We’ve sent out a number of pink Santa hats to find out how you like to wear yours and are showcasing them all in our Christmas gallery. Take a peek and send us yours! www.synergycreative.co.uk/show-us-your-santa.html
The design team enjoyed a night of Typography at an event hosted by the South West Design Forum at the Arnolfini in Bristol. Speaking at the event were David Quay and Jeremy Tankard.
Jeremy, a graduate of Central St.Martins and The Royal College of Art took us through his process of designing his latest type superfamily ‘Trilogy’ inspired by William Goldings novel ‘To The Ends of The Earth’. This consisted of three individual fonts – one a Sans, an Egyptian font and the other a fatface script. We got a really good look inside his world when he showed us his sketchbooks and explained the intricacies of type design and the complications that came with designing three different faces.
Then we got to meet Amsterdam based type designer David Quay. David and his business partner set up their company ‘The Foundry’ in 1990. The Foundry develop custom typefaces, marks and logotypes for companies including: a special font for Yellow pages, corporate fonts for British Gas, NatWest and signage typefaces for the Lisbon Metro system in Portugal. David spoke about how he created a custom type family to be used as the new signage and orientation system for the City of Bath. He took his inspiration from the existing fonts scattered around the streets of Bath.
And we got a free book! (see pictures). Thanks for letting us into your world Jeremy and David!
Clair and Zamira attended an interesting and inspiring event last week on ‘How to take your business from micro to global’ by the Institute of Directors and Chartered Institute of Marketing at UWE. It was a set of three short presentations by three incredibly inspiring individuals from a new start up to a growing enterprise and an internationally recognised and award winning brand name.
The first speaker was a young Entrepreneur called Griff Holland. In 2009 Griff and his business partner launched Friska, a healthy fast food restaurant based in Bristol. Griff spoke a lot about the Friska brand and the strong culture that they want to evolve and develop. Griffs keys to success are “stick to your idea, don’t settle for anything else and work with great people!” Well, we know where we’ll be going for lunch next!
Next was well known entrepreneur Mark Mason. Mark founded Mubaloo in Bristol in 2008 and has grown the business rapidly. Mubaloo is now the UKs largest developer of mobile phone apps for smart phones and tablets with offices in the US, Finland and Germany. He had some very insightful things to say about the ins and outs of running a business – his top tips for success were:
- Always employ people better than yourself
- If you fail to plan, you plan to fail
- Lose the client, you lose the staff
- Get shareholders agreements set up as soon as possible
- Will it be fun, Will it make us famous and is it Profitable? If a project isn’t 2 out of the 3, then it’s not worth doing! Oh yes… and don’t work with mad people!
The third and final speaker was Miles Bullough, Head of Broadcast and Executive Producer at Aardman Animations. Miles is Responsible for the development, finance and production of Aardman’s television series and specials.
Miles spoke a lot about at what point in a company’s growth does creativity start to become diluted? He mentioned that Aardman make a conscious effort to encourage their staff in all departments to show off their creativity. They organise an internal exhibition every year for staff to show off any creative work they have produced in their own time.
Miles’ philosophy is to embrace madness, get rid of the blockers and never stop trying to push creativity!
Thank you very much to the University of the West of England, the Institute of Directors and the Chartered Institute of Marketing for a brilliant event.
10 November 2011
Chartered Institute of Marketing Annual Conference
We attended the Chartered Institute of Marketing annual conference this week with the theme being all about innovation. There were some great seminars and speakers and some of the nuggets we took away were:
* A nice quote by Steve Jobs – innovation needs money, people and discipline (lots of discipline)!
* Rolls-Royce Vice President of Strategic Marketing talked about really understanding the problems people have – they feel their purpose is to ‘transport people from a-b by air’ and their focus is always their responsibility for carrying all the people that are flying in planes with their engines at any one time (200,000 passengers). Robert talked all about the importance of integrated product teams with marketing, design, programme management and finance.
* Nick Baggot ran through getting data to work for you and how best to find out about your customers, personalising their experience then building engaging campaigns and integrating social media.
* Paul Sloane was a fantastic speaker and gave an entertaining talk about using innovation to focus on growth and offered six useful tips.
