Studio Snapshot
It has been another extremely busy month in the Fanatic studio, as our team and work load continues to grow. Our glass roofed studio is a hot place in summer, so the team is powered by a good stock of ice-creams in our freezer! We’re extremely proud of the work we are producing in our design, development and digital marketing teams, and we can share little snapshots below.
We welcomed the Aqua Restaurant Group marketing team for a day of workshopping ideas and refining strategies, as well as a tasty lunch and a few beers with the whole team. With a brand new global estate of 19 websites now live, the digital team are pushing them tactically across paid and organic channels to build bookings with great success.
We’ve also been finding time for visiting conferences including Varnfest, Experimentation Elite and a Klaviyo specific. Our team really enjoyed learning about new industry trends, best practice, sharing ideas with other professionals and have returned full of enthusiasm to use what they have learnt.
We also welcomed David, an experienced Paid Search specialist, and are looking forward to welcoming another member of the Digital team, later this month.
What's new in the
Design team?
Fanatic T-Shirt Competition
It’s the time of year again where we run the Fanatic T shirt competition. Each year we come up with a theme and everyone in the team submits a design, which is supposed to be anonymous but styles of specific people shine through making it generally obvious who has designed what!! This year there were entries from the designers, developers and from the digital team members, so it is a chance for everyone to get creative and work on something that is a little different from our usual day to day work.
The Winning Entry
This year our theme was Retro Gen X Tech, aligning with the Tech from the youth of let’s say, ‘the older half’ of our team. Entries covered tapes, CDs, early Macs and game consoles.
But the winner this year was Annie, for the second time, who smashed it with her retro ghetto blaster and Fanatic Mixtape.
The T-shirts are now being screen printed by Fyah Fly, and we’re looking forward to taking delivery so we can add to our growing collection of Fanatic T shirts from the last 6 years!
LVP - 3D Model
Recently we have worked with Lime Venue Portfolio to produce an animated representation of the ‘Meeting of the Future’. This project involved us designing and building in 3D the perfect meeting experience of the future – including things such as accessibility considerations, unique experiences, future way-finding technology and much more!
The project resulted in us producing an entire conference centre with breakout rooms which all had specific details and features included.
We loved seeing this come together and are really pleased with the outcome – which Lime Venue Portfolio recently featured at The Meetings Show!
See what the Development
team have been up to
Carbon Zero
This month there has been a lot of conversation about Green Hosting. Mary also attended a MeetUp where the subject of Carbon Zero tech was the main topic. Mary did a great presentation to our studio team on what was discussed. She shared that the global emissions created by data centres is estimated at around 3% of all global emissions, meaning that the tech industry is a higher emitter than the airline industry which is at about 2.4%.
More of our clients, over time, are building to a Carbon Net Zero target, either targeting B Corp or as part of their general strategies. So Net Zero hosting is a commonly discussed topic at Fanatic.
The issue we have here though is that a green web server is not the end of the story. A modern website can be seen as the backbone of a client’s ‘tech stack’, which pushes and pulls assets and data, fetches content and pushes sales or leads in and out of back office apps which are then all individually cloud hosted. We also push data into the Google architecture, and load fonts from various sources. Sites send emails on other dedicated email platforms, not to mention the security & performance apps running from their own servers and our own stack of tools used to develop and deploy code while maintaining and updating sites.
So in reality an audit and a list of the full functionality that is not immediately obvious from the standard notion of website hosting, needs to be made.
We recently did this for OCS who we are building 17 websites for their global locations, meaning a plan can now be made for moving each aspect to green solutions, in an effort to reach a true Carbon Zero position, and not something that is an over simple ‘tick in a box’ of just the website itself being on a green host.
The latest from the
Digital Marketing team
Backlinks - are they still important?
Backlinks continue to hold significant importance in the realm of search engine optimisation. Backlinks serve as indicators to search engines of a website’s credibility, authority, and popularity.
When reputable websites link to your site, it increases the value and relevance of your content, leading to higher rankings in search engine results. Backlinks remain essential for acquiring organic links through valuable content, relationship building, and guest blogging.
It’s important to note that purchasing links, participating in link farms or schemes, and using hidden links are unethical practices that can lead to penalties. At Fanatic valuable content and quality relationships come first. We only work ethically to make sure we gain high-quality traffic from our backlinking methods.
Introducing David
How have you found life at Fanatic so far?
Great! In my first few weeks, I’ve been busy meeting with all of our clients and had some interesting conversations so far allowing me to understand their needs and align paid media strategies to improve performance where possible.
What were you doing before Fanatic?
I have just returned from 6 months in Central and South America. Before that, I was working in a Specialist Paid Media agency
What made you choose Fanatic?
Having spoken with Ian, Milly and other members of the team in my interviews, I could see this was a place I wanted to be a part of! A friendly agency where everyone supports each other is where I excel
What have you enjoyed most so far?
I previously have worked in specialist paid media agencies, it has been really interesting to start to gain an understanding of other areas of digital marketing and how everything fits to achieve growth for our clients
What’s an interesting fact about you?
I went on a two-day hike up an active volcano in Guatemala!
Our team have been visiting..
Our team have been visiting..Ian visits the Tate Modern
Lichtenstein's Whaam Painting
Ian recently took time to visit the Tate Modern to see the original of Lichtenstein’s Whaam. Drawing, painting and design were Ian’s main interests since primary school, but at 14 he came across pop art and especially Roy Lichtenstein’s giant comic book art inspired pieces. It was a series of paintings made inspired by WHAAM! that started Ian down the path of studying illustration, and Graphic Design at university.
He says “what I love about all the great paintings in the galleries is getting very close to the brush strokes. You can see the artist’s hand movements and the blemishes which could be seen as little accidents but together when standing back make a sharp polished image. Lichtenstein’s comic frames are a great example with the drawn image visible behind the paint when up close. You can see where paint has overlapped and where the artist had to stop a line to refill the brush with paint. The dots representing the printing press (the symbol of mass reproduction which places this work in the pop art movement) are sometimes smudged by the stencil, which shows us that this was made by a human hand. When reproduced you just see the image, but up close it feels like Lichtenstein himself is standing there with you!!”
Ian Collis-Smith