June 6, 2019
There are a lot of exciting new projects on the horizon in the Fanatic studio, and our team is continuing to grow rapidly. We have a new member for the digital marking starting in June, you’ll get a chance to know more in the next scrapbook, but for now we will look at everything the team got up to in May.
This month we have the designs from our T-Shirt competition, England Rugby Hospitality work, lots of European travel to see clients, and our digital team has been attending more Word Press Conferences. Also in this months scrapbook we show a very different way of looking at a website.
Annual T-Shirt Competition Winner – Theme: CRAFT
We had entries from all teams across Fanatic, a chance for everybody to flex their creative muscles competing against our designers in the 2019 Fanatic T-Shirt competition. The competition was fierce, with designs being submitted from all divisions of the studio. The Digital Marketing team should get an honourable mention for their entries, who went for a quantity over quality approach, and entered a range of amazing designs. But of course it was the Design team who shone again this year! The whole team get to vote on their favourite, and it was close, Ian had a great design with throw backs to his craft inspirations, but in the end Sam won with this Creative Machine Airfix model design. We are looking forward to receiving the screen printed t-shirts and wearing them in June’s summer sun – wishful thinking!
Here are some of the other design entries
Visual Website Maps – a different way of looking at a website!
The Digital Marketing Team wanted to showcase some often unseen SEO work, for example, every month we run technical checks across our clients’ sites, making sure everything is running like it should, all pages can be found and indexed and pages that are added during each month have been correctly added to the architecture and are contributing to increasing SEO rankings.
One impactful way we do this is with a Visualised Website Map which gives us a very funky looking report. This allows us to see which pages are linked and how a user and Google Bots will access and move around the site.
Three of the most important aspects we can analysis with this map are:
– The website’s internal linking structure
– The link depth of pages
– Word count on pages across the site and locating any thin content
England Rugby Hospitality
Our design team have worked with England Rugby Hospitality in the past, and in their new project, we have created digital banners to advertise England RFU Hospitality for the Quilter internationals and 2019 Six Nations. The team wanted to add a different dimension by incorporating the players overlapping the solid colour – having them pop out and making the action jump out.
New Tobacco Factory Mural
We love working in The Tobacco Factory and being part of the creative community that spills out across north street, where we get the chance to see some awesome pieces of artwork right on our doorstep. This month we saw a fantastic new edition to the area’s local artwork in a 25 ft mural of teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg. The piece was created as part of Summer Editions by Upfest, Europe’s largest street art festival, which has seen creatives decorate the city since mid-April. Not only is it a hugely impressive design, but also a fantastic cause to bring awareness to.
This photo shows the 3 story high painting sprayed directly to the wall. Can it be called Street Art if the Artist Jody’s feet were never actually on the ground. What amazes us is how he can paint so accurately when so close up to the wall high off the ground on a moving platform, and he’s smaller than Greta’s Nose! Check out Jody Here.
Brussels
Many of our clients would have heard us refer to ourselves as the ‘Biggest Small Creative Agency in the World!‘. You may not know this but we do have a global reach, with clients based in a number of countries around the world including the US and Australia. The newest of which is the ERT (the European Round Table of Industrialists) who are based in Brussels. We are in the beginning stages of our work with the ERT in which we will be looking at a reposition and design of their brand, as well as a website design and build. Ian and Rob popped over to visit them in their office and go through some initial design work.
Oslo
Ian has visited another Baxter Storey Restaurant this time in Oslo now completing six site surveys across Europe including 2 in the UK, Galway, Dublin, Brussels and lastly Oslo. Our new ‘FRESH’ branded restaurant design for Baxter Storey’s Cisco Client (design previously shared in last month’s Scrapbook) are being printed and fitted in the coming weeks. As you see from the pictures, it may be a long way to go, but a lovely Baxter Storey Beef Stew on arrival made it all worth while, it is great to have chefs as clients 🙂
WordCamp Conference
Not to be outdone by the Digital Marketing team heading to Brighton SEO last month some of the Development team (including James, who really needs to get some none work related hobbies) headed to WordCamp – the South West’s biggest ever WordPress conference! The weekend conference welcomed numerous speakers who talked about a range of WordPress related topics. The feedback from the team was that it offered them interesting insights into efficient workflow, CSS innovation and a view into the future of WordPress.
25 Years of the Tobacco Factory
This month we celebrated 25 years of the Tobacco Factory, the home of our creative studio. Our quirky redbrick home was originally part of a massive Victorian factory complex, but since the 1980s had been derelict when Imperial Tobacco relocated. At the time no use for the buildings could be found and so they were all set to be demolished. But one single building was saved and in the next 25 years we renovated, redesigned and repurposed into a creative and social hub.
To mark this historic event the Tobacco Factory threw a celebratory weekend which included theatre shows and performances, Upfest and artwork, live music, circus performances and street markets. It was a brilliant weekend, encompassing everything the Tobacco Factory was designed to offer the community.
