Turning the White Walls at Nous into Art
When you manufacture visual communications all day long it can be a little trying (to say the least) to get everyone to agree upon what you should decorate your own workspace with…
We could put up images of our work. But we’ve already seen that — like… a lot.
We could take the “gallery” approach and just whitewash the shit outta everything. But that would be boring (and it would highlight just how messy my desk is). And you need really expensive lights so that people think you’re interesting.
We could put up meaningful, inspiring, life-lesson quotes by amazing creative souls and business iconoclasts. But our office is not a seventeen year old girl’s Instagram account.
We could call in the interior designers. But that just wouldn’t be Nous.
So we briefed to some folks we trusted to pin down something we were finding a bit slippery.
Outsourcing the Creative
We’d brought Rick and Em of Frank and Mimi in on the Newstead Brewing Co project and so were aware of their amazing ability to turn a can of paint into a great wall. We (initially) had few restrictions and asked them to come back to us with some big ideas. They did.
After digging around Nous and finding out what we’re about (branding and marketing… duh) and where our name came from (it’s Ancient Greek: “Intelligence”) they came back with a stunning idea. Black and white line renders of intelligent animals tangled with reimagined pangrams.
Whats a pangram? —ok— “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is a pangram. It contains all the letters of the alphabet which is an entertaining novelty, unless you’re buying typefaces and need a quick way of seeing how a font “sets”, then it’s extremely useful. There are heaps of them, some more sensible than others.
It was Rick and Em’s suggestion that we use pangrams as the starting point for some old-school marketing messages of the “buy one get one free” ilk to allow them to incorporate some typography into their artworks.
We love our new walls. Even though we’ve had them since early this year, they still feel fresh and engaging.
In case you haven’t been in recently here’s a video of Frank and Mimi at work making magic happen.
