Le Gun and OneAnother brand for ContainerVille development

The ContainerVille development, launched by The Estate Office Shoreditch, is formed from 30 converted storage containers on the south bank of Regent¹s Canal, between Shoreditch and Hackney.

Each container will be rented out for £1200 a month, and will be able to hold four desks. Individual desks are to be rented for £320 per month, and there is an outdoor space with scope for holding events.

OneAnother was brought in to work on the project last summer, having created the identity for The Estate Office Shoreditch –  a project it worked on with Le Gun, which drew a series of east London characters for the branding.

Le Gun’s Chris Bianchi and Steph Von Reiswitz were brought in by One Another for the ContainerVille project to create a series of strange characters for the campaign.

Paul Hamilton, OneAnother founder, says, ‘The Estate Office Shoreditch are an East End family and part of their brief was they didn’t want to be portrayed as a traditional firm, so there was to be no marketing waffle. The idea was that they’re insiders – they’re not selling stuff to locals, they’re part of the local community.’

The identity shows a number of characters inspired by to the location’s inhabitants, including a Canada goose with an afro, a smoking swan and a dog in a Milton Glaser I Heart New York-esque slogan T-shirt. These were drawn by Bianchi and Von Reiswitz in black and white; while Hamilton designed the hand-drawn ContainerVille word mark and art directed the campaign.

Many characters are shown interacting with containers in unusual ways, such as wearing them, sailing in them or playing table tennis on them. The word mark is inspired by narrow boat signage, as a nod to the development’s canal-side location.

The yellow used in the word mark and on the speech bubbles containing text is drawn from OneAnother’s Estate Office Shoreditch branding, and all speech bubbles are spoken by a ‘wise’ owl.

Hamilton says, ‘A lot of the people [renting the spaces] are going to be quite young and creative themselves, and the last thing creative people like is having people try and sell stuff to them. It’s far more entertaining to create a message and a feeling that’s about fun and the people that live in the area’.

The designs are shown on banners and building wraps in Shoreditch, Tower Hamlets and Hackney, and OneAnother is also creating a set of desktop, phone and tablet-enabled wallpapers for users to download the branding assets.

According to Hamilton, ContainerVille will be in place for around three years, after which The Estate Office Shoreditch is likely to create a permanent building on the land. The OneAnother offices are to move in, and the consultancy will partially use it as a space to display its product design work.