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Our work

We’ve proven our experience in a multitude of sectors with a diverse portfolio of clients.

Design / ------------------------ Digital / ------------------------ Motion / ------------------------ Artwork / ------------------------
All Projects /

Highland Park

Virgin Money

Macdonald Hotels & Resorts

BuildStore

National Museums Scotland

Zoological Society of London

Wood Mackenzie

Dobbies

Highland Park

Howies

Innis & Gunn

Edinburgh Gin

European Championships Glasgow 2018

VELUX

Cottages & Castles

Canongate Books

Brighton & Hove Albion FC

VELUX

Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank

Highland Park

3d build and render

Services involved:
3d modelling, 3d rendering, art direction

Highland Park launched their oldest whisky to date – the prestigious 54 year old. 

We were entrusted with capturing the gorgeous detail and craftsmanship that went into every one of the 225 limited edition releases, to coincide with Highland Park’s 225th anniversary year.

The bottle and presentation case were all inspired by the magnificent contours and strata of Orkney’s landscape, the land that Highland Park calls home.

Our job was to showcase every grain of wood and refraction of glass.

To ensure every nuance was caught, we opted to create this all as a 3D build and render, giving us scope to repurpose the assets down the line for varying angles, lighting and animated graphics. 

Virgin Money

Transitional activity support

Services involved:
Videography, editing, digital, motion graphics, artwork

As a long-standing supplier to Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank, we were called upon again to support with rolling out a broad spectrum of communications to promote the multi-million pound rebranding of its national network of Clydesdale Bank, Yorkshire Bank and Virgin Money sites to the new Virgin Money branding.

A more recent brief was to create video content for the launch of the Edinburgh, George Street Virgin Money Store. The revamped and rebranded Virgin Money stores rewrite the definition of what a branch used to be. We were asked to show the new branch in all its glory and highlight the services that they offer including, meeting spaces, comfy lounges, high speed Wi-Fi and use of in-store iPads – all for free. As well as every day services for full personal, mortgage and business banking available to 6.6 million customers in the Virgin Money Group. Vastly increasing the network of available stores to existing Yorkshire Bank, Clydesdale Bank and Virgin Money customers. 

The revamped and rebranded Virgin Money stores are due for completion by spring 2021. 

All through 2020 we supported Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank Group with their challenge of transitioning to Virgin Money. This long process involved inserting members of our artworking resource pool in-house at their Glasgow office to provide overflow support to their busy team. 

Macdonald Hotels & Resorts

Responsive campaign activity throughout 2020

Services involved:
Strategy, copywriting, art direction, editing, digital, motion graphics, artwork

2020 has to go down as an unprecedented year for everyone, with the hospitality industry being one of the hardest hit. Macdonald Hotels & Resorts were no exception and they needed a reliable creative partner to react quickly to the continually changing COVID-19 legislation.

No sooner had we created and launched a brand new fully integrated Spring campaign for the business, the first lockdown of 2020 was imposed and a complete strategic rethink was required to reach as many people as possible and deliver results quickly for the business.

The next task was to clearly communicate to all facets of the business in the UK and Europe the changes that need to be implemented immediately to keep in-line with the ever-changing government guidelines. This took the form of a ‘Safe & Sound’ branding exercise and supporting operational guidelines outlining a charter of strict safety measures covering everyone in the organisation from reception staff to the housekeeping teams. 

With the eventual loosening of restrictions looking likely in July, we embarked on a new multi-channel ‘Press Play’ campaign promoting safe resort breaks to make the most of the great British outdoors. Working with media partners a strategy was quickly devised and key deliverables were needed in record time with only four weeks until the first TV air-date. With severe limitations on time and little ability
to produce new footage, we had to be as creative with production as our writers were with the scripts. By reviewing and rejuvenating existing brands assets we managed to show the resorts as the ideal escape and antidote to lockdown.

As summer was rapidly passing us by, it was obvious that there was still a huge appetite for any kind of staycation, which was central to the brief for our next major campaign of the year. During lockdown we’d felt safe in our homes, our comfort zone, appreciated extra family time, doing things together and where possible some extra outdoors time. This campaign combined all of those aspects but with the overarching safety message of getting away for a well needed break to a self-contained resort property.

