Red likes: huntin’ shootin’ ‘n’ fishin’ Cletus likes: Jambalya, Crawfish Pie and the Bayou
Please help Red and Cletus raise money for The Prostate Cancer Charity and the Institute of Cancer Research. You can donate online at: http://mobro.co/remedycreative
Thanks y’all
Oh no, did we really agree to this?!
One week in, and we’re getting odd looks from strangers in the street (and family members for that matter). Yes, it’s Movember, the month when foolhardy men grow moustaches for a very good cause.
If you would like to help us raise a load of money as well as a smile, please visit http://uk.movember.com/ hit the ‘donate’ button in the main navigation bar, then click the ‘TO A TEAM’ button and search for Team Remedy.
Come on, if we’re prepared to go around looking like this, the least you can do is sponsor us for a few quid!
Now before I let fly, let’s get one thing straight, I have no problem with slang, colloquialisms or gibberish! In fact I’m rather fond of a bit of dance hall patois and Edward Lear always tickles my funny bone. Language should be fun after all.
No, what really gets my goat are those insidious little everyday-isms that have sneaked their way into our language in the last 3-4 years. Language that neither make sense nor makes me smile. Surely it should do one or the other – preferably both.
Am I really the only one in the queue at Starbucks whose skin crawls when someone says “Can I get a Latté to go?”. Seriously, if I were the Barista, I would have to protest, “No, I’m the one working here, I’ll GET it for you, all you have to do is pay for it and drink it”.
Do you see what I mean. It’s as ridiculous as asking an electrician if you can do the wiring.
Another one that makes me see red (no scrap that, it makes me shake my head and want to end it all), is the phrase ‘LOL’. Don’t get me wrong, I love the sound of laughter, I want the world to be a happy place. However, when laughter is replaced with an acronym, that really is the beginning of the end.
So the question is, am I the only crotchety word lover who gives a damn? Is there anybody out there who wants to join in on the rant? Let me know what phrases get your blood boiling and maybe we can start some kind of movement. Any ideas for what we call ourselves also gratefully received.
Yours not LOL-ing in the slightest.
The ghouls and ghosties are out and about and it’s time to carve the pumpkin.
So you want to do something creative, but you don’t have a degree in sculpture?
Here are a few ideas that you could have a bit of fun with. Some a little challenging, but most even a 9 year old could do – maybe not the one with the 6 inch nails though.
Happy haunting!
Thanks to everyone who took part in our clocks-back competition.
As we’re about to get a free hour (don’t forget, clocks go back on Saturday night), the question was:
What would you do with your free hour if there were absolutely no restrictions?
There were some amusing answers and two or three quite heart warming ones.
The first two pulled out of the hat were:
“I’d take my iPhone back to mediaeval times and pretend to be a wizard”
and
“I’d take my daughter back to meet her great granny – they would have got on famously.”
So, congrats to Phil and Helen. We’ve ordered your copies of the “Time Out” London Eating and Drinking Guide 2012, so they will be winging their way to you asap.
You can see the other entries here
The clocks go back next week, which means traveling home in the dark,
but looking on the bright side, you get a whole hour, gratis, to do anything you want with.
So to celebrate, it’s Remedy competition time again. All we want to know is what you would do with your free hour if there were absolutely no restrictions. Where would you go (in the world, in time, incognito, in a stretch limo…)?
And what would you do for an hour once you were there?
Personally, I’d freak out with Hendrix at Woodstock
Tell us what you’d do and you could win the rather smashing, hot off the press, “Time Out” London Eating and Drinking Guide 2012. This definitive guidebook covers over 1,000 London restaurants, cafés, gastropubs and restaurants. It’s packed with reviews by Time Out’s team of anonymous experts who have ‘eaten their discriminating ways across London’.
We have 2 copies up for grabs, just keep your entry within the realms of decency please.
How to enter:
Leave your answer as a response to this blog post with your name and email address (see below) or send us a tweet @remedycreative. We’ll stick the entries in a hat and the first two out will be the winners
!
Terms & Conditions:
1. Entrants consent for their name to be used for publicity purposes by Remedy Creative Ltd. in printed and/or online formats.
2. Remedy Creative will not pass on your details to any third party without your prior consent, but your name will be shown on our blog.
