This was the perfect chance to align LRF’s social media channels with the campaign branding and challenge icons we created for them last year (see full story here). This campaign focused on communicating some of the biggest safety challenges facing the world today. We created a series of icons to reflect each of the 7 core challenges that LRF are tackling to truly engineer a safer world.
At first, we sought to solve the social media brief by designing two banner style approaches for the different types of audience that would be using those channels. A more fun and quirky look and feel for Facebook for example, whilst the other approach would be more professional and corporate for LinkedIn. The brand campaign we had created was very flexible and could cover both of these approaches.
However, after creating several design options to cover these two types of audience, and producing mockups of how they’d appear on their respective social media pages, we realised that one of the options could work well across all social media platforms. This not only created standout and differentiation but definitely ticked the consistency box.
The other thing that really struck us – aside from the fact that many of these platforms seemed to have changed their templates and requirements this year – was that all the channel’s content wasn’t as clearly split as it used to be, especially now with everyone talking about COVID-19. There is certainly more of a mix of corporate messaging, statistics, humour and links to each other, especially with the more business-focused LinkedIn.
This mix of content meant we were confident in a more abstract and contemporary approach that could work across all platforms. This would ensure there was brand synergy across all its social media pages, achievable by using one style of banner with the highest impact from a visual perspective. We created a collage of the 7 challenge icons by enlarging and superimposing them over one another to give the banner an abstract quality whilst retaining some semblance so that the icons were still recognisable.
There was also the opportunity to bring more energy and life to the Facebook and Vimeo pages by animating the icons to all converge together from outside the banner frame to form the final, abstract pattern. The LRF strapline that appears on all their materials, ‘Engineering a safer world’, is the final piece in the abstract jigsaw puzzle.
There are plans to use this abstract graphic on other materials to build recognition. Watch this space or one of their social media channels…