With Covid causing chaos, varying degrees of lockdown and an especially strange Christmas on the horizon, our 10th birthday celebrations aren’t spinning quite as planned.
2020. An extraordinary year. A challenge for all. A balancing act.
With Covid causing chaos, varying degrees of lockdown and an especially strange Christmas on the horizon, our 10th birthday celebrations aren’t spinning quite as planned.
How we roll
But we consider ourselves lucky. 2020 has been kind to PLOTT and we’ve weathered the Covid storm. We’ve helped our long-standing clients help their customers. We’ve looked after our awesome and ballsy team. And, we’ve helped raise over £20k for the NHS with our Lockdown Legends colouring book.
Because looking after people, customers and community is how we roll.
A ballsy refresh
A PLOTT style party was off the cards for our 10th birthday so instead, we’ve been plotting a brand and web refresh. A labour of love and a huge team effort from our talented and loyal PLOTTers.
Over the last 10 years, we’ve grown (up) a lot! From brother and sister duo to the perfectly balanced team of strategists, designers and coders we are today. This balance of expertise is what inspired the scales graphic in our new branding.
From blue to black, we’ve also changed our palette to a more timeless colour to allow our clients to take centre stage. And the eagle-eyed among you will notice that we’ve dropped ‘creative’ from our name. We’re doing so much more than just creative, so when it came to our name, we figured less is more.
Continuing the simplifying theme, we’ve introduced stylised illustrations to reflect our ethos of keeping things simple, bold and memorable. Richard worked with our friend and illustrator, Sabina Gran, to craft a suit of unique imagery to work across the brand that embodies our values.
Simple
Unlike the process of defining our tone of voice! Hundreds of iterations. Thousands of lines of copy written and discarded. Finally settling on a few, stripped back simple words.
Because we wanted our copy to sound like us. To be bold. To bravely banish all the usual marketing bullsh!t we see.
Having a ball
Our brand refresh wouldn’t be complete without a new website. So we used lockdown wisely and had lots of fun, challenging ourselves with web tech and animation.
Over the last 10 years, we’ve been involved in some awesome projects for an amazing mix of clients. Whittling our case studies down to 12 projects was tough. We wanted to showcase our finance expertise as it’s our primary sector, but we also needed to reflect our creativity.
We also had fun with our new photography. From rubber ducks (don’t ask!) to behind the scenes shots of serious plotting, we wanted to show you our reality which includes having a lot of fun!
Balancing business and community
We love being active Chamber of Commerce members and we were thrilled (and a bit shocked) to win the President’s Award in 2020 for our work on the Eco Pledge launch. Which led to our involvement in the Climate Change Conference in Birmingham. A cause close to our hearts and a factor in everything we do.
We were also the proud sponsors of the YMCA Sofa Surf in 2020, a fantastic event pivoting to virtual right at the beginning of lockdown #1.
Catching on
As our brand has evolved, we’ve seen a real shift towards purpose for the next generation. A need to understand why a business exists, beyond making money.
Millennial consumers are driving this trend, and believe the goal of businesses should be to improve society. This has never been more relevant or critical than during the Covid-19 pandemic.
We believe businesses that catch on, step up and benefit society as a whole, will be the real survivors.
“Richard and I would both like to dedicate the new brand and website to our father, Micky, who would’ve been 78 today. He ran a successful business for many years with his brother and it was him who pushed us (and gave us the proverbial balls) to take the leap of faith and start PLOTT. We’re really proud of what we’ve achieved together and we know he would be too.”
Looking after our people, our customers and our community is how we’ve built PLOTT. It means all our work now comes from referrals; happy clients who are proud to recommend us.
It makes us very proud too.
So here’s to another 10 years of branding with balls and covid-free celebrations.
Check out our new site for balls, branding and more brilliant work.
And if you’d like to find out more get in touch with Anna via email or 01675 434593.
