City Tower
OBI
A towering 1960s office block in the centre of Manchester that is perceived to be stuck in the era. Working with OBI our role was to change this and make City Tower a place for brave decisions; similar to what lead to it’s creation in the first place. The project is a complete overhaul from strategy and positioning through to interior style and staff processes. The aim is to be a place for fast growth organisations to flourish through innovation and bold new ideas. This lead to the create of a bespoke elongated woodblock inspired typeface that captures the energy and history of the building. The typeface is a variable font to be used in large graphical elements to emphasis it’s bold nature. The identifier reflects the building façade’s original concept of circuit boards and the new digital era.
We had an amazing cooperation with asdesign. Alister Shapley is very professional and flexible. From experience with other graphic designers, we had found it quite difficult to enter a conversation and a process where the content and the form would go hand in hand. In moments of decision, if it was for the font, layout, colour palette or the print technique, Alister always had prepared mood boards with different choices and information for each for us to be able to choose from. In this regard, I feel we have also learnt something about graphic design. The choices didn't seem to be empirical, but he explained why he proposes to use X instead of Y, it was specific to the content. The process was enjoyable, Alister has been flexible and not afraid of making some changes along the process to facilitate the success of the project. We used risograph printing which is probably not the easiest one, but he was brave and curious enough to try it out and we really enjoyed the result! We have worked on a magazine design together and now we hope that we will work on an entire art & architecture festival in the future
