The Design Process
Creative Services
Identity and Brand Design
Website Design
User Interface Design
Collateral Design
Design for print and packaging
Creativity and experience
We've been designing printed materials for over 20 years and we believe that the key to a successful print job is good design partnered with skillful management. This starts with the initial client brief where we gather the important information right at the start. What is the job for and how will it be used? What is the budget for it's production? Is there a deadline? These are four good questions to start with but there are many more that need to be answered before a design's initial visualisation.
Horses for courses
Design for print should involve more than just giving a file to a printer. The printing process and it's limitations, the material and it's properties, the press and it's suitability, the finishing and how the image might be affected. Important information that needs to be ascertained at the beginning and not the end of a project to ensure a trouble free print job.
From concept to production
Once we are happy that we understand exactly what our client expects we formulate a design that suits the purpose, book the right machines and people to produce the job and plan every detail of it's production, keeping our client up to date at every stage of the process.
Getting the balance right
A print job with a range of constituent elements, produced on different machines, in different locations which need to come together and then be mailed to 30,000 different addresses by a specific date quickly becomes an exercise in logistics and management with the potential for problems at every turn.
Keeping everybody in the loop
We have spent many years working in this type of scenario and have learnt that it requires careful planning, scheduling and administrative accuracy along with flexibility and the creativity to accomodate the inevitable changes that occur. Persistent vigilance coupled with a quiet determination helps us ensure that we meet our clients' deadlines.
Press advertising
Consistant and targeted
Most businesses have a clear understanding and can identify their core markets, competitors and prospective markets. After all that's where it expends most of it's time and effort and who it is trying to reach is usually pretty well established.
We have found that most small businesses need assistance not in defining their market but in working out how best to present themselves to that market via the pages of the chosen publication. We listen carefully to our clients wishes and concerns before designing eye catching and bespoke, press ready ads in time to meeet the publishers deadline.
Stop press
Press advertising has been an important part of the marketing mix for many years and a well designed ad on the right page of the right publication can still bring in the business. We design press ready ads speedily, in just about any required format and liaise directly with the publication's production department on our client's behalf.
Retail and exhibition design
Putting up a good front
The fine art of introducing yourself and your service or product via the immediate space around you is intrisically linked to understanding the mind of your customers. Be it a shop exterior or a stand in an exhibition hall the passer by needs to connect on some level with the values being extolled by the shapes, colours and messages on display. They need to feel welcomed by a coffee shop, excited by a computer gaming shop, reassured by a pharmacy or stimulated by the proposition on offer from a consultancy firm at an exhibition stand.
Working with big type!
The first thing that struck us when we began working on the design of exhibition materials, retail outlets and vehicle livery was that apart from the type obviously being quite a bit bigger, most of the design principles applied to the printed page seemed to translate rather well to walls, signs and the sides of lorries!
Spatial relationships, colour schemes and the use of graphic techniques that we previously thought of as only belonging on the printed page or a computer screen have enjoyed success in ways we never would have imagined.
On a big canvas!
Armed with this new found love of working big we have designed the interior and exterior of a successful coffee shop,
produced various exhibition and vehicle livery designs and more recently compiled marketing briefs, detailing the interior and exterior design specifications for the frozen food chain COOK.
