Scout with the IIDA Creative Excellence Award in Showroom Design

Scout Branding was just honored by the International Interior Design Association with a Creative Excellence Award for Small Showroom Design at NeoCon, the largest design exposition and conference for commercial interiors in North America. Considering that designers from all over the world compete to create the most inspiring design experience in over 700 showrooms, being singled out for this recognition is a huge achievement.

I thought it would be interesting to show our original presentation to Mannington compared to photography of the finished project. There are so many factors that can intervene with the initial concept and vision for a large project like this- budget, technical limitations, and building team consensus just to name a few. But with careful planning, attention to detail, and teamwork with the client, you will see that the transformation from concept to reality was seamless.

Starting with the overall view you will notice the drama of gunmetal walls and rich hardwood floors (Mannington Commercial’s new offering called Earthly Elements) contrasted with gleaming white lacquer displays and the brightly colored large scale patterns of the Sylvan and Monarch collections in front. The technique we employed was simple-create a visual focus on the flooring products and elegant displays by framing everything with dark tones. This allowed a unified and cohesive look to the space while drawing in the viewer with high-contrast lighting.

You will see here the concept vs. execution of several of the specific product displays. With the help of some amazing vendors we were able to make these displays come to life. The branches were transformed from our drawings into high density foam sculptures covered in white lacquer. The nest was woven here at Scout from samples of Mannington’s Sylvan Collection, and real ostrich eggs proved to be the right scale for it’s interior.

In the environmental display, arrows fabricated from different post-consumer materials products create a simple explanation of Mannington’s commitment to redirecting landfill-bound products into new flooring.

Thanks to Mannington and our whole team of vendors for working together to steal the show! You will see the showroom featured in Interior Design’s Show Daily, the IIDA website, and an upcoming feature in Contract Magazine.

We’ve recently been pleased to complete an advanced web feature phase for the Mannington Commercial website. This phase included many upgrades to increase the user experience and usability of the current site and also implement some new advanced searching features. We believe it makes the site function better overall as well as more fun to use.

The two notable front end features we implemented for them are an Advanced Search as well as a Choices That Work Search.

The Choices That Work Search feature searches by usage in different market segments.

The Advanced Search pulls in all the products within the selected criteria using javascript. The URL changes depending on the search so you can email or save your search criteria

If you select and criteria "By Color" - the results pulls in the Colorways giving you a visual representation of the different color selections.

We implemented these changes along with other user experience updates and fixed a lot of CMS issues for them. We’re very pleased with the speed and detail that the search feature has, as well as finally giving them the ability to browse products in a logical and advanced way.

BIRMINGHAM, April 13, 2010 –Scout Branding won 2 Gold and 6 Silver Awards in the District Seven ADDY Awards Competition. Gold Awards were for Scout’s work for Westervelt Communities and Silver Awards were for Mannington Commercial, Alagasco and Westervelt Communities. The Gold ADDYs will be entered and judged in the National ADDY Awards Competition.

Prior to the district level, Scout took home 18 ADDYs at the Birmingham ADDY Awards Show, 14 Gold and 4 Silver. Scout’s president/creative director, Paul Crawford, won Creative Director of the Year and Copywriter of the Year. Scout’s associate creative director, Ryan Gernenz, won Designer of the Year.

The ADDY Awards is the largest creative competition in the country with about 55,000 local entries competing in 200 cities coast to coast. Winning an ADDY at the district level is the second step in competing for a National ADDY Award.

We’ve just launched a new website! Presenting: VerandaOnHighland.com. Veranda on Highland is a wonderful fine dining establishment. We’re so thrilled to give them a website that reflects their quality, taste, and style. Most of the photography was shot by the talented Miller Mobley.
Here are some technical aspects of the site:

• It is built using WordPress as its content management system.
• WordPress has amazing built in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• The restaurant menus are not PDF’s! We built the menus using CSS and a plug-in called “Flutter” so that Veranda can easily update their menus without touching markup or worrying about formatting. We found this to be particularly important because their menu can change daily due to serving such fresh ingredients. Tech geeks: To read a post I wrote about how to use flutter for a restaurant menu go here.
• Flash-Free. With the prevalent use of mobile devices and the new iPad coming out, we made a decision to program the site without flash. We programmed the sideshow and floor-plan rollovers using jQuery.

Check it out and tell us what you think! Also, if you have any technical questions feel free to ask Sara Cannon at sara@scoutbrand.com

Scout’s Creative Director, Paul Crawford was featured in Advertising Age’s Small Agency Diary. Click here to check it out.

