Love is well and truly in the air this Valentine’s Day at Turn Key HQ with the 2013 Valentine’s campaign we’ve been putting together for our client Eden .

Briefed to design and create a range of Valentine’s collateral for the High Wycombe shopping centre, the team got stuck straight into coming up with some great creative ideas. To showcase Eden’s premium retail and entertainment offering, we swapped cliché cards and cheesy slogans for pretty pastels and everybody’s favourite retro sweet, the love heart.

We’re really pleased with the final artwork – the designers have certainly spread the love and our PR and marketing teams have thought of some really catchy slogans. The creative is being used in everything from page banners to posters, emailers to F – all promoting Eden’s Valentine’s Day offering of gifts, fashion, entertainment.

Happy Valentine’s Day from TK!


Christmas is finally upon us and as we reach the end of the countdown, it’s time to reflect on the adverts that have defined our Christmas 2012.

As October leads into November, there is always the same sense of anticipation; who will make us cry? Who will make us laugh? And who will make Mr Jones from Norwich ring the ASA to complain? This year certainly didn’t disappoint; from walking snowmen embarking on a quest for love to talking aliens, we’ve seen it all.

However, as everyone’s Twitter and Facebook statuses acknowledge, it just simply isn’t Christmas until we’ve seen the iconic Coca Cola advert, making it the favourite ad not just this year, but every year.

Another company which has felt a great deal of pressure to follow the success of its previous hit is John Lewis. In 2011 we followed a young boy and his countdown to Christmas day taking us back to our childhoods and putting a smile on even the sternest of faces. This year the snowman advert did not let us down, but perhaps this is more to do with the popularity of the song ‘The Power of Love’ rather than the initial sentiment of the commercial itself? Nevertheless, it’s certainly a heart warmer!

Two brands in particular that received a great deal of criticism and complaints for their adverts are Morrisons and Asda, who (arguably) portray Christmas day to be more of an ordeal that mothers must suffer and endure. Asda’s strapline ‘Christmas doesn’t happen by magic’ has been considered sexist and offensive. Although the message may offer up some truth, no one wants to be reminded of that by a Christmas advert!

In comparison, the Morrisons advert tackles a similar subject but with a sense of humour, finding the mum in a boxing ring with a Turkey. Although the undertone emulates the sense of stress and dread that the majority of us face at Christmas, the advert provides a great deal of entertainment and humour; particularly during the cold and dark winter months.

Perhaps the most arguably unique Christmas advert of 2012 is Waitrose’s ‘Giving more this Christmas’. The advert is supposed to dispel feelings of commercialism by providing a reminder of those less fortunate, choosing to donate the money to charity than a big budget production. It’s very simple, but is its charitable simplicity enough to stand up to the competition?

The one viral that particularly struck a chord in the Turn Key office is Warehouse’s ‘Morning After Edition #SOS’ which brings a whole new meaning to the 12 days of Christmas. The viral campaign is witty and relatable, promoting the brand’s sense of humour and getting us in the mood for the party season! We’re certainly very glad our Christmas party is on a Friday this year…


We’ve been working closely with Eden shopping centre in High Wycombe since early 2011. One of our main objectives has been to excite and inspire shoppers within the centre, as well as promote sections of the centre such as the entertainment area.

It’s been a great opportunity to use the empty shop hoardings for the creative and we have designed eye-catching messages, both directional and campaign-led. We’ve also designed the store finders, digital screen videos and plenty of posters and leaflets to grab the attention of shoppers.

Last week we were lucky enough to see some of our designs in action as we visited Eden, here’s a little look at some of the marketing merchandise we’ve created:


Let Loose!

Senior Designer Phill Smith loves… this amazing animation

We love this. A perfect example of when designers are let loose!

The only brief was to end on the company logo. Brilliant brief.

The pink jelly/digital characters are well designed and bring humour to what is a very slick and contemporary ident. They capture the motion perfectly as each poor guy is piped around well rendered clear tubes.


See the full 40 second animation here

from on .


It’s time for the latest instalment in the Porsche Strasse ‘Seven Sins’ series and this genius gem is from Turn Key Designer, Sean Simmonds.

‘Greed’ is a simple, but very effective concept which we think demonstrates the point perfectly and after all, who doesn’t dream of having a different car for every day of the week?!


We may be going a couple of years back, but as its social media week we couldn’t resist a shout out to the Old Spice campaign, which may very well go down in history as one of the most popular digital marketing campaigns amongst this generation of man.

Old Spice wasn’t particularly well known for its interesting social media campaigns, until they burst onto the scene with an incredibly funny viral video featuring actor Isaiah Mustafa as ‘Old Spice man’.

This impressive and well-worked rebranding campaign helped give Old Spice a younger image, and we think its a sterling example of digital marketing at its finest.


Innocent helps drinkers label their love

To celebrate yesterday’s day of love Innocent Smoothie s, renowned for its witty and imaginative packaging, got its drinkers in the mood for Valentine’s Day by offering consumers the chance to create their own ‘love label’ to wrap around their favourite smoothie bottle. After creating a heart-warming message drinkers could either print out their personalised label, or share it on and – a nice little idea to get those creative juices flowing.

Heineken celebrates Valentine’s Day with ‘The Serenade’ Facebook app

Heineken is well known for its engaging and creative social media campaigns, so it was no surprise to see them jump on the day-of-love band wagon and help internet users share the love. Heineken created the Facebook app to let consumers send personalised songs to potential partners, inviting them on a Valentine’s Day date.

