A Fresh take on Royal Wedding Merchandise Design

London communications and creative agency KK Outlet have commissioned seven designers to create a collection of unofficial commemorative china for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton this April. The sets of plates and mugs are to be sold at KK Outlet’s store in Hoxton Square in the lead up to the Royal Wedding in April 2011. KK Outlet is a multifunctional space comprising a gallery space, design store and communications agency.Every British Royal Wedding whips the country and event the far corners of the Commonwealth into a (almost certainly tacky) memorabilia frenzy. Memorabilia design usually take the form of plates, mugs, teaspoons, gravy boats an other household paraphernalia to be carefully stores in draws and behind glass and to be only brought-out on very special occasions (such as royal visits and coronations). The style and taste of the memorabilia designs remain virtually unchanged since the 1950s. But as the Royals have changed with the times, so should memorabilia. With that in mind, KK Outlet asked the question – ‘How should Royal Wedding memorabilia look for the Facebook generation?’ And so the KK store and gallery enlisted the help of seven British designers to bring Royal Wedding memorabilia up to date.

Designers Paul Best, Emma Morton, Angela Lidderdale, Ute Geisler, Dave Bell, Richard Walker and Keith Gray have each designed a plate with references to modern pop culture. The memorabilia will be on sale at KK Outlet’s store in Hoxton Square, London, from 15 January, so if you’re a lover of things Royal, we’d suggest you get down there and purchase your fill before the blue-rinse set catch-on.

Dave Ansett, Brandamentalist
For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Truly Deeply Brand Newsletter
Brand Designer and fan of highly attractive princesses-to-be

Spotted on Dezeen.
Photographs are by Ed Aves.

Related articles

• Get Your Commemorative Royal Wedding Plates Right Here (thefrisky.com)
• Kate Middleton and Prince William unauthorised Royal wedding souvenirs to flood UK (dailymail.co.uk)
• Surge in Online Royal Wedding Memorabilia Sales Indicates High U.S. Interest, According to U.K.-Based Retailer (prweb.com)

The Fourth and Fifth Chapters in our Comprehensive Trend Report
Over the last three Mondays we’ve published the first three sections of our research report into trends in visual language. This Monday and next Monday we’ll publish the final chapters of the report. In this week’s chapters we’re exploring trends in brand visual language of ‘Shape Shifting’, ‘QR Codes’ as well as a number of typographic trends we’ve spotted.

Trends in the visual language of brand identity are driven by many factors from the ‘me-too-ism’ of designers and their clients mimicking the visual language of market leaders, to new and emerging trends such as ‘sustainability’ that draw a similar and en-mass visual response from designers all over the world. Over the past 12 months we have collected more than five thousand different brand expressions spanning almost every major industry and category of the western world.

The brand expressions we tracked included existing, new and refined brand identities, product packaging, newspaper, magazine and billboard ads. The scale and breadth of these brand expressions allowed us to identify the major brand visual language trends of a broad range of market leaders for the last year. Whilst the majority of the examples presented in this report are recent, many trends are not in themselves new. It is our interpretation of the groundswell of take-up of a trend and the influence exerted within their market by the brands involved, that leads us to define the most compelling and influential trends.

What’s the value of a Trend Report?
All brands project an image through their visual language. It is up to each brand to make conscious and informed decisions about exactly what they wish their visual language to communicate relative to the competition and to their market’s perceptions.The report includes hundreds of examples of brands and their visual language to illustrate examples of brands who leverage trends to their advantage, as well as examples of those who follow trends to their disadvantage. The examples cross industries from fashion to food, from transport to telecommunications and everything in between, as well as markets from Australia to Asia, from Europe to the Middle East and the U.S.

Valuable Insights for all Owners and Managers of Brands
An understanding and mastery of the trends in brand visual language will allow business to ‘tune’ their brand’s image to ensure they’re consistently communicating the right messages to the right people. For every organisation seeking to best manage their brand identity, these trends must be part of the consideration process. For each brand there will be advantages and disadvantages to leveraging the cues and meaning inherent in these trends. The big question you should be considering is this; ‘does the trend provide an opportunity to leverage a set of visual cues to communicate the perfect brand messages to your market, or has the trend become so widely adopted as to compromise the uniqueness of the brands who follow it?’

Download Chapters Four and Five
of our Trend Report

Over the last three Mondays we’ve published the first three sections of our research report into trends in visual language. This Monday and next Monday we’ll publish the final chapters of the report. In this week’s chapters we’re exploring trends in brand visual language of ‘Shape Shifting’, ‘QR Codes’ as well as a number of typographic trends we’ve spotted.

Click here to download Chapters 4 and 5 of our Brand Visual Language Trend Report

Click here to download Chapter Three of our Trend Report.

Or click here to download Chapter Two of our Trend Report.

You can also click here to download the First Chapter of the Trend Report.

© 2010 Truly Deeply. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. We’re delighted for you to share, blog or publish extracts of our articles, on the condition that Storm Design & Brand DNA are properly credited (and linked to) as the source, and that you include our URL: trulydeeply.com.au

For further information, questions and enquiries, contact us.

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
For daily updates of our brand thinking, follow me on Twitter
Brand Designer

Creating Brand Identity for Local Government
Since 1995 we have been continually engaged with defining, designing and communicating brands in the local government space. We’ve worked with more than a dozen different Local Government organisations on hundreds of projects of all sizes and all manner of description. Not-so-long ago we were invited to share that experience with a group of Victorian Marketers who all work within Local Government organisations. We put together a presentation outlining our philosophy to building brands for these unique organisations, it was titled; ‘Br@#nd is not a Four Letter Word. The title was coined as a response to the approach many Local Government organisations take to the branding process – almost too afraid to publicly discuss the project. We worked with one client over many years who implored us to “never use the ‘B’ word in front of the Councillors or Senior Execs.”

In the time since our presentation we’ve had many requests for the presentation we gave that day. In order to make it easily available to everyone who’s interested, we’ve loaded the presentation onto the web site Slideshare. You can find it by clicking here.

If you’d like to talk to us about building or communicating a brand for your Government organisation, we’d be only too happy to chat.

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
If you’d like daily updates of our brand thinking, you can follow me on Twitter here.
Graphic Design Melbourne