How do you advertise discounts without looking cheap? That was the question faced by Stockholm advertising and design studio Morris Pinewood when newspaper publisher Metro International briefed the team to create a new brand for the Save My Day website. Launching as a competitor to Groupon and other collective buying sites, Save My Day was aimed upmarket with a greater emphasis upon premium goods.
“The was idea to create a mix between 60s retail branding and high-end designer brands. We took all the aesthetics and graphic symbols you have in retail – splashes, exclamation marks, speech bubbles – and put them into a designer landscape,” says creative director Mattias Frodlund, who worked on the project with art director Hanna Moe ahead of its launch in Chile, the Netherlands, Guatemala and Denmark.
Instead of bombarding potential customers with an array of multicoloured products, inspiration was found in the luxury goods spreads of magazines such as Marie Claire: “The splashes and price tags become so much stronger when there’s a juxtaposition between the two,” Frodlund says. Four different ‘colour universes’ were created, with sophisticated black and white joined by retail-world-staple magenta – “although we added a bit of yellow so it wouldn’t be too fluorescent” – and sharp orange, signalling savings. Berthold Akzidenz-Grotesk, a favourite typeface in the 60s, was chosen for the lettering.
“It’s a nice poster typeface. It’s lean and sharp and strong and heavy,” explains Frodlund, who is currently working on a campaign for the brand’s Swedish launch.
