Recently the work of USP Creative came to my attention, specifically their work in developing a new brand to link Alder Hey Children’s Hospital with the Alder Hey Children’s Charity. Not only is the design featured on their site but also a nice series of videos, text and graphics that takes the viewer through the creative thought process that led them to the creation of Oli the elephant.
http://www.uspcreative.com/oli/the-start/
In my humble opinion I think the footprints that USP created as part of the overall design could be used in some nice clear graphical ways and are a simple but strong graphic element – the Oli brand has a colourful cheery feel to it and I liked how the Oli idea was carried through into the family part of the brief on some of the materials with his elephant family along with him. The Oli concept had been used well across the other materials, one thing I felt looked a bit ‘off’ was the letterhead which looked a bit “bottom heavy” to me but that’s getting a bit nitpicky perhaps. The only other thing that I didn’t immediately quite ‘get’ was why Oli had the stitching all the way round his centre, but I liked the link back to kids favourite of yesteryear Fuzzy Felt, and the handrawn/sketch style elements of the video reminded me of kids programmes like Mr Benn in terms of the style of illustration utilised, which is another nice link back to childhood and/or elements of childhoods of yesteryear and the way the stitching was carried through into the other pieces of design that make up the brand designs so far.
Overall I thought that USP have created a bright cheery design that doesn’t speak down to kids and I think both kids and adults will like it, and it’ll be interesting to see how Oli grows and develops in the future and how it helps further link the hospital and Trust.
The occasional design blog 