February 16, 2021 Reanne Duffy

Elmtree Signs got to grips with a major branding project for Student Accommodation Specialists, Unilife…

 

When a business makes public its goal, not to be the biggest, but to be the best, you know it's setting itself a high standard to which it must aspire. Unilife is just such as business. Unilife is based in the south of England, and its mission is to provide quality accommodation to the region’s student population.

 

What Unilife delivers to its customers could not be further removed from the stereotypical impression of student accommodation of old. The company not only provides positively luxurious studio facilities to students, it’s wrapped up with a support program and underscored with an experience that makes anyone's first time living away from home a wholly positive event.

 

Unilife doesn't just distinguish itself from its competitors in the quality of the accommodations and services that it makes available to its customers, it surrounds itself with a very powerful and brilliantly managed brand. Small or not, the brand delivers an aura of confidence and competence that positions the business adjacent with its goals of being the best. It looks simply brilliant.

 

The Unilife brand is underpinned by a strong portfolio of design assets, and design radiates through every customer touch point. Elements of colour resonate with the brand’s dominant design features and hints of those colours are repeated extensively in ambient decor, signage, and functional art throughout the company’s premises.

 

Working with Unilife’s design assets, manufacturing and installing signage and decor, is a job that's fallen to Elmtree Signs. Elmtree Signs is Southampton based. The company’s work is in evidence in its local catchment and way beyond. A very versatile and capable signs and graphics manufacturer, Elmtree Signs itself has a strong creative team and puts design at the centre of its product offering backed with strong technical and practical credentials.

 

Elmtree Signs recently delivered an extensive program of branded and functional identity continuation graphics to Unilife. The extent of the works delivered, says as much about Elmtree Signs’ competence as a project manager as it does about its technical abilities as a printer and signage manufacturer. There's a lot of it!

 

Among the recent program’s most attractive works is a stylised version of Unilife’s logo installed in one of its locations’ stairwells over five floors. The logotype itself comprises the letters ‘u’ and ‘l’ rendered in a transparent blue and magenta like colour, with the elements overlapping to the extent they form a single ‘u’ character. At the intersection of the elements, the transparent colour counter-changes to become a shade of purple, or deeper magenta. It's a very attractive device.

 

The stairwell graphics’ design is informed by the logotype and features detailed infill patterns and other treatments. Some are fluid, others have a more formal geometric basis but all pick up on colour-ways suggested by the logotype itself. It makes for a very attractive expression of what amounts to corporate art.

 

Elmtree Signs printed the stairwell graphics on Metamark MD5 which was then covered with Metamark MG702 protective laminate. Given the strongly managed ID, the printing had to be colour critical. It is. The results look sensational, highly impactful, and certainly achieve the desired goal of cheering up, and branding, an otherwise anonymous public area of the building. 

 

The digital wall graphics theme continues in the facility’s gym. Metamark MD5 and the mechanically matched laminating film were again used. Here, a little home spun philosophy in the shape of a few well chosen words punctuates fields of tessellating geometric elements rendered in Unilife's corporate colours. The work speaks to those exercising, reminding them ‘they're stronger than they think.’ It also says something more than that.

 

The gym graphics also say, to designers, to specifiers, to architects or even would be decorators, that, when it comes to wall-coverings, you don't have to settle for what's on the shelves in the big out-of-town sheds. Instead, you can have exactly what's on your mind. It can be designed from scratch, or it can be created from existing design assets and scaled to fit the space required perfectly. That's the power of digital decor, and Elmtree Signs certainly knows how to deliver it.

 

Unilife’s ID succeeds in being ever-present, but never looks gratuitously overexposed. Echoes of it are to be found in the buildings’ corridors where Elmtree Signs has provisioned more decor printed on Metamark MD5. The work maintains the colour critical consistency the power of an ID demands, and underscores the benefit of using a premium MD-Class portfolio of digital media. It even finds a home in the buildings’ lifts.

 

Part of the experience of living in Unilife's accommodation is, place and time permitting, the social context. The building has communal areas where students can eat, relax, and socialise. Laminated Metamark MD5 found itself with another job to do in one such area. It covers a range of gaming tables with printed game boards featuring on the table tops. It's a neat idea. It's also another opportunity to present,  in a different context, Unilife's ID.

 

The buildings entrance features graphics rendered in printed MD5. Much has been said about the need to make powerful and lasting first impressions and entrances would seem to be the ideal place to do that. Job done. However, A printed exterior hoarding gets there first on this occasion. It’s printed on Metamark MG705 and promotes the buildings’ many amenities before the threshold has even been crossed.

 

Returning to the interior and to the communal areas, a little minimalist decor add a splash of colour contrasting those grounded in Unilife's ID. It represents a simple but very effective touch. A few stretched canvases printed in solid fields of colour with contrasting text punctuate parts of the communal area’s walls. Again, the size and the content are bespoke and manufactured expressly for Unilife by Elmtree Signs. They’re printed on Metamark AC330 Canvas.

 

Windows came within the scope of the brief. To achieve inside application of the graphics they designed and printed, Elmtree Signs’ team used printed Metamark MD5 Clear and backed the prints with solid white MD5. This technique sandwiches the print between two layers of film such that it's visible from the outside without actually being exposed to exterior conditions.

 

An equally inventive approach was taken to some of the signs featured inside the building. One in particular takes the familiar Unilife logo type and positions it on an acrylic plate mounted on stand-offs and rendered in a field of what looks like grey background matter. Closer examination though reveals that the grey is a micro-collage of pictures that resolve themselves to full detail when approached.

 

There are other signs featuring the Uni life ID mounted on acrylic plates with stand-offs. These were printed on Metamark M7-CR and Metamark Etch materials. They contribute a little formality to the otherwise relaxed looking deployment of the branding and do so without wrecking a really great vibe.

 

Unilife may not want to look like the biggest company in its business, but it certainly looks like one of the most credible and capable thanks to the work manufactured and deployed by Elmtree Signs. The students who live in the building can feel at home. That's an important consideration and one that's normally at odds with the need to bring corporate ID into the discussion.