3. The closing date is midnight 26th October 2011.
4. The winners will be informed via email or Twitter (depending on their choice of submission) on 27th October 2011.
Remedy was recently invited to present at the Not For Profit Technology Show in London, alongside James Higgott from The Royal Marsden Hospital. We wanted to impart some insider knowledge to not for profit organisations on how to make the most of their relationships with external designers, specifically, when working on web projects.
Our presentation was split into three sections – preparing a brief, choosing an agency and getting the design right.
Here is an overview of the first section (with two more blog posts to follow):
Great work comes from a great brief
It’s very rare that great creative work comes out of a hastily put-together brief. Like the foundations of a building, get this bit right and the design and build won’t be in vain. So where do you start? What will a design agency need to be able to deliver a great website?
1) Background information
Assume the design agency knows nothing about your brand, or even your sector for that matter. Arm them with everything they need to get to grips with what you do and what you are all about: annual reports, brochures, flyers, web addresses, press clippings and any industry insights that may be of use.
2) Clear objectives
What is it you hope to achieve with your website? This could be a fairly lengthy list, but you should prioritise. Perhaps you want visitors to sign-up to a newsletter, download resources, make online purchases, recommend your organisation to colleagues, follow you on Twitter or request a quote.
3) Target audiences
Who are they? What makes them tick? Why might they want to do business with you?
Do you have any useful stats? If the majority of potential customers are 18-24 with a love of social media, or if they are chief execs who do a lot of their business at the 19th hole, the designer will need to know. The more an agency knows about your audiences, the more likely they are to come up with a design that resonates with them.
4) What you want users to think, feel and do?
When someone comes to your lovely new website, what should their first reaction be? What do you want them to think about your brand and more importantly, on an emotional level, how do you want your brand to make them feel? And tying in with point number 2, once they have made an emotional connection, what do you want them to do?
5) Tone of voice and brand guidelines
How do you want your brand to come across? Corporate brand leader, no-nonsense professional adviser, an old friend you can rely on…? Every brand has a tone of voice (or at least they should have) and this needs delivering consistently whether online or offline.
Many organisations have a set of brand guidelines. Unfortunately many of them are kept in bottom drawers and not referred to. Don’t let this be the case with you and your brand. If there are rules when it comes to using your logo, your design agency will need to know. Similarly, do you have corporate colours, typefaces, a library of up-to-date imagery? If so, your new website should follow your guidelines (unless of course, it’s time for a brand refresh).
6) Competitors
In the Not-for-Profit world, these are known as ‘other players’. Whatever you call them, unless your brand’s offering is totally unique, there will be other organisations out there that are vying for the attention of the same customers/members/donors. So who are they, which ones do you admire and why? What can we learn from them? What mistakes are they making that your design agency should avoid?
7) Other brands
There may be organisations that do things in a certain way that, although nothing to do with your sector, you admire. Looking at their websites in particular, they may have a visual style that you like, a certain way with language or a particular way of organising content. It may be more of a ‘brand values thing’. Which brands have an attitude or personality that you might aspire to be like – John Lewis, Volkswagen, Apple, Shake ‘n’ Vac…
8) Content and functionality
Content is, 99 times out of 100, the one thing that will delay the launch of a new website. Whether you are supplying draft copy; fully edited, perfectly formed, search engine optimised copy or a list of bullet points, your site is going nowhere without content. The real need for this may come further down the line in the design process, but nevertheless, it’s best not to leave this right until the 11th hour.
Functionality however, will need to be addressed right up front. A design agency will need to know what your new website has to do. Will it be collecting data? Will it integrate with existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software? Will there be E-commerce functionality, members’ log-in areas, blogs, social media integration…? Without this information, the agency won’t be able to give you an accurate quote or get close to a design solution that makes sense.
9) Measuring success
Looking ahead; the new website has launched, the marketing department are proud to show it off to the world and the competition are green with envy. The question you need to ask yourself way before any of this has happened, is what will you consider to be a successful interaction? For many clients it will be orders or enquiries, but equally it could be Google rankings, the number of users who sign up to support a campaign or a Gold D&AD award. If you know what success will look like to you from the outset, this will definitely help to steer the design process.
10) Hosting
Who will be hosting your website and what kind of server will you need? This will be dictated largely by the amount of traffic you expect and how ‘mission critical’ your website will be.
