When the creative team at Rees & Company were approached to develop a brand identity by a trendy new company called Art Under a Monkey, we thought they were bananas. What does a monkey have to do with challenging prejudice in the art world, we wondered? So we asked them to explain…

The company’s aim is to source and market one-off pieces for a maximum price of £500 (or in cockney speak, ‘a monkey’), removing the intimidation and price barriers so often associated with buying art. The typography and monkey image were specially drawn by Rees & Company, and the result not only wittily leverages the company name, but also delivers the cheeky and unique brand personality that the owners hoped to achieve. This was carried through the entire brand, from the initial logo through to company stationery, business cards, direct mailers and website design.

Audio mixing console manufacturer Calrec are broadcast industry specialists. With products among the most widely-used by TV stations and outside broadcast operations worldwide, they’re a big name, but customer feedback, confirmed by our research, indicated that Calrec’s outdated brand image was lagging behind their innovative product road-map.

Calrec commissioned Rees & Company to breathe new life into the brand, so we focused on highlighting their strong broadcast heritage, providing a high profile launch-pad for an exciting new product range. We re-designed everything from the logo, strapline and website to product literature, advertising, newsletters and new media animations. The effect is truly dazzling, allowing Calrec to step out of the shade!

Rees & Company were briefed to create a logo for Apollo, Calrec’s new sound mixing console. The finished solar image cleverly reflects the central role of sound in Calrec products, by incorporating soundbars into the image, whilst simultaneously developing the original Calrec logo, which also features soundbars. And all with an ingenious nod to the products’ namesake, the Greek god of the sun. Dazzling!

Twin sister of the award-winning Apollo, Calrec’s new Artemis consoles match the power of their predecessor, incorporating massive routing capacity and processing brilliance with the instant feedback and flexibility that customers have come to expect from Calrec’s ground-breaking Bluefin2 and Hydra2 systems. Rees & Company presented the new product in a cleverly- packaged CD, featuring a logo that leverages the products’ name and its association with the moon, along with cutting-edge animation and interactive models to demonstrate the functions of the new Artemis consoles.

DPS asked Rees & Company to overhaul their dated image and come up with something that reflected their modern take on business. We put our heads together and came up with a strong brand identity with a contemporary, pared-down feel, using a combination of bright colour, eye-catching typography and an ingenious logo. The result is fresher, funkier and more accessible.

Rees & Company designed some seriously tasty packaging for a gorgeous new range of healthy, freshly prepared meals by Made Myself. The utensil graphics cleverly leverage the home-made nature of the products, while the choice of colours evokes a cosy, country kitchen feel. The labels for the different meals echo this, giving a tantalising description of the delights inside coupled with a quirky graphic of the main ingredient. Mouth-watering!

At Rees & Company, we’re all about helping your brand to blossom. That’s why when New Leaf approached us, we were keen to help give them a brand identity shake up. As a high-end independent purveyor of sophisticated and contemporary ‘objets d’art’, New Leaf needed an image which would signify its re-invention to customers and artists alike, combining approachability and accessibility with the clean, modern identity the gallery is known for.

Rees & Company began by coming up with a fresh name, ‘New Leaf Gallery’, which we feel perfectly captures the idea of rebirth. We then designed a simple, striking brand logo – an image of a single green leaf against a stark white background. They say that sometimes a picture says a thousand words, and we feel that this graphic, along with the multi-style typography, really reflects the cutting-edge creativity of the gallery. We then leveraged these core aspects of the brand identity throughout the gallery signage, stationery, brochure and merchandise.

As part of the re-brand of the new company following the merger between Snell & Wilcox and Pro-Bel, Rees & Company were commissioned to come up with a new brand identity and logo, to drive home the Snell ideology, and consolidate their place at the centre of the multi-screen world.

The new company is dynamic and design-led, and so we focused on selecting graphics to convey this. We sourced a series of images, each set based around a specific colour, with each colour representative of a particular product category, which is in turn associated with its own logo. Our brilliantly eye-catching photography captures the kind of content Snell products provide to their customers, helping to establish them as a really big name in digital media.

When Snell asked us to create a logo for the internal launch of the Intelligent Solutions concept, we came up with a truly ingenious design. Cool, crisp and modern, the IS logo can also be incorporated into words and phrases to further enhance the brand identity, neatly encapsulating the distinctive qualities that make Snell stand out from the crowd: dynamic, inventive and insightful, it’s clear that with Snell, Intelligent Solutions are innate!

Here at Rees & Company, we like to use our skills to do good things. So we jumped at the chance to help spread the message for Tomorrows, a brilliant charity dedicated to funding research into Cystic Fibrosis and helping sufferers of the disease live a better life. We focused on really strong branding throughout, from the logo to the website, and across a range of promotional merchandise. Big, colourful and eye-catching, the stylised dove logo is impossible to ignore, and really drives home the key concept of hope.