Page 8 - Adnews Magazine November-December 2021

Behind the Cover
www.adnews.com.au | November-December2021
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The creative contingent of adland is the beating heart of the industry. Each issue, AdNews asks an agency to work its magic to create an inspiring cover. This time it’s Houston Group.
Inspiring hope and freedom
A GIANT AD WAVE • INDUSTRY LEADERS GLAM UP • CADBURY’S BOY ON A BUS • TWITTER TEAM
FORMAL PYJAMAS OR CASUAL SHIRT? • CLIMATE WARRIORS • 2022 FORECASTS • VAX ADS
What were your initial thoughts on the brief at hand? In two words, the brief was to inspire “big hope” — the sense of freedom and better days ahead as we collectively dust ourselves off and emerge from the uncertainty, fear and negativity of the COVID- 19 merry-go-round.
Post first-brief chat, what went through your mind(s) and what were the next steps you took as a team?
Hope means many things and was a broad and rich territory to explore. Stu and the creative team began with rough sketches and discussed insights with [AdNews editor] Chris Pash. We sat and col- laborated around key themes, pinned them up on our concept board with sketches, and lived with them for a while so we knew the directions were right.
We then opened the brief to the whole studio. The year 2021 was experienced in different ways. This moved us into the visualisation phase and bringing to life different expressions of the idea.
How did you know you’d landed on the best concept? It’s the simple ideas that are often the most powerful. For us, vacci- nation was the ticket to freedom,
WORDS BY
MAHA OBEID
and therefore a powerful symbol of hope. Embellishing the vaccine syringe with various hope-induc- ing visual metaphors was where we knew we wanted it to go.
Who from the team was largely involved and what were their roles?
Stuart O’Brien CEO & Alex Toohey ECD worked together as a creative duo, collaborating on the big over- arching idea and sketches, curat- ing a shortlist of their favourite illustrators to approach to bring the final idea to life.
Paul Principe, Houston’s Design Director, finessed the con- cepts to help visualise and con- solidate the strongest ideas in preparation to collaborate with our chosen illustrator.
Noma Bar is a graphic designer, illustrator and award-winning illustration artist, based in London. We loved his work and him as a creative, and approaching him was really a long shot. His work is powerful, and fortunately for us he loved the brief and the opportunity. We were very lucky for him to say yes, which was a real win for the concept and idea.
Stacey Wren, Houston’s Chief of Staff managed the production, herding all the aforementioned cats to ensure we could pull this off.
What were the biggest hurdles to making this
a reality? Any challenges? During the past two years we’ve been saturated with the visual lan- guage and symbolism of COVID-19. A lot of which inspires negativity rather than hope. So our biggest challenge was landing on the right visual metaphor to capture the journey: how far we’ve come, through our ticket to freedom, and really capturing that sense of free- dom and hope for the future.
Tell us about the actual creation techniques.
How did it come together? From Houston: To get from the ear- liest rough, hand-drawn sketches to the final illustrated result took a lot of collaboration and ideation bounc- ing between Stu and Alex to con- dense a very long list of themes to a very short list of frontrunner ideas. Then Alex and Paul explored execu- tion and different illustration styles, to finally brief and commission the perfect illustrator, which was key.
From Noma Bar: “I’ve created this image to give hope and free- dom while we are still living with the pandemic. The metaphor describes a combination of the syringe/health and birdcage/free- dom; drawing an open birdcage as a syringe hub and the hanging wire as the syringe needle.’
Thinking. Insights. Ideas.
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November-December 2021
Credits
Agency: Houston Group
ECD: Alex Toohey
Designer: Noma Bar
Design Director: Paul Principe Designer: Ticky Lan
CEO: Stuart O’Brien
Chief of Staff: Stacey Wren
A limited edition bespoke AdNews ‘A’ trophy is also up for grabs for the winner.
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