The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) is the UK’s oldest building conservation body, founded by William Morris and Phillip Webb in 1877.
SPAB briefed me to design a new press advert and bring a fresh, 'modern heritage' feel to their advertising to help raise awareness and encourage new membership.
The solution was to create an imaginary landscape depicting the array of different building types that SPAB work with. Thirteen buildings were illustrated, each based on a real building that the organisation has helped to look after.
The SPAB 'house red' colour was incorporated into each building illustration to symbolise the organisation's hand in caring for the buildings, and to visually link the advert with SPAB's red logo, reinforcing their visual identity. A limited colour palette of cream, blue and grey was used, overprinting the colours in places to create two shades of green.
Four landscape variations were then designed: one full page advert, two half pages and one quarter page advert. The buildings were re-postioned and backgrounds adjusted to work with each of the four different advert formats. The first run of the new adverts will be in Country Life Magazine.
