Latest Project: Animal Care Open Day 2016

Local animal charity Animal Care situated in Lancaster is a regular client of Back Room SAM. Animal Care recently contacted us to commission a poster design to help publicise their upcoming Open Day taking place in May this year.

The Open Day is Animal Care’s biggest fundraising event in their annual calendar. As the charity is entirely self-funded and receive no aid from the government, the success of events like this is vital for securing funds to allow their work to continue in caring for and re-homing unwanted and abandoned animals that come to them from all over North West England.

“Every adventure requires a first step…” The Design Brief
The brief we were given for the poster design was a challenging one. The open day is primarily aimed at families with children, and this year the event is to take on an Alice in Wonderland theme. This theme needed to be explicitly communicated in the design. Tea parties, cheshire cats and mad hatters while experimenting with bold colours and chequered patterns meant we soon found ourselves in Wonderland! However, while implementing this theme we wanted to avoid compromising the core standard branding of the charity. This also needed to be represented so that folk already familiar with the charity could quickly recognise this as an Animal Care event.

ALICE: ‘This is impossible.’
THE MAD HATTER: ‘Only if you believe it is.’

Another challenge was the amount of information to be included on the poster. Lots of different stalls and activities would be happening at the Open Day event to attract people to come along, and it was important that all of these were communicated clearly. The trick was to refine the poster layout so that it didn’t appear cluttered with ‘information overload’. The poster was to be printed in various sizes – A2, A3 and A4 – so we needed to ensure it was still visually attractive and easily readable when reproduced at the smallest size.

‘I’m not crazy. My reality is just different from yours.’ Cheshire Cat

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Mad as a hatter about the result
The client were delighted with the final outcome, and feel the design very much represents their vision for the event and successfully attracts and compels the target audience. Plans are coming together nicely for the day, which is set to be their largest fundraising event to date!

‘Animal Care used Back Room SAM to redesign our adoption folders, forms and business cards as well as to design posters for our different fundraising events. Back Room SAM really has been such an easy business to work with, very helpful and has made it very easy to order everything we need from one place. Sarah’s design work is very professional which has given our charity a clear and quality look to all adoptions. We are always very pleased with everything we get from Back Room SAM and look forward to working with them for many more years to come.’
Faye Goymer, Principal Manager at Animal Care

See more of Back Room SAM’s projects

Got a project of your own you’d like to chat through with us? Contact us now

Have you got your Facebook timeline cover design covered?

facebook timeline design

A bit of latest news for you…if you have a page for your business on Facebook, you will have probably already spotted that on 30th March 2012, your page will, in Facebook’s words, be getting a ‘brand new design’. Facebook are rolling out their timeline format across all pages, both personal and business.

So what are the advantages of the new timeline layout? These will soon become clear as you play around with the new format. To name just a couple of useful changes, you will be able to pin your most important posts to the top of your timeline (formerly referred to as your wall). And as your posts are now displayed chronologically, if you’re clever about it you can use the new format to show the world how your business has evolved over time. Check out the new ‘milestones’ you can use when creating a post about a particular key moment or episode in the life of your business you wish to highlight, such as a new product launch or special event that’s happening. A milestone post will be marked out from the rest of your posts and will be more prominently displayed on your page.

But perhaps the most obvious and important change that will happen to your page on March 30th is the introduction of a 851-pixel wide cover image of your choosing spreading all the way across the top of your page like a banner. This image will be present in addition to your standard profile picture, which is now required to be a small square (and so any vertical banner you have had designed for your page previously will be reduced to this!). This change is a brilliant opportunity to create a great first impression of your Facebook page and your business as a whole, so choose wisely. But beware! There are a number of restrictions regarding what information you can include on your cover design – for more details about these restrictions click here.

Need a hand with the design of your Facebook cover image for the new timeline layout? Throughout March and April 2012, Back Room SAM will happily design and deliver a professional and eye-catching banner design especially for your page, for just £30. Just give me a bell on 07866 417211 or email me on sarah@backroomsam.co.uk to chat about your new fancy design.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading, and hope you come back very soon!

sarah x

www.backroomsam.co.uk