Our Favourite Places

Our Favourite Places

Our love letter to Sheffield

Our Favourite Places (OFP) is a place brand for Sheffield that focuses on culture. It celebrates cultural life in the city and promotes the creative community who live and work here.

Our studio created OFP from scratch. We launched in 2010 with a guidebook and have continued to develop it ever since. We’ve published guidebooks, city tours, newspapers and colouring books. We’ve created a Sheffield alphabet. We’ve made a bunch of promotional films. We've produced a series of creative events. And we edit the OFP website, a guide to arts and culture activity in Sheffield. We’ve been busy.

We do all OFP's branding, tone of voice, design and illustration. It's our love letter to the city.

Creative approach

We approached the creation of OFP as we would any commercial project. We had a clear understanding of what we wanted to achieve and how it should look, feel and sound.

We devised a purposefully simple graphic mark to brand OFP projects so that the things we make take centre stage.

Double-page spread in OFP book, with food and restaurant illustrations.

Double-page spread from OFP book with pink graphic map of areas of Sheffield covered.

Double-page spread of OFP book with Cultural Industries Quarter graphic against green on right.

Double-page spread of OFP book with images showing local parks.

Double-page spread of OFP book with illustrations of Sheffield Antiques Quarter.

Guidebook

We’ve published four OFP guidebooks to date. Covers show graphic road signs… all roads lead to Sheffield! We research and write the books, do all of the illustration and design, and some of the photography. The best shots are by OFP friends Nigel Barker, Shaun Bloodworth, Gemma Thorpe and Will Roberts.

We’ve also designed and published a book about the Sheffield Round Walk, a glorious 16-mile loop through parks and green spaces in the city. You can buy a copy from OFP's online shop.

Cover of OFP Sheffield Round Walk book with green acorn graphic against brown background.

Double-page spread from OFP Sheffield Round Walk book with Graves Park Animal Farm photos.

Double-page spread from OFP Sheffield Round Walk book with brown illustrations of a Tudor house and a tree.

Double-page spread from OFP Sheffield Round Walk book with photos of coffee and allotment.

“Our Favourite Places is promoting the creative wealth of innovative Sheffield.”

It’s Nice That

Cover of Colouring Sheffield book with illustrations of rainbow pencils, alpaca, Park Hill flats and sunshine.

Detail of Colouring Sheffield poster, with felt tip pens.

Cover of Sheffield Culture Calendar 2018, with yellow and blue graphic year on grey background.

Detail of colourful illustration in Sheffield Culture Calendar, with people, ice-cream, ceramics, beer and musical instruments against cream background.

What we’ve learned

Creating OFP and its associated spin-offs has taught us a lot. How to achieve buy-in from partners, attract funders, and build loyal and engaged audiences.

Our place-based work is authentic. We understand how to create work that is rooted in the place it comes from, to engage local residents and foster civic pride. We don’t take short cuts. We take time to do the groundwork and build a community.

Spread from OFP newspaper showing illustrations focused on cycling in Sheffield.

Cover of Sheffield – Our City newspaper.

Newspaper spread on cycling with photos and illustration.

Spread in newspaper with photos of restaurants on Sheffield's London and Abbeydale Roads.

Newspaper spread with images and text highlighting 20 culture picks for the season.

Sheffield Culture Guide

The OFP website is a platform for promoting arts and culture in Sheffield. It includes a calendar, where cultural organisations can submit their events for free. Our lovely freelance contributors write regular theatre and exhibition reviews and festival guides. And they interview Sheffield's creative people and communities for our Meet the Locals series.

We developed the current site in 2017 in collaboration with Sheffield Culture Consortium with Arts Council Cultural Destinations funding. In the years since, we received support from Welcome to Sheffield, Sheffield City Council, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield Theatres, and Sheffield Museums.

With all OFP projects (the website, Photomarathon, etc) our aim is to offer a friendly ‘way in’ to the city’s cultural spaces. We love our home city, and we want to encourage others to explore and engage with it through creativity.

Tone of voice

Sheffield is famously warm and friendly, modest and determinedly down to earth. We try to capture the personality of the city in everything we do. We don’t present it as something that it’s not, but we lean in to the things that make it unique.

We work hard on the tone and brand language to ensure OFP speaks in an authentic voice that’s true to ourselves and to the city.

In the press

OFP has been featured in The Guardian, the New York Times, Design Sponge, and It’s Nice That. In 2020 Conde Nast Traveller commissioned us to write about Sheffield for their article on “the coolest neighbourhoods in the UK.”

Our Favourite Places from A to Z

We created a Sheffield Alphabet print to celebrate some of the things that make the city proud, in a pleasing retro palette.

It takes you on a tour of the city from A to Z – starting with A for Arts Tower and ending with Z for Zero One One Four (the city’s dialling code) via H for Hills, J for Jarvis, and R for Real Ale.

Illustration of a person with long hair's back, wearing a Def Leppard jacket.

Illustration of paintings on a wall, to represent the Graves Gallery.

Illustration of houses and trees on a hill, with more hills in the background.

Illustration of a hand holding a pint of beer.

Illustration of a knife and fork with pink and orange striped handles.

“Eleven Design are a huge asset to the city.”

Rebecca Maddox, Head of Business Development (Culture), Sheffield City Council

Photo of both sides of the Typographic Tour of Sheffield, showing illustrations on one side and text and maps on other.

Photo of both sides of the Poetry Tour of Sheffield, showing illustrations on one side and text and maps on other.

Tours

We've created a series of printed OFP tours to highlight some of our favourite things about Sheffield. From typography to poetry, beer to bike rides – there’s something for everyone.

We produced many of our OFP tours in collaboration with partners in the city. In 2018 we partnered with Off the Shelf Festival of Words on a Women's Suffrage Tour to mark the centenary of women's right to vote. We worked with Magic Lantern Film Club on Sheffield on Film and the University of Sheffield on Sheffield: Science City. And together with Joined Up Heritage Sheffield we created a Sheffield Heritage Trail.

We research, write, design and illustrate each tour. They’re a great way to show the niche and off-beat charms of the city, and they’re one of our favourite things to do. The Guardian named our Typographic Tour of Sheffield was as one of the top 10 quirky UK guides.