With December looming, we were faced with yet another increasingly uncertain period ahead. Our final fully integrated campaign focused on seeing out the year as a festive highlight, or at least offering the possibility of future planning for your next break, whenever that may be. By promoting the added extras and gift vouchers available from Macdonald Hotels & Resorts, coupled by flexible booking options and special offers, we were able to keep Macdonald Hotels & Resorts at the forefront of everyone’s minds for 2021.

Spurred on by our need for more resort footage earlier in the year, the Alliance called on one of our many talented creatives to pick the right moment to head to the Trossachs and capture some fantastic location drone footage at the Forest Hills Hotel & Spa Resort, coupled with some new interior hospitality imagery. This suite of new imagery has now been earmarked for an upcoming social campaign for 2021, and will also be used on their websites and for internal promotional pieces. 

In amongst the main campaigns for 2020, we also produced a number of smaller scale activity in order to maintain brand visibility. These small bursts included online ‘Eat out to Help Out’ voucher promotions for the numerous food and beverage destinations within the group. ‘Kickstart your business’ targeted other businesses in September to offer them safe environments to hold meetings and events in a bid to get help them regain some kind of temporary workplace normality. ‘Hello Autumn’ and ‘Black Friday’ online and email offer promotions also performed well, recording
a significant upturn in engagement and bookings. 

BuildStore

UX design and website build

Services involved:
UX/UI design, Web development

Working with BuildStore’s own designer, we worked out how to break down the individual components of varying styles and re-use them throughout the site via a custom content-builder in Craft, allowing BuildStore to produce pages that suit the content section rather than be forced into dull repetitive templates. This resulted in increased flexibility in the way the site was built. 

Forms and applications were a big part of the site, therefor setup of a form builder allowed for better control and setup of these multiple forms. 

Mobile navigation presented another challenge, as the whole site nav was to be included. Clever use of caching and custom JavaScript meant no negative impact on site performance. 

National Museums Scotland

Various project support

Services involved:
Artwork, design, digital, retouching

Since 2014, the Alliance have been assisting National Museums Scotland with a whole host of marketing collateral promoting a broad spectrum of events and exhibitions throughout their 4 Scottish sites: National Museum of Scotland, National War Museum Scotland, National Museum of Flight Scotland and National Museum of Rural Life Scotland.

Projects have included regular updates to printed site leaflets and posters, creation of seasonal promotions and invitations to specialist exhibitions as well as producing some of their educational literature. Many of the campaigns are supported by static and animated online activity. 

Their ever changing schedule of first class events and exhibitions make the Museums extremely popular destinations all year round. 

Zoological Society of London

#OneLess fountain toolkit

Services involved:
Artwork, design

We worked with Zoological Society of London (ZSL) to create a guide to installing water fountains across London in the hope that the initiative will go some way towards reducing the amount of plastic waste in our oceans.

As tweeted by Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London “On average, Londoners buy 3 bottles of water every week. You told us that you want to be able to refill your own bottles from fountains that are safe, accessible, visible – and working. We’re delivering for Londoners and cutting single-use plastic waste.” 

An online and printed toolkit was created to aid communities with their installations as well as directing people to all of the existing sites across the London area. An important and innovative step in changing habits for the better.

Visit www.onelessbottle.org to get the full picture. 

Wood Mackenzie

Promotional animations

Services involved:
Design, motion graphics

Our client Wood Mackenzie briefed us to produce some visually engaging animated content to use on their social media channels and for general presentation purposes. 

The first ‘Black Gold’ project was an informative journey through the rise and fall of the oil markets over a 150 year period. A thought-provoking piece highlighting predicted trends and how oil production could affect all manner of businesses in the future. 

The second piece is a generic animation graphic sting that was used in multiple presentations and social media posts. 

The creativity and experience of our animator really came to the fore when creating these projects, rightly earning high praise from the client. 

Dobbies

Microsoft Office templates

Services involved:
Design, artwork

The marketing department at Dobbies approached us to redesign and create new Microsoft Office documents that could easily be updated and adapted by their own internal staff. 

For their main presenter, the most flexible solution to retain the desired level of creativity was to build it in PowerPoint, given the complexities of that particular document. 