* Cisco shared their innovation programmes with employees all around virtual brainstorms and suggestion schemes.
* Finally Daniel Rowles (CIM) and Shuva Saha from Google gave an update on digital. Daniel is always a great speaker where you leave with heaps of things to go and try (thank you Daniel!). Shuva showed us two fantastic examples of brands using digital to differentiate themselves. Both videos on YouTube so check out the links below.
One is how the Listerine brand used ‘make your own video’ along with a fantastic concept to raise awareness of their brand in a funny way for the nature of the product they offer.
Secondly how Tesco in Korea have thought really different using digital to raise their market share in Korea without increasing the number of stores and therefore overheads they have.
(Listerine mouth vs life)
(Tesco South Korea)
A great day all round. If you’d like a copy of our detailed notes from the day, email gemma@synergycreative.co.uk
We were honoured to be able to see Willie Walsh (previously CEO of British Airways and now of the merged BA/Iberia airline AIG) talk at the UWE in Bristol.
We have to say, the guys up at the UWE business school really do have the best black book, they’re speakers are fabulous.
We managed to speak to Willie Walsh at the end – what did we learn from him?
* Don’t let go of your direct dialogue with employees
* Keep direct comms channels always open
* Be open and honest – don’t let problems fester – deal with them
* Your manager’s are key – they must be visible and face to face dialogue between managers and employees is essential
* Talk directly to your people at any opportunity
It was great to meet him – a very open, warm, funny Irish man who said he always worked outside of his comfort zone.
We went to a great seminar last night by Jonathan Phillips of Coca-Cola to hear all about his thinking on their intranet. With 13,500 employees, 40+ brands and 5 languages he’s got his work cut out for him. It was great to hear a technical talk in easy to understand Plain English (thx Jonathan) and we got to hear about their intranet plans for 2015. Nuggets we took away which we thought we’d share:
- Boundaries are being blurred – finding that intranets, extranets and internets will begin to blur/merge
- Make sure you remain inclusive – not everyone out there wants to share in the new ‘social world’ and not everyone likes to receive their comms digitally – be mindful of this. In particular think of people remotely and be mindful to offer choice
- If your CEO is not a natural blogger or isn’t that interested in doing this (some dont like the idea!), then rather than ‘force this or ghost write it’ ask the CEO to comment on other people’s blogs – it will feel more genuine
- Location is the future – also called Web3 zero – intranets are developing so they’ll know where you are logging on from and where you are (via GPS). Why is this good? You can be log on to the intranet and see events relevant to the location you’re in (for example if hot desking), you can receive job vacancies in your company relevant to your location. You can build quick teams based on your skills and location on a particular day building virtual teams straight away – Credit Suisse are doing this now.
Read more about intranets with Jonathans blog which you can find at http://intranetizen.com/
A really good evening – thanks everyone.
Great to see the outdoor advertising poster hoarding we designed for Aster to promote their new homes development.
We enjoyed a lovely day this week doing a photoshoot for Kirby Sheppard solicitors in Bristol. The photos of the team are going to be used in the new website design we’re designing and building for the team.
As you can tell the Kirby team are models in the making!
The perfect shot
Rolling around on the floor to get the best shot
Kirby Sheppard Solicitors team - models in the making...
Synergy Creative is shortlisted for 6 awards!
We are delighted to hear that we have been shortlisted for several awards for three recent communications projects.
Our Magnificent Seven campaign to creatively communicate Vision and Values to employees has been shortlisted in the CIPR PRide awards for internal communications and the Institute of Internal Communications Awards in the category Best Communication Skills.
The new design for NHS North Bristol’s employee magazine Insite has been shortlisted for the CIPR PRide awards and the Institute of Internal Communications Awards for Best Communication Channels and Best Communication People category.
Finally, we’ve also been shortlisted for our launch of the world’s first talking Freeview digital box, Smart Talk, which we named, branded, marketed and launched nationally.
We’re proud of our fantastic creative team for their achievements and we’re looking forward to the awards ceremonies.
You know how much we love cake, sweets and treats and an excuse to celebrate. Reaching a new milestone, we’re celebrating being five year’s old.
And so much to look forward to – expansion upstairs, two new members of staff and lots of great creative projects to get stuck into.
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