Working as a freelancer means that you often get left in the dark about what happens to your work. People with whom you worked move on, clients fall out of favour with agencies, projects reach natural conclusions and/or something totally unexpected happens, like a major global recession, and you never return

At the risk of pestering agency staff it's perhaps best to lay low and not ask too many questions. Sometimes years pass before any client-side developments become apparent and work that was kept confidential for so long eventually becomes redundant. When this happens non-disclosure agreements become void and, in my view, that work is free to be displayed publicly

In 2007 I worked on the Life Bank brand for SCG London. We evolved the corporate brand identity established by another London-based brand consultancy, supplying the bank with a full set of brandmarks derived from a typeface that I tweaked to meet that requirement. Click on the typeface above to see the live work entry in my portfolio

In addition to the updated identity I developed three 'Look & Feel' routes, all three of which were chosen by the client to go live. The thinking was that the second route would replace the first and the third replace the second in roughly 5 year intervals. Click on the typeface above and then on 'Look & Feel' in the right-hand menu

As I didn't have any client contact and I've never been to Russia I saw no evidence of the route in use. I assume that at least the first was used and properly implemented. The illustration above is part of a relationship diagram identity system that I created for route 2. Click on the illustration to see the full entry in my portfolio

Last week I discovered that Life Financial Group have an entirely new brand identity, developed by a Russian agency in late 2012. It appears that the accompanying 'Look & Feel' illustration style of the lines and dots has been directly influenced by the system I developed for Life Bank. The lastest 'Look & Feel' has distinct visual similarities to my design but doesn't appear to be based on the initial idea, which is that 'the essence of life' is all about relationships

I'll write a separate post with links to the new work as well as the agency responsible for the new brand identity