Our designer worked from existing brand guidelines to further develop a broad selection of slide masters that could feasibly work for all manner of layouts, depending on what level of content needed to be input by the Dobbies team. 

Once the layouts and assets were approved, the build was completed by our Microsoft specialist. Ensuring that the full functionality of PowerPoint and Word was utilised, creating master layout slides to draw from, coding for macros, style sheets and creation of a user guide, all designed to make the templates as simple to work with as possible. 

Highland Park

Twisted Tattoo Packaging

Services involved:
Artwork, retouching

Conceptualised by the hugely talented IL Design, this was a striking and exquisitely crafted packaging project to be involved with.

Featuring the talents of Danish tattoo artist Colin Dale, we were required to adjust and extend Colin’s beautiful illustration to allow it to flow seamlessly around the packaging carton and bespoke bottle labelling. 

We were asked for our artworking support to ensure that the layouts went off for production correctly set up to precise production specifications, separating the printed white ink and metallic foils. To give the design a further lift, the printers made a cracking job of bringing this to life with some subtle embossed detail on the dragon’s scales.

For the whisky lovers out there, this is also a mighty fine tipple.

Howies

Website design and build

Services involved:
Design, digital

We were tasked with the design and build of the new website for Howies restaurant group. Handling every part of the project lifecycle, we took the job from initial requirement gathering, through design then build to website launch.

To allow easy updating of all content, including Howies’ extensive food and drink menus, we created a bespoke WordPress theme, customised and streamlined for their needs.

The modern, mobile-friendly site features high quality photography to showcase Howies’ food. A celebration of Scotland’s natural larder and local suppliers. 

Innis & Gunn

Advertising campaign support

Services involved:
Artwork, digital, motion graphics, retouching

Our friends at Studio Something approached us to help finalise their concepts and assist them in rolling out a number of campaigns for their client Innis & Gunn.

We took the already approved concepts developed by Studio Something and created hi-res campaign assets, including extensive packshot retouching and production of supporting campaign graphics for outdoor use. We then worked closely with their media partner to artwork a rotation of creative executions to appear across multiple outdoor static and digital sites. 

Animation was used to add some dimension to the digital executions, not to mention producing a personalised digital site in rapid response to a social media post related to their newly launched campaign. Great reactive exposure for the brand.

We continue to lend our support with ongoing campaign bursts, working with updated creative executions for outdoor usage and more recently creating HTML5 banner ads for an online media campaign.  

Edinburgh Gin

Advertising campaign support

Services involved:
Artwork, digital, motion graphics

The Alliance have been working with Punk over the years helping to finalise their concepts and produce a number of campaigns for their client Edinburgh Gin.

Working from approved concepts developed by the Punk creative team, we were tasked with creating the digital campaign assets for use across multiple outdoor digital sites and social media platforms. 

Subtle animation was required for some of the digital executions, to bring a further touch of ‘glitz’ to the already eye-catching creative.

Punk continue to request our creative support with a number of their ongoing projects.

European Championships Glasgow 2018

A Bonnie Tale

Services involved:
Motion Graphics

Cello Signal came to us looking to produce a six minute animated video for their client promoting the 2018 European Championships in Glasgow.

Working with a supplied script, voiceover and illustrations from Cello Signal, our animator Chris Ross needed to bring the world of Bonnie the Seal to life in a very tight timeframe. Bonnie’s tale of becoming the games mascot was posted on a number of social channels to boost the profile of the event, as well as heighten engagement and support amongst children of all ages for the upcoming games.  

VELUX

Online product brochures UK/ROI

Services involved:
Artwork, design, digital

VELUX had historically produced a traditional print product brochure, but they came to us asking if we could advise on the most effective way to create a digital version using the Zmags platform. The site ultimately had to engage better with their customers, contain additional content, reflect regular price updates and contain rich media. 

An important factor for VELUX was that the digital brochure was always up to date. To achieve this, it was built using HTML and Umbraco, so that it would look great and also make it easy to manage and update the content quickly. The layouts were designed to maximum effect for publishing on the Zmags platform, ensuring a high quality display and distribution of the brochure.

