Paddock Akers

A document asking for money has to look like it doesn’t need any. Looking expensive is mostly a matter of leaving things out, so I left out nearly everything: one navy, one serif, one thin rule, and a great deal of paper doing nothing. The cover got the name and nothing else.

The opening spread – a full-bleed photograph on the left, and on the right the company statement with its first words in small caps.

White space was the main material. I gave the text less room than it could have had – one justified serif column set high on the page, the bottom third left alone. A prospectus that fills every page looks like it is padding; an empty page reads as confidence. The small caps opening each section do the work a subhead would otherwise do, so nothing has to be set louder than the body.

The numbers are the argument, so they got the only piece of drawing in the book. I made the house-price chart six arrows rather than six bars, each arrowhead further right than the one below it, because the point was not what a house cost in 2015 but that the line had not stopped. A bar chart states; an arrow leans.

Auckland house prices – six years as six arrows, grey deepening to navy on the current one, with the argument set opposite.

The costing spread is the densest thing in the book and the reason it exists. I tabulated the same development twice, side by side – New Zealand dollars and pounds sterling, each with and without GST – because the money was raised in Britain and spent in New Zealand, and an investor should not have to do arithmetic to know what they are looking at. Navy bands carry the rows that summarise, and the darkest is on the last line of all: in a document like this everyone goes to the bottom line first, and I would rather they found it than hunted for it.

The costing spread – the same development tabulated in New Zealand dollars and in sterling, with a doughnut of the cost split opposite.

Four years later the same people came back under a new name and wanted a mark. I drew the P and the A sharing a stroke, in the same serif register as the brochure – so what carried over from 2017 was not a logo, which had never existed, but a way of setting type.

The PA monogram – the two letters sharing a stroke, with the company name set beneath in a lighter serif.

The site is five pages, desktop and mobile of each, and it inherits the brochure rather than restating it: the same navy, the same serif on anything that carries weight, the same coastline in the photographs. Some of the running text is the brochure’s, moved across word for word. The structure is conventional – hero, three columns, footer – and I left it that way, because an investor arriving from an email is looking for four facts, not for a layout to work out.

The 2021 home page – the monogram at its head, a full-width hero, and the three sections of the site as three columns beneath it.

The brochure carries the older company name, The Ordinary House Building Company; the site carries the new one. Same people, four years apart, and the second job had to look like it came from the same place as the first.