Creative. Web. Print. Design. Content. Strategy. & all that good stuff.
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Cocktail menu for leading Brighton based bar and nightclub, Audio. Focus on clean minimalism, quality of materials and print process. Featured some beautiful debossing on high quality board for the cover, a thin translucent sheet with illustration that interacts with content beneath it and classy grid structured layout.
Poster campaign featured artwork that we commissioned from guys like Serial Cut (Madrid) and Helen Musselwhite. They are geniuses and deserve all the respect in the world.
I just posted a new interview with Mark from Modularlab over at CCCCAREER…
Montreal, NYC, San Fran & Stuttgart. Adventures in design with Modularlab
Mark is absolutely awesome by the way. Just saying.
Enjoy!
I recently put together an article for the JustGiving blog all about fundraising through live music. Check it if charity fundraising is your vibe!
Setting up a live music event for charity
Here’s an excerpt…
A lot of fundraisers find it natural to jump straight into big sporting events like the London Marathon, Great North Run, Great Swim, or Race for Life. These are major events and they raise massive amounts for charity. But if you’re anything like me, running a cool 26 miles sounds pretty tough going - and frankly, not so fun. But if you’re like me, you’d love to rip it up, or dance it up, and live it up to help support your good cause. Whether you’re a fundraiser looking to raise money for a good cause, or a charity looking to engage non-sporty fundraisers, music can be a great way to expand your fundraising. Read on.
It’s easy to dismiss live music events as hard to organise or expensive to start up. In reality, you don’t need to be Live Aid (or Bob Geldof) to start something that attracts the attention of hundreds or thousands of donors in your local area. Because music events are a really great way of getting like-minded people together. This is something really special, because people can be as passionate about music as they are about a cause. And when you ignite someone’s passion, they tell their friends, and that means a message can spread.
My new guest post on CCCCAREER…
Ten years ago it might have been enough to type up a solid CV and collate your portfolio materials into a leather bound folder – but expectations have changed, times have moved on, and frankly the world is too competitive a place to just leave it at that. Whether you’re a photographer, writer or designer, then maximising your coverage online is an easy route to getting more eyes on your work and increasing your chances of generating new leads, be that for freelance or permanent employment.
The good news is that the social-web is full of places to display your portfolio, discuss it and get feedback, as well as to comment on your peers’ work and discuss trends or the industry in general. Here’s a few ideas to get you started…
This week I launched my new blog: CCCCAREER. It’s a site designed to publish articles providing real-world support for creative industry newcomers including interviews with established creative industry professionals.
I just published a very inspiring interview with Mark at Blush - Bespoke and custom letterpress printing in the UK.
Letterpress in the 21st century and career beginnings – Blush
Here’s an excerpt:
CCCCAREER: I get a lot of intense happiness by getting involved in any physical print process. What’s your personal history in printing and what keeps you in the industry today?
MARK: My interest in printing goes way back to a John Bull printing set my parents kept on top of the kitchen cupboard. Small rubber type placed in a small red plastic holder. Press the assembled type on the ink pad then stamp it onto the paper and hey presto! Business cards for the whole family.
I became interested in other printing techniques at art college, lino and woodcut prints, mono prints and etching. My first letterpress experience was at a jobbing letterpress printers. I remember it all so clearly, walking in through the door to the front desk the first to hit was the smell of ink and machinery. Looking beyond into the press room, Heidelberg and Thompson Auto Platens were the letterpress work horses, guillotine and paper racks at the back wall and Multilith 1250WL and Rotoprint to the right. The composing room was upstairs, filled with cabinets of wood and metal type some of which we still use now. I remember the Linotype near the window in a small room, one of the most impressive contraptions ever invented.
Now I spend my time surrounded by letterpress. Working with antique machinery to create tactile prints on beautiful papers that never fail to impress. I’m a lucky chap!
I love WordPress. I really do. I love WordPress 3.0 especially. I love the greater control I have over menus straight off the shelf. It means a lot less dropping into code to manage navigation, and it means I can pass more control over to my clients. My clients don’t really care about WordPress all that much, but they do love not having to call me up to make pretty rudimentary changes. I love happy clients, and that’s another reason to love WordPress right there.
