For a while now, we have been feeling the ‘social’ has been disappearing from ‘social media’. So we started exploring how we could use social media technology to impact on a real–time, tangible, social setting. as the saying goes, ‘any excuse to have a party’.

Named ‘o here’s to…’, we launched a live twitter campaign to celebrate people’s wishes and toasts for the new year. Coinciding with a party in our studio, for each tweet a dram of our national drink was raised then dutifully emptied (overseen by a qualified whisky ambassador). Tweets were projected live at the event and can be seen in our stop–frame film here.

As well as developing unique identities for their three galleries (Modern, Portrait & National) we also created a new identity for the central organisation of the National Galleries of Scotland. The challenge was to modernise the brand, enabling it to evolve into new media and online channels without alienating the established old school audience base. We retained and crafted the original type and introduced a new graphic device representing both saltire and picture frame. It has given the organisation a renewed sense of confidence and the ability to communicate with a consistent and dynamic tone of voice.

We’ve been working with the good folks at Celtic Connections since 2010. For this year’s festival, we felt it was time to explore a new direction for the campaign visuals.

The event has evolved a truly global focus in recent times and we decided to try and reflect this richness and diversity with a bold graphic pattern. Built from interlocking letter Cs, we added shapes and textures created by hand and combined them to produce a rootsy, folk-art homage that has an almost ethnic feel to it. This simple process gave us a rich, complex collage that was then applied in various ways to a host of mediums across screen and print around Scotland and London.

We cannot claim all the credit but like to think the campaign went some way to attracting more than 100,000 people who attended the hundreds of concerts at venues across Glasgow. For the first time, ticket sales topped topped £1.1million. Job well done!

O Street worked alongside both the director and the marketing team at the National Theatre of Scotland to create a programme for their production of Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’.

The design was inspired by Victorian bill posters, newspapers and typographic ephemera. We commissioned the GSA’s typography technician and artist in residence Edwin Pickstone to create a bespoke piece of set metal type, to give the programme that authentic Dickensian feel.

The production was set in a Victorian era office (Scrooge & Marley’s). The audience, immersed in the historical setting, even had their programme rubber-stamped as they entered. More than just a programme, we saw it as one of the supporting characters in the production. One that you could take home and keep on your bookshelf.

Inksters asked O Street to design a christmas mailer to spread festive cheer, and introduce their new image to clients and peers. The result was their most successful and engaging mailer to date. With the starting point of the new brand positioning as a ‘Forward Thinking’ firm we came up with the format of a Christmas hat, incorporating the key ‘arrow’ shape. Recipients were invited to take a photo featuring the hat and submit it to win a prize.

Inksters created a tumble-log showcasing the results, which by all accounts were overwhelming—over 100 submissions along with hundreds of tweets and mentions across the web. When most cards were long-gone (hopefully recycled into pulp) and even that handy memory stick had probably been lost in the bottom of a briefcase, people were still writing to Inksters with requests for their Christmas hat. The only challenge now… how do you cap that?