Hero. Of all channels.
Bjorn, a colleague of the Stockholm office, came up with a book project that is unparalleled in the world of real estate marketing more than a year and a half ago. We wanted to introduce the project to you a long time ago, but to be honest, we had to take a break from it first - 50 copies, each made up of 98 components, 4 x 1091 km on a plane and a crazy 8,952 minutes of production. But it was the only way to make "Hero of all channels".
This is how the publication was defined by the originator of the project, the design Open Studio from Stockholm, who approached us for cooperation. The Portalen Pop up book was the focus of the entire marketing concept for the Värtahamnen-Portalen office building. And thus the protagonist of all the communication channels used. Whether it was social media, direct marketing, newsletters or personal presentations to customers.
As cult director David Lynch says, "Ideas are everything." So when the designers at Open Studio were looking for a parallel to present the concept of a building that reinvigorated post-pandemic office space as a complex of corporate hubs enabling creative business interaction, they came up with a truly original idea. Flexibility, versatility and sustainability played a vital role in the renovated spaces. The idea of the Pop Up Book, which underlines the whole concept with its playfulness, design and execution, is therefore based on these.
We've seen a lot of things in our production, but the Portalen Pop up project has taken us to a whole new level. We created a special multidisciplinary team, in which our skilled colleagues, printers from Indigoprint, Tereza Hradilková from Porigami, graphic designer Karolína Křížová, stamp makers and project managers from two countries stood side by side. It was a really intense and close cooperation. Without it, such a project would not have been possible at all.
All the time we are talking about a book that is only a few pages long. Nevertheless, this was a project of fundamental importance. The base of the volume is a thick board covered with Natuur&Halflinnen cloth with black embossing. The block is glued together by hand, using sandwich boards in a combination of cardboard and Materica board from Fedrigoni. Each page has its own theme. The traffic layout around the building is represented by a map with pop up objects in the form of vehicles. Flexible offices are approached with fold-out double sheets with chairs and desks, on which there is no shortage of coffee cups or a cat. On the last double sheet, green terraces with lots of birds jump out at you. But the building itself dominates everything - a masterpiece made of Materica Terra Rossa cardboard with printing and copper embossing by Tereza Hradilkova.
We honestly couldn't imagine how incredibly difficult the book would be to put together. Printing out all the parts, cutting or laser cutting the pop up elements and preparing the bookbinding base for the block was just the very beginning this time. The real school of patience and careful composition began afterwards. But even that was not enough. For the book to work with all the pop up components, experience with this type of dynamic elements was also necessary. We can talk about how lucky we were to have the graphic designer Karolína Křížová in our team. Without her, we would not have been able to realize the project in the final. She created a detailed design of all the pop up components and then glued all the parts together into a functional whole. Thank you!
The Portalen Pop up project has once again proved to us that honestly made traditional craftsmanship can perfectly meet the needs of contemporary marketing. Although it was a tough school again. Our Open Studio clients summed up the project's difficulty nicely in a post on LinkedIn, "We had no idea how much work would be required, but it became a spectacular book!" And what are we going to make up, we would have signed our name to that sentence too.
