The best retail address in London?

It's got to be up there: the huge space directly underneath Piccadilly Circus's famous illuminated advertising hoardings. A space currently occupied by Burger King, but which is soon to become vacant.

This whole building, Piccadilly Lights, is owned, almost inevitably, by my client Land Securities. With Burger King's lease up, they're looking to let this unique location to a leading international brand. So, naturally enough, they turned to Hat-trick - and me.


Together, we've created a brochure and a website (beautifully realised, as ever, by Bounce) that reflect the location's glitz and gloss. In fact, the brochure's so incredibly glossy, slipping it out of its clear envelope for the first time released a pungent bouquet of ink and varnish: an unexpected, but rather wonderful, olfactory bonus. Mind you, I'm one of those people who loves the smell of creosote.


In this location, retailers have a real shopfront on the world, not just London. So the copy focuses on the site's potential to enhance any international brand, tying it to one of the globe's great city icons.


The images, reminiscent of the towering billboards themselves, are pixelated with tiny little shopping bag pixels, which tie in to the numbers of people seeing, passing and visiting the site.


You can read all the copy, and see more of the imagery, at the One Piccadilly Lights website.

D&AD Xchange 2007

I recently worked with Hat-trick on my first D&AD project, which was nice. It was a booklet to promote D&AD Xchange - the annual two-day event for educators in design, advertising and communications.

As ever, D&AD had assembled a stellar line-up of speakers. So the concept for the materials was 'Mix with some big names'. The cover of the booklet (left) is a playful interpretation of that idea.

If you'd like to read what I wrote, click here to download a PDF of the booklet.

Capital Commitment advertising

Capital Commitment is the name for Land Securities' London portfolio - a multi-billion pound collection of property that the company has been developing since its earliest days in the mid 1940s.

Those sixty-odd years of investment in London have allowed Land Securities to develop a knowledge of the capital that's difficult to beat.

The new capital commitment ad campaign - which I've created alongside fellow roster creatives Hat-trick - plays obliquely on that knowledge.

We dug out some of London's most peculiar legal imperatives, and have created a set of signs that imagines these peculiar regulations in full, public force. (They're all technically still on the statute books.) The strapline on the campaign is 'capital knowledge'.

The posters and press ads are now appearing all over London, and we also produced a little booklet of the ads that was tipped in to trade publications and Time Out.

You can see more of the ads as a slideshow on the Capital Commitment homepage.

Land Securities brand values book

As part of the launch of its new identity, Land Securities produced this little book explaining its core values.

The book, designed by Hat-trick and written by yours truly, sets out and illustrates the philosophy that sets the company apart. It's also a good demonstration of the flexibility built into Hat-trick's deceptively simple identity.

The little corner marks have a life of their own, picking out the relevant elements in visuals, type and just about anything. It's very neat - suitably corporate, but with a wit and charm that lifts it well above the run-of-the-mill.

To download the full book as a PDF (1MB), click here.