Scout Branding Company

BIRMINGHAM, February 8, 2010 – The American Advertising Federation Birmingham held its annual ADDY Gala at Old Car Heaven. Scout Branding won 18 ADDYs — 4 silver and 14 gold. Scout’s president/creative director, Paul Crawford, won Creative Director of the Year and Copywriter of the Year. Scout’s associate creative director, Ryan Gernenz, won Designer of the Year. The five-person shop had the highest total of gold ADDYs won Saturday night.

“The awards are nice,” says Paul Crawford, president/creative director at Scout. “But, we don’t let awards shape how we work. The main focus at Scout is to find ideas that help our clients grab market share and grow their revenue.”

Scout Branding was also recently named Agency of the Year at the 2009 Birmingham Peak Awards also held at Old Car Heaven.

BIRMINGHAM, January 27, 2010— Scout Branding Company has been hired by the Universal Postal Union to craft an awareness campaign about the risks of buying counterfeited or pirated medications, electronics and other items through the mail.

Scout will refer to their experience in creating the national campaign for the United States Postal Service to alert consumers of e-mail scams.

The Universal Postal Union is headquartered in Berne, Switzerland and is the primary forum for cooperation between postal-sector players to help ensure a truly universal network of up-to-date products and services. With 191 member countries, it sets the rules for international mail exchanges and makes recommendations to stimulate growth in mail volumes and to improve the quality of service for customers.

Scout Branding Scout Branding is an award-winning advertising, branding and interactive company that adds real value to a select group of companies through ideas. www.scoutbrand.com.

Birmingham, AL—Scout Branding was awarded Advertising Agency of the Year at the American Advertising Federation of Birmingham Peak Awards. The Peak Awards is an awards competition to honor top advertising professionals for their work and dedication in the advertising and marketing fields in the Birmingham area. The event is judged by experts from outside Alabama who have no prior knowledge of the nominees in making their final decisions.

Our first project for our new client, Mannington Commercial, was a challenge and a reward. Mannington has pioneered a revolutionary closed-loop recycling program for vinyl composite tile (VCT), a utilitarian product that typically ends up in our landfills after use. Instead the new Mannington program diverts those old tiles you may have walked on in elementary school and creates new VCT products from this waste stream. In the ad we needed to communicate the transformation of these old tiles into their new VCT, show the product, and also communicate the wide color selection. We presented several concepts, all achieving this end, but stylistically very different. Ultimately Mannington chose the imagery of the butterfly, symbolizing the metamorphosis of the old unattractive tile into their beautiful new environmentally- friendly product.  It is so rewarding to have the opportunity to promote Mannington’s innovative products while doing work we are proud of.  Look for this ad in Interior Design Magazine and keep posted to see many more exciting Mannington projects!

Mannington VCT Ad

Mannington VCT Ad

When you walk in through the doors of Scout, you see a gigantic footprint.

We have a large 5’ x 7’ wall display where we show off recent projects. The project that currently occupies this display is the first I came to know at Scout: Alagasco’s “Cut Your Footprint in Half.”

We had the pleasure of designing Alagasco’s tradeshow booth at the Green Building Focus Convention this past summer.

Scout created the footprint image to illustrate one of the major benefits of natural gas to the Green Building Focus audience. By using natural gas, you reduce your carbon emissions by 50% over electricity, making your environmental conscience completely comfortable. Additionally, Alagasco wanted to entice visitors to help plant a tree by filling out a simple survey. So, we created a “Plant a Tree in 3 Clicks” program.

The tradeshow booth was a success and the talk of the show. The footprint made up the backdrop while some “live” green elements took center stage. Let us explain: Two weeks leading up to the event, Scout grew its own wheat grass right here in the office. What started off as just plastic trays of soil soon blossomed into green masterpieces, so fluffy you wanted to rest your head on them. Four saplings we bought from Plant Odyssey soon joined the wheat grass.

In addition to the greenery, we brought three Mac Book Airs to conduct a survey among those who visited. By filling out the survey, visitors could “plant a tree in 3 clicks”—really. Scout created a simple Web site for the survey as well as a database to capture the responses. Alagasco set a goal of planting 15,000 trees in Alabama, one for each survey taken, with help from the Alabama Urban Forestry Association.

Alagasco was thrilled with the response. We are thankful to have worked on such a unique project and the learning experience has left a footprint on our hearts, well, on our wall. Thanks, Alagasco, and feel free to come visit Big Foot anytime.