CES

SYS.01 Objective

A think tank sells credibility, and credibility is cumulative. Every artefact a reader meets, a brochure, a slide, a sponsorship prospectus, the signature on an email, either adds to the impression that this is a serious institution or quietly subtracts from it.

Which makes the brief unusually wide and unusually unforgiving. There is no single flagship piece to get right. There is a standard to hold across everything, produced at the pace of a small organisation that is also trying to run events, publish research and sell membership.

SYS.02 Creative response

The whole commercial and creative contract: brand identity and its applications, the website, the publication and deck systems, event material, and the marketing and CRM operations underneath it. The Monitor, the autonomous intelligence engine, is a separate product within the same contract and is documented on its own page.

Creative system

• Identity and its applications. The mark in positive, reversed and favicon treatments, and carried through to a virtual business card
• The deck system. A maintained house PowerPoint template, revised annually, so anyone in the organisation can produce a presentation that looks like the organisation
• Publications. The membership prospectus and brochure, produced yearly and documented at <a href=”ces-membership.html”>CES Membership
• Events. Future of Security, the two-day Bush House conference, at <a href=”future-of-security.html”>Future of Security, plus session material for the DSV Leadership Summit and a GTR workshop
• Research and campaigns. Access to Cash and the economic-warfare tooling work, each recorded separately
• Marketing operations. The CRM, the mailing infrastructure and the messaging integrations that carry the output to an audience
• The Monitor. The intelligence engine, at <a href=”ces-monitor.html”>The Monitor

Building the deck template early, and maintaining it as a yearly artefact rather than a one-off, is the decision that does the most work across a contract this wide. An organisation of this size generates far more slides than any designer can make. The choice is between designing a fraction of them and designing the thing that makes all of them, and only the second one holds a standard.

The same logic runs through the publications. A membership prospectus reissued annually is not a new design each year; it is one system that absorbs a year of new content, which is why the second year costs a fraction of the first and looks more established rather than different.

Keeping the engine on its own page follows the same instinct applied to this site. The Monitor is a different kind of claim from a brochure, and a reader assessing whether you can build an autonomous system should not have to find it inside a list of brand work.

SYS.03 What the contract covers

• Identity and its applications. The mark in positive, reversed and favicon treatments, and carried through to a virtual business card
• The deck system. A maintained house PowerPoint template, revised annually, so anyone in the organisation can produce a presentation that looks like the organisation
• Publications. The membership prospectus and brochure, produced yearly and documented at <a href=”ces-membership.html”>CES Membership
• Events. Future of Security, the two-day Bush House conference, at <a href=”future-of-security.html”>Future of Security, plus session material for the DSV Leadership Summit and a GTR workshop
• Research and campaigns. Access to Cash and the economic-warfare tooling work, each recorded separately
• Marketing operations. The CRM, the mailing infrastructure and the messaging integrations that carry the output to an audience
• The Monitor. The intelligence engine, at <a href=”ces-monitor.html”>The Monitor

SYS.04 Creative response

SYS.05 The work