Amplifying local engagement with a high-profile gallery event.

We’d created banners for Watford High Street based on a concept that explored the places and activities that make Watford such a great place to live, work and visit. We’d paired up with young local artist Marco Caruso, who produced a series of fantastic sculptures which captured the spirit of places like Vicarage Road, Cassiobury Park and The Palace Theatre.

Our design team then used those sculptures as the basis for this stylised series of banners, which not only helped to promote local things to see and do, but also brought a real splash of colour and eye-catching design to the busy street.

Now it was time to take what we’d achieved and create a pop-up gallery in the famous shopping centre; it would be an event which showed off the creativity in the project, and again helped to ignite a sense of pride in local people as they saw iconic Watford places brought to intricately-realised life. We had to be pragmatic with budget and efficient with turn-around.

Having worked in close collaboration with artist Marco since the beginning, we’d been witness to the astounding level of thought, planning and detail in each of the sculptures. From colours and materials to the backgrounds these pieces of art were presented against, every piece was meticulous and astounding. The only issue was that they were fairly small. We needed a way to explode them into the consciousness of passing shoppers, so they would be drawn in instead of passing by.

The answer was to take these intricately detailed sculptures and present professionally-shot images of them as large as possible. They would initially catch the eye and pique curiosity, before shoppers would come in to see the real things.