May 1, 2019
April was a wonderful combination of chocolate and long weekends, but we still managed to be as creative as always. Our avid readers (hi mum!) will know that we have been working on the Carmichael Fisher rebrand for the last few months and have been dying to show you the finished website. Well you are in luck as it went live this month, we also look at changes in the Fanatic team, our trip to Brighton and how display marketing is helping our clients brand awareness.
Carmichael Fisher Live!
Carmichael Fisher has been a massively enjoyable project for the studio, stretching across all departments of Fanatic from design to development to digital marketing. This project gave our teams the freedom to push creativity and break new ground on the web development side of the project with a focus on animation/transitions. This focus on motion throughout the site helps enforce the core values and diversity that was injected into the brand from the start of the project. Overall we are extremely satisfied with the outcome of the rebrand and web build and are looking forward to rolling out more work with Carmichael Fisher in future. Below we have put together a walk through of the site, but you can see it first hand here.
Display Ads
Our digital marketing team are always on the look out to help clients promote their products, services and brand as a whole. Being seen online is the basis of SEO and PPC, if someone can’t find you they can’t become a customer. We also offered a bespoke approach to each of our clients, some wish to increase brand awareness, others are looking for bookings and enquiries. Our approach is tailored to these goals, and we make recommendations in line with budget limitations.
Recently one of our clients wanted to increase they website traffic and brand awareness, but only commit a small budget to test the waters. Looking at their website and services, we recommended display ads, offering a lower cost per action then the standard search ads, it also gave us the chance to utilise some of their stunning photography.
The results were fantastic and in a month they received over 1 million impressions! It is difficult to imagine this level of brand awareness in any other form of marketing with a month for less then a few hundred pounds. The ads also led to 50 enquires. One of the adverts was for wedding venues bookings and had a cost per conversion of just £3.29!
Fanatic T-Shirt Design
With Spring on the horizon and the sun teasing us with the odd cameo, we can finally start wearing t-shirt again (admittedly only for short periods of time) and that means it is the perfect time for us to launch our yearly t-shirt design competition! Everyone in the studio has the chance to put forward a design, with this year’s theme being Craft (one of Fanatic’s core values).
With such a creative team we can’t wait to see this year’s entries. While the contest is only for the studio team we will be asking the public for votes across our social media channels. If you take the time to vote you will be entered into a prize draw to win one of the winning t-shirts!
36 Days of Type
Last month saw the return of the yearly 36 Days of Type challenge where artists, designers or typographers challenge themselves to render a letter of the alphabet everyday for 36 days (including numbers). This challenge sees artists stretch their creativity to create some astounding pieces ranging from 3D models, hand drawn letters, vector art or just about any style you could imagine. It’s a great way for designers to try out new things and explore other artists’ work at the same time.
Above are some of the amazing designs Sam created for the 36 Days of Type Challenge. If you would like to see the full month’s worth of his creations then head over to his Instagram page.
Tom Q&A
In last months Scrapbook we announced that Tom from our design team would be leaving Fanatic. We were able to ask him a few questions about his time in the studio and what we is looking forward to in his new role.
1. What is your highlight of being at Fanatic?
From the very beginning I was trusted enough to work on my own briefs and speak directly to clients – because of this I learned so much in a really short amount of time and I don’t think I’d be at the slightly above average standard I’m at now if it wasn’t for this. Ian never saw me as a typical ‘junior’ so I had a really positive experience and it’s stayed positive throughout my time here.
2. What’s your favourite design?
It has to be the Carmichael Fisher rebrand and website design – it was massively refreshing to see a project stay close to what we envisioned from the beginning, and the team involved have been a great bunch to work with. I think this project has stepped up the quality of our work and this will continue to progress over the years. The website’s gone live today which is my last day, so it’s nice to have it wrapped up in time to celebrate it with everyone!
3. What are you most looking forward to in your new job?
Starting from scratch again and learning as much as possible from new challenges, opportunities and clients.
4. When did you first want to become a graphic designer?
I did 4 years of graphic design training before going to uni (national diploma & a HND) and it wasn’t until my last year of my HND things clicked into place and I started to love design and animation. I studied animation at uni so I was always on the fence as to whether or not I wanted to be a graphic or motion designer but working at Fanatic has been more or less 50/50 which is exactly where I want to be. I’ve always been into art but I was convinced I was going to become a tattooist until I realised I’m too delicate
5. Is there a particular designer who inspires you?
My reflection. There’s several designers that inspire me, so it’s more so the design community in Bristol that I find most inspiring, but if I had to choose I’d have to say either Gavin Strange (Director at Aardman) or Kate Moross (Founder of Studio Moross)..
6. What’s the one thing you will miss about working at Fanatic?
Being a valued member of the team has been great, I’ll miss working with everyone. And also the 30 second walk to Aldi for lunch.
Bright SEO 2019
Joe and James from our Digital Marketing team made the bi-annual pilgrimage to the Brighton SEO conference. This is the largest event of its type in the UK and attracts speakers from all over the world. The guys split up to listen to talks on their specialities, James taking a more technical approach with talks on site structure for better indexation and Winning effective rich snippets while Joe split his time between PPC and CRO. Both came back with a head full ideas and will be working on implementing these into their current and future tasks.
The Web Development Team Expands
Our technical team don’t get many mentions in the Scrapbook. But this month we welcomed a new member to the team – Ellie.
Before starting at Fanatic I was freelancing, helping out a range of people in both web dev and brand development. I did this for around a year, as after graduating from my degree in Digital Media at UWE I didn’t know what part of the industry I wanted to go into. My degree involved a range of things from graphic design and UX design, to creative coding and audio-visual production. Freelancing allowed me to explore these and I ended up working with some interesting people, building their web presence with the different skills I developed at uni and realised this was the route I wanted to take. I’ve already learnt so much in the last few weeks, and I’m looking forward to developing my skills even further at Fanatic, hopefully bringing my ideas to both the design and development aspects.
