This past week, a former PR director and business director from Mother launched what they are calling a “new kind” of communications agency.

Newly founded Semaphore London says it will aim to blend PR strategy with the content capabilities of an ad agency.

Founding partner Liam Fay-Fright was formerly the director of communications at Mother and D&AD, while fellow founding partner Aaron Cole served as business director at Mother, having previously worked at The Corner, Fallon and TMW.

With a roster of design focused clients, the Semaphore London branding was a key concern. Created by Jordan Amer, the brand blends two concepts:

“We loved the visual idea of the Semaphore Signalman, a now extinct Naval job which had a sailor learn a hard coded international language for positioning flags in different ways to create viewable messages from a distance. It fell short on a different mandate though; that the brand be rich and communicative throughout platforms and comms and not reliant on the repeated use of a well-crafted logo. It needed a fully fledged visual language, and the sailor rebus didn’t quite delivery that for us.

“Our next best solution, built with the help of designer/illustrator Hana Tanimura, utilizes the whole alphabet of primary coloured naval flags a Signalman could hold. It didn’t however, lend itself to a single logoform; the alphabet as a whole has vast, flexible potential for communication but as a single mark, it came off as arbitrary and generic.

“And so with those two brilliant but flawed prospects on the table and a rule dictating that they can’t work together. We decided that rules are great; and that we should break them; implementing both routes into a hierarchy where they could both live: Signalman as emblem, flags as language.”

Jordan Amer \ www.jordanamer.co.uk
Semaphore London \ www.semaphorelondon.com