We researched and proposed the solution that is still in place today, being used as not only a go-to reference point for their product range but also as a staff sales tool. Videos and ‘How to’ guides were also created to assist staff when updating content.

This project showcased a great example of the Alliance’s flexible team building capabilities, simultaneously coordinating the artworkers creating the print brochures, then supplying the approved content to our designers and developers to build the digital version. 

When the project was originally launched in early 2015, Zmags quoted this as the best use of the Zmags software they had ever seen, and as a result, clocking up over 20,000 unique users with over 400,000 page views in a very short period of time. The online brochure is key for VELUX in terms of showcasing their extended product range.

The success of this project has resulted in regular content updates year-on-year.

Cottages & Castles

Annual property brochures

Services involved:
Artwork, retouching

On behalf of 60 Watt, the Alliance produced the artwork for this weighty property brochure every year for Cottages & Castles from 2012 to 2016. Averaging around 200 pages, there was a huge amount of content and imagery to be processed throughout the numerous artworking and amends phases, requiring constant dialogue with the client and Iain Hawk the designer.

Before the projects could begin, hundreds of bespoke data merged interactive forms were created for client completion. These forms were then sent back to the artworker for reference when updating the pricing, listing information and new photography.

Canongate Books

Karl Pilkington book series

Services involved:
Artwork, retouching

We were approached by Canongate Books in 2013 to develop and produce the second book by Karl Pilkington The Further Adventures of An Idiot Abroad. A hugely enlightening project to work on, pulling together the illustrations, photography and Karl’s narrative, using a combined effort to keep up with the print date as author’s amends came in from wherever Karl was on the planet at that particular time.

There were over 7,000 images from Karl’s photographer to work with, and frequent dialogue going back and forth with the team while the photographer was on location with Karl. With an assembled team of artworkers and retouchers liaising with a globetrotting client, this truly was a global effort, and a great end result, all correctly profiled to make the most of the uncoated stock.

This went so well that Canongate asked the Alliance to produce the second Karl Pilkington publication, The Moaning of Life and also the third in the series, More Moaning. All three books were produced to follow up Karl’s TV shows which aired on Sky One.

Brighton & Hove Albion FC

Supporters Museum and Lancing training ground graphics

Services involved:
Artwork, retouching

In 2013/14 the Alliance were appointed to provide artwork support to designer Mike Kinlan in helping create a new supporters museum, housed within the Amex Stadium on the outskirts of Brighton. Working closely with the BHAFC marketing team and their club historian, the museum showcases the club’s history and all manner of memorabilia collected by the club and its fans since the early 1900s. 

Close communication with the print contractors and fitters was essential to the smooth running and success of the project, gaining us high praise from both the club and its supporters. 

Continuing on from the museum project, we were tasked with producing brand graphics for a large amount of public areas of their new state of the art training facilities at nearby Lancing. Our first visit to the site was while it was under construction, so conceptual illustrations needed to be created to evolve the creative work, which was finally installed on completion of the building. 

More recent work has included large scale wall vinyls for the players tunnel at the Amex Stadium. 

VELUX

Printed product brochures UK/ROI

Services involved:
Artwork, design

Working from an existing artwork base, the Alliance were briefed to update the extensive annual product brochures for VELUX.

Some design development was required by the artworkers to refresh the spreads at the front end of the brochures, as well as updating numerous pages of product images, product detail and of course all of the associated price changes for the UK and ROI. Given the size of the task it was essential that there was a small support team in place to ensure prompt delivery all the way through the process.

We have been entrusted with numerous other large scale brochure projects for a number of the VELUX ranges over the years.

Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank

Press and outdoor ad campaigns

Services involved:
Artwork

Since 2012, we’ve enjoyed a close relationship with Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank providing them with creative support on a huge variety of projects.

Working alongside the bank’s media and creative agencies, we were entrusted to roll out all of the artworking executions for their full production schedule and dispatch each one direct to the publications and print contractors. We have delivered artwork for eight of their extensive national press and outdoor advertising campaigns.

We’ve inserted over 1,000 ads in over 70 different news and magazine titles, and created artwork for around 60 unique outdoor locations – both in print and digital media channels.

Our flexible and extensive resource is regularly utilised by the bank, providing them with both regular in-house studio support, and remote artworking and design support as well.