Member Article

Flow Creative kick-starts SmartImpact project in Eindhoven

Flow Creative - an award-winning design and video production agency - has kick-started the SmartImpact project with Manchester City Council (MCC) at a conference in Eindhoven. There, the Northern Quarter-based agency presented design concepts to the ten partner cities.

The initiative, which will see Manchester lead a collaboration between a host of European cities including Dublin, Stockholm, Zagreb and Porto to develop and share best practice in implementing smart city objectives, is rapidly picking up pace ahead of its launch in March.

The project aims to help cities to become cleaner, greener, more efficiently run with better integration of data and technology, and ultimately to help to make them better places to live, work and play.

Flow has been tasked with creating the branding for the project, to provide a consistent ‘look and feel’ to a range of content, and to provide a brand toolkit for all ten partner cities to use for communications within their own territories.

On the approach Flow have taken, Creative Director Karl Doran said: “After an extensive development stage where we worked very closely with MCC, we’ve opted for a bold, contemporary brand style, using a lead colour and a simple geometric pattern to identify each of the five themes of the project. This will allow the audience to easily navigate the site and will be used across printed material and video content to offer consistency. With a complex subject like this it was imperative that the content was presented in such a way that helped to make it as accessible as possible.”

As well as being responsible for branding the project, Flow will be creating a range of content including case study films, animation, print material and a website to showcase the content and explain the purpose of the project; predominantly to educate the audience comprised of the European Commission, national governments, European financial institutions and market sector organisations.

The Manchester-based agency is proud to be working with MCC to support the development of SmartImpact, which will be rolled out from March 2018 to 2022.

Flow’s creative director, Karl Doran, said: “It was a pleasure to meet the representatives from the ten European cities involved, and a privilege to be able to present our design concepts to them. The ideas were really well received and we got some useful feedback that helped to inform our decisions and make sure the creative effectively showcases the incredible work of the project. We were also there to shoot interviews with all the partner cities, so it was a busy few days! We’re back in Manchester now and are working hard to complete the scope of work in time for its launch next month.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by lucy yates .