Clients: The Hippo
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Sound in Theory created the branding, website and print materials for the Hippo – a new music venue that would open in Plymouth in Spring 2009. The Hippo’s aim was to be the best live music venue in the South West; our aim was to create the best branding, website and print materials of any venue in the South West.
As the Hippo was a new venture, their team had a limited budget to spend on the initial branding. Sound in Theory’s branding experts met with key members of the Hippo team to brainstorm ideas and focus the vision for the brand. We then delivered them with a range of original logo designs and concepts that paid close attention to their requirements, yet varied enough in tone that the Hippo team had a broad range to choose from.
The Hippo team were thrilled with the results, and selected a logo and branding that cleverly played on their venue’s homograph name. Though the Hippo is short for hippodrome, we created a logo that plays on the word’s meaning as short for hippopotamus, by using a quirky identifier in the logo design: an oxpecker bird, which sits on hippopotamus’ in the wild. This can be removed from the Hippo text, so used in different parts of their website and print materials. The branding’s brown colour palette is a twist on the traditional live music venue black – invoking a creative, arty feel, yet meeting all the criteria of a classic rock venue. This new branding tested brilliantly with the right target market.
Armed with a winning brand, Sound in Theory’s web design team produced an exceptional, unique website design. It is very high-end design – featuring no straight lines, to invoke the perfect grungy, live venue feel, and peppered with original logos and quirky features, including original MP3 players.
The Hippo team were delighted with the design. The challenge was for Sound in Theory to build it into a website with a content management system (CMS) advanced enough to allow for video images, audio uploads, ecommerce, order processing and a flash introduction. This CMS also needed to provide a tight control over events and mixed security levels, to allow the Hippo team to spread the authoring of the content (necessary for a variety of people to update the events, bands and news regularly).
Striking, advanced, innovative and extremely easy to update, Hippolive.co.uk is exactly what a live music venue website should be. The large website serves a whole community of music lovers and fans, with links to buy tickets, forums to discuss music and upcoming gigs, and a variety of information and media for each band that plays at the Hippo, including images, music tracks and links to their websites. By providing the Hippo team with a substantial guide to using the Hippo admin system, we ensured that whatever a user’s knowledge of the system, they will be able to update the Hippo website easily, without needing to return to us.
As the launch of the Hippo venue neared, the Hippo team looked to Sound in Theory again to design and produce a flyer to promote the venue. Featuring the new logo design and branding, Sound in Theory’s print team produced brilliant promotional flyers for the Hippo’s launch night.
Client Testimonial
We have been looking for a great design team to work with us for far too long so it's such a pleasure and relief to have finally found the team at Sound in Theory.
From the offset they entirely got where we were coming from and followed that understanding up with a great logo and an outstanding website design.
I've never seen a CMS being used so effectively to create such a visually rich website.
They're also a great bunch of human beings and we look forward to working with them again in the near future.
David Louis Puttick, Venue Owner | The Hippo
Responsibilities for The Hippo