King's Cross
Places
KX Quarterly, A briefing on the creative minds transforming London.
With so much happening in King’s Cross, SomeOne were approached to look at the best way to reveal the stories and characters behind London’s New Creative Quarter.
Marketing conferences and conversations are swamped with chat around the best ways to engage diverse audiences — opinions on Virtual Reality, Chat Bots, SnapChatting Influencers and Machine Learning abound in a sector obsessed with novelty — but few approaches match the universal appeal of a newspaper that arrives on your doorstep on a Sunday.
Transform Awards 2018 — Best Place or Nation Brand
Transform Awards 2018 — Best Visual Identity in the Property Sector
Creative Pool Awards 2018 — Best Rebrand
Shining A Light On London’s New Creative Quarter
SomeOne has been working alongside Argent, local residents, artists & students, retailers & restaurateurs to help better connect this unique central London location with a wide variety of audiences.
Hundreds of interviews and research programmes have been undertaken to discover the leading themes that run through one of London’s most exciting neighbourhoods.
Great brands have many visual and verbal assets to call upon. Rolex, for example, has a crown icon, a word mark, a texture, a pattern, a colour system, a typographic style… this enables them to brand everything from a watch to a box to a stadium intelligently. We set out to develop this broader range of assets, for a broad range of audiences and applications.
KX Quarterly celebrates a wealth of talent in the area, from Tom Dixon to Maya Magal and Studio No12 to Tom Broughton of Cubitts.
It’s a privilege to work with local illustrators, photographers, food stylists and students to create a newspaper that brings together the KX community in one accessible printed platform. Bring on the next one!
Making sense of an abundance of possibility
Very few areas of London offer such a rich collection of things to see, eat, drink and do. It’s time people start to discover what’s happening at King’s Cross.
As a place so rich in diverse offers, from Google’s cutting-edge tech, to Central Saint Martins world-class creativity — this is a place of radical thinking mixed with international food and drink — it makes for a magnetic mix.
North of the train station is now home to a huge array of free events that rate as some of the most compelling in the capital.
To reflect this position, SomeOne has been working with the teams at King’s Cross to develop a refreshed visual and verbal approach rolling out across all of the area’s communications.
From social media connections to a dedicated website that offers a full listing of the dozens of daily events available to the public.
The Quarterly is all about shining a spotlight on the local characters and forgotten stories of King’s Cross.
We’ve worked with local, London-based journalists, to help convey the abundance of personality found within KX.
Every issue reveals another well-kept secret within the King’s Cross area, that’s what keeps us — and hopefully our readers — coming back for more.
‘With so many elements, it could be easy for a project like this to lose its way.
We’ve helped keep things on track strategically and visually, with a strong central focus on the original thinking that is so readily found at King’s Cross.
No other part of London is like it, and in KX Quarterly we’ve placed that bubbling creativity on every page.’
King’s Cross is a place where change is the new constant, 2018 sees transformative new additions to the area in the shape of Coal Drops Yard, with architecture designed by local superstar Thomas Heatherwick.
With so many exciting new events and ideas taking shape, it’s time to develop a more useful way to bring these original stories together.
‘We could have developed a multi-faceted series of campaigns, comprising of dozens of strategies, a variety of visual styles and sent them off to differing channels, each managed by a small army of marketing professionals.
After all, we are talking to very different audiences. Bakers, Bankers, Bouncers, Beauticians, & Bright Sparks aplenty.
But then the penny dropped, we could do all of this in the most traditional of platforms… a quarterly newspaper.’