Designing a style for the opening of a new Unizo building

Sep 11

Designing a style for the opening of a new Unizo building

Posted by Benedikte Vanderweeën on 11/09/2012

In July, i started with a rather big project for the opening of a new Unizo office in my neighborhood. UNIZO (Unie van Zelfstandige Ondernemers) is a Belgian organization of Self-Employed and Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME); it is mainly situated in the Flemish region of the Kingdom of Belgium. UNIZO wants to give SMEs a voice from the local up to the European level.

Together with 3 other key organizations, AB Partners (accountancy), Sociaal Bureau Vlaamse Ardennen (social security) and ZENITO (retirement plans and savings), a new office will be opening on Saturday september 15.

The Brief

In the brief I was asked to design the overall style for the:

interior and exterior photography of the new building
design of 2 printed invitations with the aforementioned photo's
design and coding of a one page responsive website with subscription forms for the 6 workshops

Overall style definition

Before i went taking pictures of the building, i wanted to define a style that would go hand in hand with the style of the building. The architecture style is minimal with use of raw materials on the interior: concrete, Granito, wood, black steal, glass, … The building was built by KNAP Architects

I sketched out some minimal designs for the style of the invitations, the enveloppe, the advertisements and the website.

The use of the Granito texture at the reception desk is an element that catches the eye when entering the building together with the dark grey tiles that cover a part of the facade on the outside. My idea was to re-use these tiles and textures as graphic elements in the design.

_{initial sketch for the style definition}

Photography

Buildings

As a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, i downloaded the new version of Adobe Photoshop® Lightroom® 4. Adobe Photoshop® Lightroom® 4 is a very useful tool for organizing and editing photographs. I had a previous version installed but i never used it because of performance issues. The new CS version has improved, it's quick and the build-in features are intuitive.

I took the pictures with a Canon PowerShot G10. I use this camera for some years and although it's not a professional camera, i can shoot just the resolution i need for the print work i had in mind. After downloading the Raw shots from the camera into Adobe Photoshop® Lightroom® 4, i did some tweaking and filtering before sending them to Adobe Photoshop® for conversion for print.

Because i needed the pictures for printed material and for screen use, i duplicated them in two different resolutions and color spaces.