Studio Snapshot
The most exciting news going round the Fanatic studio this month has been the introduction of Aldi’s £3.99 imitation Crocs. Having an Aldi right next door to the Tobacco Factory, we of course had to check them out for ourselves.
Despite being unimpressed with the choice of colours (black or khaki for men, pink or blue and flowery for women – boo, Aldi!), two of the coolest members of the team immediately purchased some. Our walks around the studio are now extremely comfortable.
What's new in the
Design team?
Annie has been working with Bristol City Centre BID, Redcliffe & Temple BID and Broadmead BID to design the Love Bristol Gift card
This scheme aims to support Bristol’s diverse shopping, dining and leisure scenes by promoting local spending. With this in mind, we took an illustrative approach to the design as we wanted the gift card to reflect all of the iconic and diverse parts of the city and be recognisably Bristol. The design includes iconic parts of Bristol including the coloured houses, hot air balloons and the Millennium Square planetarium.
We have also designed collateral for the promotion of the gift card, using elements of the illustration to create flyers, social media posts and digital ads.
Sam and Thomas have been working on the ERT Benchmarking Report
Recently we have worked with ERT to produce a data-heavy report highlighting KPIs from across various themes around the world. This required us to produce many charts and graphs in a stylised way which were also easily readable and clear. These charts and graphs ended up very clean and clearly ERT branded, while still delivering the necessary data/information.
We finalised the document both for print and digital application as well as producing some supporting collateral for social media. This project has pushed our data visualisation process and really allowed us to explore ways to best display data.
See what the Development
team have been up to
Phil has been involved in the development of the ESS Angola site
If I were to ask you ‘What are your top 100 favourite things about the Republic of Angola?’, you might, after balking at the constraints of such a short list, start by giving me a fairly typical example like ‘It has the 23rd biggest Forest Landscape Integrity Index in the world!”. But would you praise Angola for its being the proud home of food catering company ESS Express? I hope so, as we have been tirelessly optimising the site’s performance, so it should be one of the first things which spring to mind.
Part of this optimisation involved things like hosting the website on an African server (allowing requests to be sent and received more efficiently) and creating a multi-language version of each page: one in English and the other in Portuguese. The site was built in Umbraco, which has a load of great tools for building a multi-language variant site, allowing CMS editors to edit using a “split screen view”, building and comparing the two versions of each page side-by-side.
The latest from the
Digital Marketing team
Stathis created a new PPC campaign for Artfarm
Last month we launched a very successful Father’s Day Google Ads campaign for Artfarm’s Durslade Farmshop. Competition in e-commerce is extraordinarily high, especially for seasonal products. On top of that, we only had two weeks until Father’s Day, so we had to act fast, perform solid keyword and competitor research, and create compelling, eye-catching ad copy in just a couple of days.
In the end, we managed to land a very successful PPC campaign with click-through and conversion rates way higher than the industry average, generating a 118.20% return on investment.
Amy has been building out West Country Water Park's social media strategy
Creating WCWP’s social media strategy has been a really fun and exciting project. The brand lends itself so well to social media marketing thanks to its exciting offerings, opportunities for photography and the bold, refreshing brand identity created by our Design team. Our primary aim for the social plan was to expand our reach and make more people aware that the park was opening and that they could book activities. We did this by creating shareable content, using hashtags and interacting with our audience.
One thing that the West Country Water Park team were keen for us to push was the human aspect of the brand. The park is a massive passion project for its creators, and we wanted to get this across in our social media strategy to build trust and loyalty with our audience. To do this, we’ve been highlighting our customers through photography and reviews, as well as holding competitions to give back to them for their support. We’re also planning to do posts showcasing individual members of the WCWP team to show the brilliant people behind the brand.
We've been visiting
We've been visitingAmy took a 3-week trip around the North East of the US and Canada!
Industry News
The explosion of DALL-E
For the last couple of months, one of the hot topics with both developers and artists has been the announcement of Open AI’s DALL-E 2, which generates images from text prompts. Whilst we are waiting for the API to become available, a number of other independent developers have been building their own image generation AI tools: one of the most popular being DALL-E Mini. Upon learning about this from one of our designers, I immediately opened up the site and typed in the most obscure things I could think of. I got back some impressive results.
The first prompt was “Elon Musk getting chased by a giant orange in the style of Edward Hopper”, which I think created a very successful depiction.
Phil, Developer
Amy, Content Lead