awards portfolio page

Visit the Shine website

More about our work in design for charities