FALLON'S PACKAGE DEAL

via Shot

Not content with creating the advertising, Fallon London has branched out into package design for Orange's latest mobile phone handsets.

The advertising agency renowned for groundbreaking spots for the likes of Sony Bravia and Skoda is nothing if not fearless and initially approached its client Orange about a package design brief. It has now taken its first steps in creating physical identities for the packaging of a new series of Orange mobile phones. "The client was in for a meeting one day and we just mentioned it," explained the agency's head of design Hugh Tarpey. "They didn't actually realise that Fallon had a design department. We thought we'd love to have a go and that's basically how it came about." Tarpey and creative director Micah Walker began thinking of ways to illustrate the character of the phones, each of which is named after a famous city. According to Fallon head of art, Mark Ellwood, who oversaw the project, the main obstacle wasn't unfamiliarity with the process, rather avoiding urban clichés. "The names were given to us by Orange to work with. The idea was that we didn't want to do the usual cityscape angle which makes it look like more of a travel situation," he said. "It'd be very easy to pick out famous buildings in Tokyo or Berlin, so it was a lot nicer to do something more thought-through and not so obvious." "We looked at different sort of props to spell out each name," added Tarpey. "We wanted it to be 3D; a sort of environment. We basically searched out how we could make little objects of each of the actual letters. Also, there are some nice little things going on inside the box when you open it up which are hidden from the outside." After two months of work the packaging was finally revealed for the Berlin and Tokyo handsets, and with five more designs being developed over the next few months, Fallon has plenty of opportunity to perfect the process in readiness for any other similarly adventurous and willing clients.