Studio Snapshot
In an effort to mix up our regular team Zoom meetings, we’ve started breaking off into our individual Design, Development and Digital Marketing teams on a Wednesday. This means we can go into more depth about industry news and trends and talk about how we can apply what we’ve learned to our client projects.
Each team is then taking turns to do a “stand up” each month, just like we did back when we were in the office (so long ago!). This has helped us to share knowledge across the business and create even more impressive work. See above for Phil’s demonstration of Umbraco.
What's new in the
Design team?
Eco-minded design for ERT
We were tasked with creating an identity for a series of pieces of collateral all about ERT’s position and goals regarding the Green Deal. This is a massive topic within the industry and many of the ERT members have voiced their commitments and goals in tackling their effects on the climate.
We created a collection of documents including a Long Industry Paper, Highlights Paper and Case Study Archive. These were all united using a 3D city graphic we created highlighting the various sectors within the papers. This gave a cool, modern and clean appearance for the collateral, which we are continuing to work with on digital outcomes in the not-too-distant future.
See what the Development
team have been up to
Our Developer Phil has been working on a wellbeing website build
I recently finished work on RA Group’s Ways to be Well website which was built using the most recent version of the Umbraco content management system. One of the great things about Umbraco is the way its Grid Editor feature allows content managers to build their own custom rows, add them to a web page in the back office, and preview these changes in real time.
This essentially means that I could just build a number of row templates and the designers were able to populate those templates, configure the styling and organise them in any order on a page, building up the website that way. This helped reduce development time and has made the site easier to change in the future.
The latest from the
Digital Marketing team
Google updates in action
The team has been looking at Passage Indexing, which was a Google update introduced at the end of last year. It’s all about improving results for long-tail search queries, and involves Google determining what different passages in a page rank for.
For example, our client Effect Doctors are ranking in “position 0” for the term ‘Myers’ Cocktail’, which is the name of a popular vitamin IV drip. This means the Myers’ Cocktail page appears at the top of the SERP as a featured snippet, pulling out a brief description of what it is.
When a user clicks on the link, instead of the page opening at the top as usual, it drops down to the section that Google thinks is most relevant and highlights it in yellow. This way, the search engine is helping its users find the information they need in the simplest way possible.
We've been listening to
This month our Graphic Designer Ryan has been listening to In My Blood by Vitamin String Quartet (Bridgerton soundtrack, anyone?!)
What's inspired us this month?
20 years of Fanatic
Having experienced a startup straight from graduation, then working within a large creative agency, I was left with an ambition to start my own creative agency. It would be driven by a passion for powerful graphic design and a goal to build a well-respected brand, known for the quality of its work. It would have a down to earth approach and would respect the people within it, giving both the opportunity and the credit to the professionals within the team for their hard work in delivering quality projects and generating happy clients.
We have many client relationships that have spanned over our 20 years, and now work nationally and within Europe. We still enjoy the fresh challenges and working with the latest design, development and marketing techniques. We love the individual skills and passion each person brings to the team, and enjoy seeing people grow and become fanatical, as part of Fanatic!
Read more about Ian’s journey with Fanatic here.
Ian, Managing Director and Founder
Ryan, Graphic Designer