Bringing back to life the Old Dutch Masters

My colleagues and I always use large black foam-boards to present our designs and idea’s. Most of the time we end up with several of them. But how do you transport a bunch of those things? For years we’ve used standard king-size art-folders, but everybody’s got those… They don’t let us stand out of the crowd and they’re too expensive to just hand over to a client every time we present new designs. It feels rather cheap to return home with an empty art-folder after a presentation and leave the client with a pile of foam-boards on his desk… Apart from that we were also looking for a way to let our company and designs stand out at the very beginning. So we decided to create our own foam-board carrying cases. They were designed to carry foam-boards, impress the client from the get-go and they were to be made out of cardboard so we could hand them over along with the designs. We decided to look at the Old Dutch Masters for inspiration.

The carrying cases come in two sizes: One for the large foam-boards and another for half a foam-board. We’ve decided to let the cases look like old-school paintings. They’re fully printed and the sides look like the edges of paintings. For the front-cover we’ve used Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ combined with Mondrian and my company’s logo (a Rose). The other case combines Vermeer’s ‘The Milk Maid’ with Kandinski (not Dutch but Russian-French and a favorite artist of one of our Art Directors) and we’ve kind of tattooed the girl with a rose pattern we use in our company’s design. The back of the case looks like the back of a painting as well.

We’ve been using the carrying cases for some time now and they certainly get noticed! We’ve received really good feedback and clients are always surprised they actually get to keep the case.

(Images were saved with an ICC-profile).

And a quick iPhone shot of a collegae with the case.