They’ve also spread the word on , where millions of people from across the globe will be able to participate and create their own songs via this viral platform. Check it out

Spread the love

This year, Marmite teamed up with renowned artist Pete Fowler to create a series of e-cards for users to send to their loved ones this Valentine’s Day. After ‘liking’ the Marmite fan page fans got the chance to send three bright and quirky messages of love, these included – “I need you in my life”, “spread the love” and “let’s get together”.

This clever campaign drove people to the Facebook page and encouraged Marmite lovers to share recipes, videos and much more to win fantastic prizes – now that’s some serious social love!


Whether you are currently wading through snow or not, it’s impossible to escape the ‘cold snap’ of weather; with reports of travel disruption, commuter chaos and frozen pipes dominating both the media and general conversation. But what opportunities can the snow bring other than the inevitable boost in sales of sledges and wellington boots?! A quick Google search came up with these little advertising gems – the ‘polo stamp’ is our personal favourite – but what do you think?



Turn Key Creative Director and retouching specialist Richard Colvill has worked with many world-class photographers including Guy Farrow and this partnership has resulted in various incredible and award-winning projects over the years. In his guest blog post for BlipFoto Richard shares his advice on creative retouching and offers an insight to some recent creative projects produced in collaboration with Guy…

Retouching has completely changed the art of photography and although it still remains a controversial discipline, it is undoubtedly an art form which is constantly evolving and producing ever more impressive results.

Although retouching is an incredibly skilled and time consuming job, achieving the desired end result is only possible if you start with high quality elements. Retouching covers a wide range of techniques and image alterations, from a simple post production clean-up to the creation of an image in CGI that would be impossible to obtain in real life.

In between these two extremes, lies the Natural or Invisible retouch- resulting in a flawless finished piece and Creative Retouch which is my favourite and will be the focus of this post.

Involving the seamless composition of different elements, Creative Retouch usually begins with a concept and subsequent careful consideration of the intricacies faced in the shoot.

Every month I am challenged with creating an advert for Porsche Strasse and this is one of the projects where I have the most creative licence. We have conceived a concept entitled the ‘7 Sins of Strasse’, the first of which was ‘Gluttony’ in which I wanted to portray a car made of cake. The obvious route could have been to commission a bakery to make the cake, but this wouldn’t have been precise enough, so instead we had to use some creative thinking! Guy and I primed a scale model of a Porsche, filled in all the nooks and crannies with icing, added a base and then painted the whole thing in a neutral colour before shooting it.

Creative Retouch was used to combine this with an image we had taken of a cake, resulting in the rather tasty-looking finished product you can see below.

‘Pampered’ is another concept devised by one of our Turn Key designers, Darren Jacques, for an earlier Strasse campaign. This challenging project involved the composition of over ten different images, which was certainly not a quick job! The car was shot first in an industrial setting, and the background was then fully rendered to create the clinical image you can see below. Individual model shots were all photographed separately before being bonded to the car; along with appropriate shadowing and reflections.

Another great example of Creative Retouch on a very different project this time is a series of images created for professional triathlete, Dion Harrison. We wanted to communicate Dion’s incredible strength and fitness through the shots; making it appear as if he was breaking through glass. The images of Dion were all taken in studio and each individual shard of glass was shot separately and compiled. This was undoubtedly a time consuming process but a real labour of love with a stunning end result.  In fact the image was so successful it has recently received a prestigious AOP Sun Award and is currently touring the UK as part of the awards exhibition.

Fast on the heels (or trainers!) of completing the Dion shoot, Sony approached us to create a similar concept which would showcase their waterproof headphones. We came up with the idea of capturing an athlete in the rain, but as natural rain is far from an ideal photography environment we had to shoot the athlete in studio.  The ‘wet look’ was achieved using a glycerine spray, and we created ‘rain’ by photographing droplets of water on a glass screen, before combining the two images to create the atmospheric shot you can see below.

Although creative retouch is a highly skilled practice, it will only achieve the desired results if the initial images are good quality and well composed. Creativity allows the initial concept or big idea to be devised, skilled photography allows the images to be realised and retouching is (in some cases) quite literally the icing on the cake!


I was having a clear out recently and came across some of my first pieces of work, which I created entirely using hand-drawing techniques.

In the early years of my career I set out to become skilled at every illustrative technique; fine-lining, Magic Marker, Airbrush and pencil. Once mastered, I learned how beautifully these techniques work with each other but since the invention of the Mac there is little demand for them commercially anymore and they have sadly been pushed aside.

I will always remember when I showed a piece of work to my dad; he looked at it and didn’t seem impressed or even interested, but I couldn’t understand why, until he explained that he thought I’d been showing him a photograph from a magazine and not my own handiwork.

My drawing of the plane bursting through the paper was not, as you may think commissioned, it was a punishment for throwing things in a school art class. I was told to complete an airbrush assignment in my own time, a task which turned out to be not so much a chore but instead the start of my design career!

So whilst Apple Macs have completely changed the design world and definitely make our lives easier I think it’s also important not to forget the traditional techniques which can create incredible pieces of artwork by simply putting pen to paper. It still is and always will be a passion of mine; now you know what I do at the weekends!