Brand Identity / Graphic Design — 2019 · Haustalks

Haustalks

Identity and campaign plates for Haustalks, an advice service that puts a client in touch with a named building professional — a red speech-bubble monogram set into rendered scenes of steel and stone.

What the campaign has to say, it says out of its own artwork: two advertisements inviting the reader to connect with a structural engineer, then with a quantity surveyor, on haustalks.com for free expert advice. Each plate takes one profession as its subject and builds a scene around the mark.

The mark is a solid red square bubble with a chamfered tail cut into its lower-left corner, its counter holding a lowercase t that rises out of the frame’s right edge and joins it. On every plate the device works at two extremes at once — small, in the bottom-left lockup beside the Twitter, Facebook and YouTube handles, and blown to the full height of the composition behind the render so that the scene passes across it.

The structural engineer’s plate sets the bubble behind a steel space frame: tubular struts and gussets in dark metal, red rim-light running along their edges, several of them wrapped in red-and-white bands that take the mark’s own coloring. The frame is built through the letter rather than in front of it, so the bubble reads as something the structure was assembled around.

The quantity surveyor’s plate makes the same shape out of the trade’s own material. A row of full-height finish samples — clear glass, mirror, dark oak laminate, veined marble — stands in line in a blackened room and is lit from behind until the red spills out of the gaps and pools on the floor. Where the first plate crosses the mark with structure, this one assembles the mark out of the very samples a surveyor is asked to cost.

Both plates run the same grid. A three-line headline in a heavy geometric condensed sans, tightly stacked, at the head of a left column; a thin red rule dropped beside a light, generously set paragraph of body copy; the call to action in small capitals with HAUSTALKS.COM struck in red; the lockup at the foot. The right two-thirds is left entirely to the render. It is a layout that survives the change of subject, which is the point of it.

Documentation was published to our Behance archive in April 2019. View the original project on Behance.

Campaign Plates

One profession per plate, one layout holding both

Structural engineer plate: the red bubble behind a dark steel space frame with red-rimmed, red-and-white banded struts crossing it, and the campaign copy in a left column

Quantity surveyor plate: the bubble assembled from a row of full-height finish samples — glass, mirror, oak laminate and marble — lit from behind so red light spills across the floor