King's Cross
Places
Rebranding London’s most exciting neighbourhood physically & digitally…
Coal Drops Yard, Gasholders London, Central Saint Martins, Google, Universal Music, Everyman, House of Illustration, Dishoom, German Gymnasium, House of Illustration, Design Junction, Canopy Market, Regent’s Canalside Steps, Fenman House, Gasholder Park, The Lighterman… with so much to do and see, King’s Cross really is London’s most exciting neighbourhood.
2018 Transform Awards — Best place or nation brand
2018 Transform Awards — Best visual identity in the property sector
2018 Creative Pool — Bronze for Rebranding King’s Cross London
2018 Best Brand Awards — Best Agency
New visual and verbal branding launches to support London’s most exciting creative quarter.
SomeOne has been working alongside Argent, local residents, retailers and restaurateurs to help better connect this unique central London location.
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.
An overwhelming sense of individualism was found in all parts of the research.
From residents who call King’s Cross home, to creative retailers who are flocking there to offer more original products and services.
A new district, for a new london
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 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.
From music festivals to ‘designjunction’. King’s Cross hosts public events to rival almost any other part of London.
We’ve worked with Colophon to make a typeface that’s both signature in its look, and historic in its references.
The ghost signs that are found around the King’s Cross neighbourhood formed the basis for this new typeface. It will work hard now to add a cohesive visual asset across all branded channels.
With so much change in the air, rather than develop fixed assets such as a single logo, typeface or colour, a flexible and adaptive system has been created.
Clear, helpful new work including iconography, wayfinding, colour and imagery are now being introduced, including a new bespoke typeface from the London-based type foundry Colophon.
King’s Cross is a place where change is the new constant. Next year 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.
A new way to get around an historic district
To help people better navigate this rapidly changing neighbourhood, we were asked to create an extensive new mapping system highlighting landmarks and local sights.
We often talk about branding being coherent, not consistent. King’s Cross was a strong believer of this so we focused on the creation of a flexible kit of parts.
Our primary logo allows for a formal voice within more serious applications whilst our suite of KX marks stand as brand signifiers: a method of bringing out our informal, playful character on applications like our newspaper.
We’ve also launched the areas first local newspaper.
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.
With so many facets, King’s Cross is a place with a thousand stories, so a newspaper is the perfect medium to develop for those in and around the area.
The paper will continue to be a tremendous new channel for anyone interested in what’s going on.
A Brandbook for the digital age
The new brand work is all hosted on SomeOne’s custom CloudLines platform. Doing away with dull, unread PDF guidelines so often deployed in branding programmes.
The live cloud-hosted site carries analytics that enable those involved in the branding to see what is being used, where and when.
As is essential with any modern brand, the elements used in the communications can be swiftly and seamlessly adapted to better fit with the audience’s needs.