PA Ingenuity Review

In 2022, PA’s in-house Design Studio refreshed PA’s visual identity while our Digital Marketing team, with agency Area17, embarked on transforming PA’s website.

From the outset, Design Studio wanted to incorporate illustration into the system. Our first commission was for six key pages that dealt with ‘global shifts’ PA sees as central to our vision for a positive human future. Cynthia Kittler's illustrations felt like a perfect complement: her sketches inked by hand creates a human touch, adding colour digitally.

In re-telling for PA’s ‘Ingenuity Review’, we wanted to reuse the illustrations, but without diluting the impact of original pages. Our solution was to develop collages representing the broader year in review: integrating elements of the illustrations alongside other highlights.

Ingenuity Review 2022. PA's annual review looks back over the year. It is also used throughout the following 12 months as a sales tool for client interactions, and as a window on PA's work and culture for prospective new joiners.

PA's internal Design Studio consists of a team of 17 people. We work autonomously and in small teams, encouraging our designers to learn all aspects of project management, and client-facing communication and presentation. The Ingenuity Review is a chance for a few designers to work together, to exchange ideas and utilise each other's strengths. It's a great way for designers to push out of their comfort zones and frequently leads to surprising results — often engendering a new perspective on old habits.

This project was no exception: "it's great to watch the team bounce ideas around, and through the process of working together, find themselves designing in new and unfamiliar territories: A joint effort to create a mood board, out of which came an original idea for collage from Jon Ashby, brought to life by Selina Akram, and reconstituted into a grid format and then serialised into multiple collage artworks by Marcel Bittencourt, finally, back to Jon Ashby for animation. Perfect."