White, sky blue,
and no photo.

Better Service
Better Advice
Better Solution

Draft 1

Draft 2: name moved to the top (the city photograph and contacts in the lower panel are not shown) — Draft 2

Draft 3

Draft 4

Printed version: script slogan, three round photographs, contact panel moved to the middle; photographs shown as flat tints (contacts and badges blurred) — Printed

Five versions side by side: drafts one to four and the printed banner · contact details masked, stock photographs replaced by flat tints

00The project

Client: Jiajing (Jim) Wu
Brokerage: Mortgage Architects
Year: 2023
Format: Roll-up, 33.5 × 80 in

Jim Wu arranges mortgages in Ontario and British Columbia. In 2023 he needed a roll-up banner and sent three lines of brief, his brokerage’s logo and a post someone else had made for him earlier. We drew four drafts; the fifth went to print.

Roll-up banner
Four drafts
Print file
2026 re-set

01The brief

A brief
in three lines.

It came with the brokerage’s logo file and an older post. Everything the banner needed was in these three lines.

01
Keep it simple: white and sky blue, to sit with the brokerage’s logo. No personal photo.
02
Use the brokerage’s line — Better Service, Better Advice, Better Solution — with one line of Chinese: helping you find a comfortable home in Ontario and BC.
03
Add Xiaohongshu and WeChat.

02Drafts and print

One grid,
five frames.

The grid of eight services never changed from the first draft to print; everything around it did — the header, where the name sits, whether a photograph goes behind. Draft one kept to the brief: a white column, a sky-blue frame, the slogan as a header. Then photographs moved in — a city behind the contacts, towers behind the logo — and the printed version added round photographs and a script slogan, and moved the contact panel to the middle.

The eight services: line icons with English and Chinese names — The eight services, in English and Chinese · draft 1

032026 re-set

Taking the brief
at its word.

Looking back, the first draft was closest to what Jim asked for and the printed one furthest: photographs crept in, the slogan went to script, the contacts took the middle. For this case we re-set it the way the brief reads — white and sky blue, no photo, the slogan as the headline, the eight services as a quiet bilingual list — and fixed the ‘Mutil-residential’ typo carried through all five.

A briefin three lines.

One grid,five frames.

Taking the briefat its word.

A brief
in three lines.

One grid,
five frames.

Taking the brief
at its word.