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All about typography

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!

Turning ideas into business seminar

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

Innovation is the way forward

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