Run For The Hills' branding for Cardiff's Coal House marries urban style with sustainability

Run For The Hills is an award-winning London-based agency specialising in branding and interior design. Its portfolio includes bars, restaurants, boutique cinemas, stylish workspaces, and residential properties. It also creates and exhibits its own range of fine art and designs bespoke pieces for private and commercial clients.

Run For The Hills' latest project, opening in September, is Coal House: a progressive workspace in the heart of Cardiff. In partnership with real estate investor Create, the building has undergone a stylish, industrial-chic refurbishment to allow sustainability-conscious businesses to thrive in an ultra-green environment with all the perks.

The branding brief was to work up the visual brand identity and graphic language and to design a stylish website for prospective tenants. The studio began exploring how the brand might look during the naming process, helping the clients to visualise a look and feel which would stand out in the marketplace, breathing new life into an existing building.

Central to the creative work was to give the development's branding an urban, sustainable heart, making sure all of the key eco-benefits of the new workspace were prominent on the website and messaging.

For the brand palette, Run For The Hills used a stylish monochrome and green mix to appeal to the target environmental-conscious demographic.

They designed an urban deco graphic language for illustrations within the brand world, loosely based on the building's architectural fenestrations, animating a series of these patterns for the website, which were also used on interior architecture details.

The website is interactive, with the usual side-scrolling, full of motion graphics and a custom video, bringing the project to life for prospective tenants.

Coal House is not the first project Run For The Hills has designed for Create. The studio also designed Create's own new brand identity, injecting gravitas and establishing the company in the property market as a key challenger brand.

The core Create brand is monochrome (with black substituted with dark blue) with a pop of deep red used sparingly for contrast. The studio took inspiration from the 'hatchings' used in architectural CAD construction drawings to create a series of brand devices. These were then animated over black and white drone footage of some of Create's property developments, using time-lapse and speed-ramping the aerial footage to dynamic effect.

Run For The Hills is also using its signature bold and creative approach across various other up-and-coming Create developments, including Avonside and Portwall Lofts, creating unique brand identities and websites for each, including logo design and core identity to website design, signature brand illustrations and animations.

"The workspace sector is constantly evolving, and due to the pandemic, real estate developers need to go above and beyond to attract tenants," says Chris Trotman, co-founder and creative director at Run For The Hills. "Our vision and ethos to contribute economic, social, and environmental value shine through their buildings.

"We're excited to be going on a journey with them across multiple sites. Each of which is distinct, and it is great working with a creative client who wants to create original identities and websites for each of their projects, celebrating the differences rather than trying to harmonise them into a corporate collection of brands."