OUGD405 | Study Task 1

This afternoon we were challenged as a group to use a concept to rebrand the sandbag company Hesco. At first glance, designing for such a company seemed challenging as it is not a company that I am particularly interested in. However, I was pleased with the results we came up with. 

From our research we found out that Hesco was about more than sandbags but about life saving products used in war zones and during natural disasters. We felt that we should communicate the real Hesco through its branding. 

As a group we struggled to come up with a strong concept which reflected all elements of the company. Hesco already had the slogan "defend, protect, secure" which we liked as a group. So we decided to leave this unchanged and use it as out concept. 

We came up with the idea of using vectorised symbols to communicate the work of Hesco. These symbols tied in with the 3 words of the concept. For defend we used a bullet to represent war zones- this later changed to a shield upon the advice of a tutor. This was in red to highlight warning/danger. We use 3 lines to represent waves and flooding for protect- this was in a blue as there is a safe feeling about the colour. We finally created a padlock for secure in gold - a colour commonly used for locks. We boxed the symbols to make the images clearer.

Hesco was written in arial bold caps to emphasise the solid defence and reliability offered by the products. 

We played around with the composition of the squares including the thickness of the strokes and the position on the page. I personally feel the smaller, thinner symbols work best. 

We developed our brand by creating letterheads. These designs were good, however, due to time constraints the quality was not perfect- for example the word HESCO is difficult to read. 

A tutor also suggested we consider packaging for such a company. We created a pattern for the brand which could be used in a variety of situations. We also created a tape design which would be used for packaging the larger products on offer from Hesco. 

Overall I was pleased with how the branding looked. It seemed to have a professional and unique appeal. The group all worked well together and we bounced ideas off each other well. We could have prepared our verbal pitch better but this was due to poor time management meaning we focussed too much time on the design itself.