BVD

Speaker: Susanna Nygren Barrett

Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Website: www.bvd.se

Case

Blossa Annual Edition

A true success story. Blossa Annual Edition is a Swedish mulled wine that launches each Christmas season before the 1st Advent with a new taste and new packaging. The limited edition series began in 2003 and since then has gained enormous success, both with the consumer as well as in the design industry. The aim of the Annual Edition is to generate awareness of Blossa ahead of the mulled wine season and drive sales across the whole range. The custom design bottle form remains the same each year and the color and graphics change to suit the taste and spirit of the season. Despite an increase in volume each year, this product continues to sell out, this year over 700 000 bottles sold out within a few weeks time, it received over 600 press clippings, was featured on over 200 blogs and has won 7 design awards.

Background

Blidholm Vagnemark Design®

BVD is a design and branding bureau that works with strategic design projects for both small and large corporations, local as well as global, and within all fields of business. We view design as a strategic marketing tool above anything else and know that a successful project requires not only exceptional creative skills, but also in-depth knowledge of market conditions, business expertise and insightful analysis. Over the years we have carried out a number of successful projects for leading global brands with concrete and measurable results.

Susanna Nygren Barrett is a Creative Director and partner of BVD. With more than fifteen years experience working with strategic design Susanna has worked with all aspects of branding media from naming and identity design, packaging and print, retail concepts to in-store communication and web.

Her career started in a multidisciplinary design office in Vancouver, then she moved to New York in 1997 where she was the head of a 5 person design office and finally residing in Stockholm in 2001 when she joined BVD. Over the years, Susanna has won numerous design awards, held lectures in design schools in Vancouver, New York and Stockholm and her work has been published in many international books and publications.

Beetroot

Location: Thessaloniki, Greece

Website: www.beetroot.gr

Case

Title: Fashion design or design fashion

Background

Beetroot was founded on September of 2000, in Thessaloniki, Greece by Vagelis Liakos, Alexis Nikou and Yiannis Charalambopoulos. Today Beetroot counts 7 employees who have studied graphic design, new media, photography and marketing in Greece and Great Britain.

Beetroot Design Group is involved with projects in all kinds of media that graphic design can be applied (print, branding, new media such as web, cd-rom, video, tv or installations). Beetroot client list encompasses companies and organizations established in Greece and abroad.

The company has won prestigious distinctions in all competitions of EBGE awards (among its awards are the Grand EBGE 2008 and Grand EBGE 2006) in Greece, at EPICA (European Creative Awards 2004), at Ermis Awards and finally at European Design Awards 2007 and European Design Awards 2008 (Agency of the year).

Alex Trochut

Speaker: Alex Trochut

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Background

Alex Trochut’s illustrations, designs and typography take the modern notion of minimalism and flip it on its side. Trochut’s work philosophy is “More is more.” It is rich with elegant, brilliantly detailed executions that simultaneously convey indulgence and careful, restrained control. Trochut is driven by a desire to constantly evolve which can be seen in his eclectic body of work.

Renowned for his technically exquisite type creations and designs, Trochut attributes his special connection with typography to his grandfather Joan Trochut – a typographer and the creator of a modular typographic and ornament system built in the 40s. Alex Trochut’s client’s include Nike, The Rolling Stones, Nixon, British Airways, Coca-Cola, The Guardian, Non Format, Wieden + Kennedy, Saatchi and Saatchi, BBH, Fallon and Beautiful Decay.

2009 Adrian Frutiger

Adrian Frutiger’s acceptance speech for the ED-Awards ceremony in Zürich 2009: Link to YouTube.

Adrian Frutiger (born May 24, 1928) is one of the prominent typeface designers of the twentieth century, who continues influencing the direction of digital typography in the twenty-first century; he is best known for creating the typefaces Univers and Frutiger.

At the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed four years, as a compositor, to the printer Otto Schaerffli in Interlaken; between 1949 and 1951 he studied under Walter Käch and Alfred Willimann in the Kunstgewerbeschule (school of applied arts) in Zürich, where students studied monumental inscriptions from Roman forum rubbings. At the Kunstgewerbeschule, Frutiger primarily concentrated on calligraphy — a craft favouring the nib and the brush, instead of drafting tools.

His first commercial typeface was Président — a set of titling capital letters with small, bracketed serifs, released in 1954. Later that year the Deberny & Peignot type foundry wanted to add a linear sans serif antiqua in serveral weights to the range of the Lumitype-fonts. Adrian Frutiger suggested refraining from adapting an existing alphabet and instead to develop a new font that would, above all, be suitable for the typesetting of longer texts. Using his old sketches from the School for the Applied Arts, he created Univers font, which was published in 1957.

In the 1970s, the French airport authority’s commissioning a “way-finding signage” alphabet for the new Charles de Gaulle International Airport in the Roissy suburb of Paris. Frutiger considered adapting Univers, but decided it was dated as too-Sixties. The resultant typeface, originally titled Roissy, the typeface was renamed Frutiger when released it for public use in 1976.

In the late 1990s, Frutiger began collaborating on refining and expanding the Univers, Frutiger, and Avenir, in addressing hinting for screen display. Univers was reissued with sixty-three variants; Frutiger was reissued as Frutiger Next with true italic and additional weights. Adrian Frutiger’s career and typeface development spans the hot metal, phototypesetting, and digital typesetting eras. Currently, he lives near Bern.

Wikipedia