The Mayor of London’s office advertises across the capital and across a number of platforms. Such widespread communications inevitably lead to confusion and disarray.

In response, the Greater London Authority’s creative team has developed an A to Z guide not for navigating the City’s winding streets, but for unifying the design principles of the Mayor’s communications. The ‘A-Z of London’ guidelines outline the standards of practice for public communications from the Mayor of London’s office.

The first major campaign to follow the new guidelines are the cheery, tricolor Celebrate Diwali posters that have been decorating the Underground in anticipation of Sunday’s festival in Trafalgar Square.

“We try to strip everything down to its essentials,” GLA’s head of design Tom Lancaster says. “At the moment we’re running a Diwali campaign with quite an abstract light and we’re about to release one with a firework on it for new year’s eve. As often they’re used on the tube, people have only seconds to see them.”

The guidelines provide alphabetically-organised pictorial advice for design and visual communications. It was influenced by Saffron’s branding of Visit London which focuses on bold, catchy, uniform advertising in only a few colours. The GLA wanted to create a system that all departments within the Mayor’s office and its partners could follow in public communications.

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