Working with the Euro literature

Client: HM Treasury

Designer: NE6 Design Consultants

Project: Working with the Euro literature

Print-run: 20 brochures totalling 200 000

When HM Treasury’s Euro Preparation Unit set about publicising the impact of the Euro on small companies, its main design problem was how to get the audience of small businesses interested in such relatively unpalatable information. ‘We needed something straightforward that gets the message across without confusing it. Something that’s not over-designed with flash graphics that get in the way,’ says an HM Treasury spokesman.

Print was deemed the most suitable medium, mainly because many of the target audience are unlikely to be Internet-proficient. ‘If they need to absorb something it needs to be in the cup of tea and bun break,’ adds the spokesman. NE6 won the design job through its links with the University of Durham business school which provided the research and text for the 20 case studies of small businesses and the Euro featured in the brochures.

NE6 needed to find both a linking device and a way of creating interest in the dry subject. The group’s solution was to select a cover image which summed up the profiled company – a round of cheese for a cheesemaker, a toy lorry for a freight company – and commission high-quality, almost reportage-style photography of the production processes by Alex Telfer.

Inside, the brochure is graphically divided into small chunks of text on the company’s customers, competitors, pricing, suppliers and such like. ‘The problem we had to overcome was that all the companies were quite different, so we wanted to find something that would be an icon for what the sector is about,’ says designer Andy Reay. ‘The photography was to make it more lifestyle, to brighten it up a bit.’

The client is satisfied. ‘It’s exactly what we want,’ says the HM Treasury spokesman. ‘It’s not standard industrial photography. It looks entertaining enough to bother reading.’