Branding and Identity
Red Dog can help you at any point of your brand journey, from naming a new company or product through to the visual and verbal expression of your brand. Our projects in this area are varied and exciting, from helping a new non-profit distinguish themselves with a great new name and creating their visual identity, to helping companies develop their brand architecture, brand story and identity systems. We’ve also worked on many successful visual brand refreshes over the last few years.
Our day-to-day project tasks include research, stakeholder interviews, group workshops, facilitating staff engagement sessions, writing taglines, elevator pitches, positioning documents and, of course, all the design pieces required. Our design team thrive on good research and a good brief so the brand strategy work we carry out delivers on this. The creative team will always provide several solutions to the brief – all of which will capture your personality, be relevant and built on a solid idea.
We also firmly believe in Red Dog that the verbal is as important as the visual so we partner with the best writers to ensure that you get the best tagline, elevator pitch or tone of voice book. Please enjoy the work you see on our website but do contact us if you want to find out more about any of these projects or the process applied.
Campaigns
We may be stating the obvious but reaching the right audience with the right message is critical to a successful campaign. Over the last few years we’ve helped charities, not-for-profits, universities and commercial organisations successfully hone their messaging and deliver it in a relevant way.
Campaigns are only successful when the individual components of the campaign work together to deliver a coherent message. Our campaigns hit their audience usually through a combination of online, outdoor, press, radio and direct mail. Getting all those elements working together harmoniously is easier said than done – but we can show you the way!
Social Media
A key component of any marketing activity today is a structured social media plan. Whether we like it or not, social now plays a huge role in awareness, advertising and community building. However, finding the time and resources to generate good content can be difficult – so Red Dog offers social media content creation and management to our clients. From devising your social media strategy to implementation we can support clients on social, ensuring that we behave consistently and in the correct tone of voice at all times. Get in touch and we can tell you about some of our success stories in this area.
Annual Reports
Annual reports have been at the cornerstone of our creativity from back in our formative years and we never grow tried of the challenges and solutions inherent in these projects. Designing a successful annual report isn’t a simple case of making facts, figures and balance sheets look pretty. Instead, it involves identifying a single theme that can support the entire report and can be recognised throughout the document, tying all of the disparate elements – highlights, statements, directors’ reports and the financial statements – together into one coherent, memorable and readable document.
Over the years we have had the opportunity to design several high-profile annual reports and have been recognised nationally and internationally for our approach to annual report design. Many of our clients return to us year after year – none more so than Concern Worldwide who have asked us to design their annual report for each of the last sixteen years.
Design for Print
When Red Dog started back in 1993, we couldn’t have imagined a time when we weren’t designing for print. Gladly, despite all the changes in technology and user behaviour, it’s never quite come to that.
Whether it’s brochures, books, annual reports, event programmes, stationery, press ads, outdoor or campaign materials, there’s still lots of lovely print design going on in our studio. We wouldn’t have it any other way!
Digital
Websites – where would we be without them? For a start, you wouldn’t be reading this! Individuals today spend most of their time staring at tablets, smartphones and laptops so, as you’d expect, we spent a lot of our time designing for the same. Our process is one that ensures you not only have a great looking website but one that is structured properly according to your user, written very well and one that reflects who you are as an organisation. Our websites run the range from brochure sites for a gastro-pub to content-heavy sites that manage to speak to two different audiences at the same time. If your audience is online (and let’s face it, everyone’s audience is online) we can help you reach them through well considered websites, email campaigns, videos, animation, social media platforms and online banner advertising.
Environment and Exhibition
We don’t limit ourselves to designing things to look great on paper or screen. We also like to apply our design thinking to buildings, convention centres, theatre stages and exhibition halls. While the canvas is unquestionably bigger, our approach to environment and exhibition design starts at the smallest point and works up from there. What will the user see? How will s/he navigate the space? How can we make it as easy as possible for everyone to take in as much information as possible without being overawed or exhausted? Finding the answers to these questions is the starting point to a successful solution.
In recent years, we’ve produced effective staging for Government events, designed all of the signage and backdrops for university campaign launches, and made the best use out of small spaces for tourist-facing exhibitions. We also recently designed a complete wayfinding system for a purpose-built care home in Dublin. We’ve even held our own exhibitions once or twice along the way!
Video and Animation
Sometimes we find that a website or a printed document alone isn’t going to be enough to communicate what our client is trying to say. Perhaps there’s a lot of information to take on board that could better be explained in an animation. Or we may reach the conclusion that the best way for our client to reach their potential customers is in the form of a short video.
Red Dog partners with illustrators, filmmakers, editors and music composers to produce original videos and animations that produce better results for our clients than a brochure or a website can ever do. Of course, a video or animation isn’t the answer to everyone’s communication needs but when the message, delivery and production are harnessed correctly, they can often be the smartest and most effective way for our clients to reach their audience.
