Our visual identity, and a model to support originality for the creative industry.
Originality. At Stobbs, it’s our obsession.
We set out to disrupt the legal industry, to create and own the category of Intangible Asset Management, and to deliver for clients and their brands in a way that no other firm can match.
It’s important for us that we stand apart from other firms in our space, to demonstrate our own originality.
As a firm that’s 12 years old, with a team of over 230 people, with the calibre of clients we represent, we need to continue to differentiate ourselves – and our visual identity is critical to communicating our position.
Our brand identity.
We wrestled with the issue of our new visual identity for over a year – but the solution was much closer to home. We called Squirlart.
Squirl are illustrators, street artists and visual development artists from the South East, with overactive imaginations. They have previously worked with the BBC, CBeebies, Urban Outfitters and John Lewis.
Squirl has played a key role in Stobbs to-date – from the murals in the offices, and the caricature sketches of each person in the firm. They were perfectly placed to help.
Identity in use.
We want to use our visual identity across multiple platforms – from our documents, marketing, office overlay, and also our articles and events.
How do we do this in such a way that we don’t need to go to Squirl every time we create an image? We publish 5 articles a week, and are involved in over 60 events per year? How can we manage this scale? Squirl have other things to focus on after all!
We wanted a solution that made things manageable for us, and respects the creativity of the work:
- We agreed a fixed fee for the production of our Originality Obsessives characters and ensembles.
- We agreed that we would use AI to automate the creation of images involving these characters – using them directly (in different poses) and also creating new images from an AI model that has been exclusively trained on the characters themselves.
- From a creative point of view, it’s important that Squirl would sign-off on the process that we would use to manage this.
- We agreed an annual license fee with Squirl that would allow us to use the original content with the AI solution – they are still being recognized for the original work – in-line with how we are benefiting from it.