Everybody on the same page

The Brief

As a memento of the day, and as a means to keep the strategy alive and top-of-mind, we provide everyone with a bespoke notebook they can use throughout the year. It contains our vision, purpose, values and key initiatives for the year.

The Solution

The notebook’s design is led by the theme of our strategy each year. This year’s theme – Sparking the imagination – is about aiming higher, stretching our thinking and creativity and looking at things differently. It reinforces that we are all creative and have a role to play in our collective success.

While primarily a notebook for staff to use at meetings, a key secondary objective is to produce a creative talking-piece that engages clients, leading them to ask about its design and how it works. As a staff engager, a showpiece of our creativity and a sales tool for staff alignment, it’s a notebook that has to work very hard.

The creative idea behind the design was interaction, providing a hands-on experience that allows staff to think, play and do in order to express their own creativity. This comes through in fun brainteasers, stickers, puzzles, games and other fun activities that hark back to our childhood - when stretching your imagination seemed so much easier.

Our company values provide a further vehicle to think about possibilities. Engaging images with cut-outs hint at what lies beneath, inviting staff to use their imagination. A fold out page expresses the idea of thinking beyond the constraints of the page.

This year we incorporated an augmented reality experience under the provocative, and foil highlighted, title of change perspective. Pointing a device at Nellie the Astronaut brings the image alive, releasing a number of interactive activities and games, that bring a new dimension to the notebook experience.

The colours are expansive, the images imaginative and the typography unexpected. The overall feel is bold and expressive, deliberately incorporating multiple creative styles to deliver an eclectic finished product. The tone is somewhat irreverent, suggesting the pushing of boundaries and challenging design convention. 

The Results

Staff love the book and every so often you hear fits of laughter as they mix and match stickers or complete teasers in interesting new ways. We all carry our notebooks to every meeting and many clients have commented on them. This becomes an invitation to open it up, show the various expressions and discuss how it helps to align staff with a company’s purpose, strategy and values. Already we have two clients talking about creating their own staff notebook.

The functional strategic elements are contained in a small book within the notebook that can be removed in order to create a version for gifting to clients. There’s something very gratifying seeing our clients come to meetings with us, holding our notebook.