I love WordPress’ simple, functional, well thought-out and elegantly styled interface. I love it’s simple structure of pages and posts. I love its infinite extensibility and massive plug-in repository. I love it’s recently added features like featured images just as much as I love it’s old ones like being able to organise a collection of Links. I love that it’s nearly ideal for SEO right off the shelf, and I love that it’s got powerful built in commenting features and user registration. I love the dedicated team of geniuses (is that the right plural?) that constantly deliver above-expectation improvements in every iteration. And I love the dedicated community of geniuses that put together impressive free and premium themes in every layout configuration that you could possibly consider. I also really love the other dedicated community of geniuses that build powerful extensions like MU and BuddyPress.
I love using WordPress as a core or a component of more complicated projects like simple e-commerce sites, digital download sites, and online magazines. I love that it’s too advanced to be a straight up blogging tool, but neatly understated and lightweight enough to be dismissed as a full blown CMS.
But more than anything I love that I took the time to learn how to use it way back, and that the big investment in understanding how to get the most out of it is, for the most part, over and done with. Ultimately I’m glad that I didn’t go down another route like deploying Joomla or Drupal for clients regularly, both of which are respectively good solutions for different styles of project but at the same time frankly cumbersome, poorly designed and shameful in comparison to WP’s finesse.
I’m about to embark upon a project involving a deployment of Umbraco as a CMS on an asp.net platform. It’s not ideal from a personal point of view but I’m not involved in the development or site integration and using it seems pretty standard so I’m sure it wont be hard to learn. It seems that running a big Microsoft enterprise stack might well be a really solid solution, but it sure does limit your access to open source software. Write off PHP/MySQL integration sitting alongside a transactional site for security, and that limits you to very few low-cost solutions. Still, I’m looking forward to learning some more about Umbraco.
You know what? I’m pretty glad that I don’t have a stack of sites built using legacy platforms that require a lot of project history knowledge before jumping in to update them. Or having a stack of custom code built on a legacy platform that is just too massive to be brought up to date.
No, instead I have a pretty little WP auto-updater that makes sure my clients are well serviced at the core level, making their projects easy to work on when they need additional work completed or a template design freshened up.
I still sometimes work on sites built with static CSS/XHTML pages and some includes / dynamic content brought in with some simple PHP+MySQL, and it feels like I’m back in 1998. It’s like I should be making lozenge style buttons for navigation using Paintshop Pro while I’m at it.
Working with WP now feels like the default - it IS a website for me. When someone asks for a fairly standard site I immediately build it’s deployment into the project cost unless the client has a specific requirement that rules it out, and I discount that deployment pretty heavily because I’m now very accustomed to working with it.
Are you feeling the WordPress love? If so I’d like to hear about some of the projects that you’ve been working on using it, especially anything out of the ordinary. I also want to hear what you’d like Automattic to include in their next major release. I’d like better off the shelf mobile content delivery from WP, but I’m also interested in hearing what you think the future of the platform will be over the coming years.
Not feeling the vibe? Let’s hear why! Rip it to shreds if you like. Let’s get some facts on the table.
Plugin love
For those of you who work with the tool day to day, and for those just starting out, I thought I’d share a list of 6 plug-ins that I use regularly to extend a default WordPress install to bring a whole set of common features into action:
I should probably send Matt Mullenweg a box of chocolates or something because I have a lot to thank this guy for. I’d go so far as to say he’s really changed the face of the net thanks to WordPress’ impressive success. As a tool for users to deploy simple sites and blogs in a hasstle-free way, and that’s not even mentioning the hosted service, it really excels, and is kind of a good stepping stone marking the maturity of the web away from old school crap like Geocities and, (dare I even mention it) Angelfire. WP is obviously less prolific when compared to social networking Facebook and Twitter but it is definitely up there in importance with those guys. It totally shames stuff like Blogger. When you get high profile guys from Google like Matt Cutts actually deploying WordPress for his blog rather than using a proprietary Google service then that’s really saying something.
All the best of luck with your next WordPress project! Enjoy!
Drop a comment if you’d like to recommend a plugin and include a link to your blog, I’d love to check some new ones out.
It’s an attractive term isn’t it. The thing is, so many businesses I speak to believe that it exists. They believe in a “build it, and they will come” business model. With so many SEO and Social Media blogs all over the place shouting the odds about how easy, quick and cheap it is to [...]
Another e-commerce site that we’ve been working on with the guys over at Prominent Media here in Milton Keynes. Siam Market are a unique Thai ingredient specialist who will ship you authentic, hand picked Thai cooking products so you can recreate the kind of cooking perfection that you usually can only find in Thailand itself.