11) Deadline
Websites take time. Well-planned, beautifully designed, carefully executed websites take longer. If you need to hit a certain date in your calendar, this should be in your brief, but schedules have to be realistic.
12) Budget
The $64,000 (wouldn’t that be nice) question. It would save a lot of time and effort for client and agency alike, if along with all the other nuts and bolts, a realistic budget was part of the brief. Whether you decide to share your budget or not, having a figure agreed internally is essential. At this juncture, it’s worth remembering that as with all things commercial, with website design you get what you pay for and invariably, a £500 website will look unsurprisingly like a £500 website.
If you don’t have the resources or expertise in-house to do some or all of the above, any design agency worth its salt will be able to help guide you through the process, but the more of the groundwork you can do, the better. Even if you are able to write a great brief yourself, the objectivity that a decent agency brings to the table means that you should be prepared for them to challenge, distil and even re-write parts of it.
Should you have a brief you want to discuss, or if you need help putting one together, we’d love to hear from you.
You can download the talk in PDF format including slides from James Higgott at www.ioftech.org.uk/resources
We were really happy when Build Africa asked us to help put together a fundraising film for
their annual gala dinner earlier this month.
The evening raised enough money to completely rebuild Miti Mingi Primary School and also
another two schools in rural Kenya. We reckon the star of the film had something to do with it.
Millions trust it every day. If you’ve ever been to London, you’ve read it. Over the past eight decades it has become a British design classic.
I’m talking about the London Tube Map. It was originally designed in 1931 by a man called Harry Beck – not a household name by any means. Born in 1902, Beck was an Underground electrical draughtsman, who was tired of the complex and confusing maps of the various Underground railways.
London’s Underground network had rapidly grown from it’s beginnings in 1860 to become congested by the early 1900s, with many different private and public railways constructed under the city. In 1933, the government forced a merger of all the independent public transport companies in London, to create ‘London Transport’ in an effort to integrate the capital into a single public transport network.
Tube Map, 1908
Back in 1908, it was easy enough to fit the whole Underground network onto a geographically accurate map with streets superimposed on it, but by 1933 it had become increasingly difficult due to railway expansions into the suburbs. Beck realised that because the railways ran below ground, the physical locations of stations were less important. People simply wanted to know how to get from one station to another.
Tube Map, 1926
Beck approached London Transport with a new concept for a map of the entire Underground network, with the stations equally spaced and each line colour-coded. The map wasn’t geographically accurate, nor did it have a street map superimposed on it. At first, London Transport rejected the map, citing it as too radical, but in 1932 a trial run of 500 copies were printed. It proved hugely successful with Londoners, prompting a first batch of 700,000 to be printed in 1933, with a large second batch required after just one month.
Beck’s original Tube Map, 1933
After Beck’s success with the map, he continued to develop the design for London Transport until 1960, when he fell out with the Underground’s publicity officer. Beck then fought to retain control of the map. The Victoria line was added to the map later in 1960 without his approval, and after further rejections for a new design he created, Beck realised that he would never work for London Transport again. However, he continued to draw other versions of the map until he passed away in 1974.
Beck’s tube map has influenced metro, bus and tram maps all over the world ever since it was first printed. Over the years, there have been subtle changes to Beck’s map but the core design remains the same as that in 1933.
Tube Map, 2011
The simplicity and logic behind Beck’s tube map are the reasons why we still trust and love the design today. In 2009 it was declared a British design classic, where it was voted second only to Concorde, and was printed as part of a special edition set of Royal Mail stamps.
Royal Mail ‘British Design Classics’ stamps, 2009
Why is Harry Beck one of my creative heroes? Short answer: Function before form. Long answer: Because he took something incredibly complex and created a compellingly simple and easy to use piece of design that millions of people use every day.
You can see Harry Beck’s work for yourself at the London Transport Museum, Covent Garden, or alternatively have a read of Ken Garland’s book, ‘Mr Beck’s Underground Map’ (1994).
We’ve put up with the sirens, the 4pm stink (goodness knows what that was) and the wall of fag smoking auxiliary workers. So it’s with a cheer, we’re saying goodbye to the Kent & Sussex.
This little time-lapse movie was taken on the day the hospital officially closed. Over the coming weeks we’ll put together another movie of it being pulled down. I wonder if Fred Dibnah would have approved?