Behind-the-Scenes: Designing our Silver Anniversary Creative

As with any design agency worth its salt, at Azam we like to prepare our creative well in advance of when it’ll be needed; it’s not unusual for us to be designing graphics and landing pages for a client’s Christmas campaign in February and their Valentine’s campaign in December.

It doesn’t always work out like that, due to external parties – clients and partner agencies – not always being prepared to have designs done and dusted in good time for when they may need to be passed onto the respective marketers to make use of the materials.

It’s often been the case our designers have, for instance, received specifications for an email broadcast from a client on a Friday at 4:55pm and therefore for them to have to frantically work over the weekend to ensure it is ready to be deployed to hundreds of thousands of people on the Monday morning.

When we are not having to wait upon others to design creative, we like to think we’re usually pretty well prepared at Azam. For instance, here is a video we completed in March 2021 for, believe it or not… Christmas… 2025!:

Aware our milestone 25th anniversary was going to take place this August, our graphic designers and video editors started working on the overarching theme for the creative to celebrate the occasion back in April. Whenever they had spare time away from assignments for clients (since day one, our client work has always, always taken priority), they would brainstorm and iterate different themes and concepts.

In terms of the colour palette for the 25th anniversary creative, they decided it would be in harmony with the guidelines for Azam Marketing’s brand. The colours used in creative would be dark blue, light blue, white and a dark lime green, the same four that are in our logo and all websites we use for our business, such as this blog and our corporate website.

After brainstorming what must have been a hundred and one different blueprints, they decided the theme of the anniversary creative would be ‘Space and Celebration’. Space because (a) in the same way that the next frontier for humankind is exploring the stars, Azam Marketing has been at the cutting edge of its field as a digital agency founded in 1997 and still leading the way, and (b) astronomy and space exploration have always been associated with information technology. Celebration, of course, because a 25th anniversary for any business is something to commemorate and also the stars typically used in celebratory designs juxtapose with the space theme.

Here is a couple of initial designs for our company’s profile image on social media:

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We decided having our URL “WWW.AZAM.NET” on the creative, as great as it would be to remind potential new clients of our website address, would be too salesy, so scrapped that idea. Furthermore, we decided to brand it our “silver” rather than “25th” anniversary.

We finally settled on the following design:

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In terms of the background cover image to use on our social media presence, after trying several different designs, our creative team settled on the following. The icons at the bottom-right and bottom-left focus on our areas of expertise, so they depict a shopping trolley, a loudspeaker, a mobile phone, clouds, a camera and a computer mouse etc. (click/press on any of the creative to see it in full size):

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To say these cover images are a headache to get right is an understatement. Frustratingly, each and every social platform has their own preferred dimensions for them, the images looking quite differently on desktop and mobile devices, and, to complicate matters further, personal and company pages on the same platform such as LinkedIn and Facebook show the images quite differently. For that reason, we actually ended up with eight different variations of these ‘wallpaper’ images to use in different places.

See how the final cover and profile images appear on our LinkedIn and Facebook pages below:

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We had also planned to send luxury hampers and gift boxes to all our clients and colleagues. These would include personalised letters. Therefore, our design bods also created the following Microsoft Word template. As you may see, it features the skyline of where we were founded in the 1990s and our headquarters are still based, London:

Moving from static to animated creative to mark the anniversary, our designers wanted the videos in two sizes: square shape to employ on social media and vertical that would be more suited to Youtube, this blog and elsewhere.

In terms of the former, here was an early version. We were not so keen on it. We liked the idea of the number ’25’ bouncing onto the screen and the playful music, but the rest of the video lacked creativity:

After a fair few days of our video editors setting their eyes on fire while working their magic in Adobe Premiere Pro, they completed the mission. The following became our official social media promo video. We used the animation to announce our anniversary on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok and Twitter:

Our creative team also decided to conjure up longer, vertical videos, which would provide an insight into our journey since 1997. As it was our 25th anniversary, we decided to use 25 video clips and photographs in a showreel format.

It took weeks of painstaking work to find the images and video clips in our archives and then have our Post-Production Designer stitch them together.

Here is the first completed video:

Here you may enjoy our stirring, longer movie, which we have entitled “Dot-Com Bust and Boom 1997-2022”:

All in all the static and animated creative suite have taken hundreds of hours of work over the last few months, with invaluable input from the entire Azam Marketing team. Our design gurus have excelled themselves and we are proud of their finished work.

The feedback we have received has been rapturous, with people using words like “stylish” and “pulsating” to describe the creative and one industry figure describing the last showreel video above as follows: “this video walk-through of Azam’s 25 years is, without a shadow of doubt, the best anniversary video I’ve seen for any marketing agency. A slam dunk!”

See our latest videos here on YouTube.

Contact us if you’d like our talented web, graphic and video designers to get their teeth into your projects. Ring us any time on +44 (0) 20 33 55 4334 , Skype AzamMkt, or email [email protected].

Go here to read Ather Mehdi, Director of Design and Development at Azam Marketing, explain the processes involved in building a major website in a trilogy of articles.

Go here to read congratulatory messages from three of our clients of over ten years on our silver anniversary.