We’ve launched our latest website this week: Six Summer Saturdays for the Birmingham Hippodrome theatre.
For the first time this Summer, Birmingham Hippodrome will be animating the city by presenting highlights from the best in outdoor theatre.
Whether you’re on a day out with family and friends, enjoying a shopping trip or dining in an outdoor cafe, we’ll be bringing performances directly to you.
The following weeks will welcome raving grannies on souped up shopping trolleys, giant kangaroos bouncing around the city, classic puppetry, contemporary mime, juggling tennis players and international acrobats!
Sarah from the Hippodrome approached us to design and build the website with existing artwork. With only a week to build the website we got straight to work and the Hippodrome are really happy with the results.
View the project…
SMILE began trading officially on the 1st July 2009. Here we are one year on. What’s happened? What’s going to happen? At the end of this article, we’ll be announcing a big change to this blog too.
July
We had a great start, we got moved in with our essentials and landed a Jewellery Exhibition catalogue which was heaps of fun to do. Towards the end of the month we were asked to create a brand, and distribution method for a new educational tool.
August
The hot weather disappeared and had our first taste of go-karting because we were pretty dead during this time. In September we had our first magazine appearance in Design Week. This was a huge leap forward in marketing for SMILE.
October
Personally, October was the most memorable month for me. I went to Berlin to meet Erik Spiekermann. The whole trip was amazing. On a different note, this is when Sue made the fatal move of purchasing a Blackberry - and yes, she regrets it.
We also got a mention on Form Fifty Five which took our website down because of all the visitors - we had to upgrade.
November
Typographic Horizons took place in November, where I exhibited some work and made some great friends. This was followed by a spell of trips to London.
December
December was a good one. Tight deadlines made ever tighter by Christmas.
January
We sat down and had a big chat. We refer to this a lot now. Why? Well, put simply, we wanted to up our game. We started making changes to the way the studio ran and our individual workflows.
February
February is most famous for my birthday (clearly) followed closely by the rewards that were coming from our January chat. We saw real profitability in the studio and knew that we were onto something.
March
The birth of the Created in Birmingham shop fell in March - this one surprised us - it was like an unexpected bonus at the end of the month! We also got featured on minimalsites.com which is still giving us referring hits today.
April
We were struggling to keep up with demand at the CiB shop. We bought hundreds of frames and had to use all 3 cars to get them to the studio.
May
I exhibited some experimental typography at Not my Type in the heart of Birmingham. The exhibition was noted on the Creative review blog.
June
We’ve been busy finding new work, and completing briefs for some great clients.
All of this and I haven’t really talked about the work!
We’ve done so much it’s hard to know where to start, so I’m not going to. I can’t sum up SMILE in one blog post but this is just the start for us. We’re looking to work with new clients that identify with our principles and ideas on design.
Where are we now?
Our latest venture is design for mobile platforms, especially Apple iOS. We have a pool table that is a favourite lunchtime pursuit. The studio is full of collected design goodies, we have more filing systems than we ever imagined and we’ve learnt a heck of a lot about business.
More than anything else, the whole operation feels more slick. The systems that we deployed as graduating students have allowed us to upscale at a pace that suits us and easily too. We’ve also invested heavily in new online tools to make the business side of life easier too. 12 months ago we didn’t have the foggiest about CRM - now we have custom workflow rules set up to make selling hassle free.
We’re looking forward to year two, we hope you are too. We have big plans for ‘10/’11 so if you have a design problem and want to work with us to solve it - contact us!
The SMILE blog is changing
We love our blog - and we hope you do too. When we set up a year ago, we made a promise to post three times a week with consistent themes and by each member of the team. 12 months on, we are no longer able to keep that promise. The truth is that we’re too busy to fulfil that promise.
As a result we’ll be changing the way that we blog. We will make no promises that we will blog regularly or on a consistent theme. It’s important that we keep it fun to do, as well as relevant. We’ll try and put something online at least once a week and keep it around studio life or new work.
Ahhhhh, my Anglepoise Lamp obsession is returning!! I think it’s probably about time I started my search for another one. I’m not so keen on getting brand new ones (although I do have one) I like the charm of the old ones, and I especially want a wall mounted one! Anyone out there have one?! Please.
Check out the fruit of my labour yesterday! I spent a fairly busy day sorting out a typographic filing system. Sad I know!! But it also (in my opinion) looks very cool.
I searched for my favourite typeface beginning with each letter of the alphabet. A was Avenir, B baskerville, and quite obviously, H was Helvetica!
I then printed each letter and began the painstaking task of tracing each letter onto a box. So we now have thirteen letter combo boxes, numbered boxes 1-9 and a personal box each.
All that’s left to do now is to begin filing away all of the paper work we’ve been collecting for the past twelve months! Oh joy!!
Sadly, the CiB shop is now closed. We had a great time selling our stuff in there and we’ll miss all the friendly staff faces.
On a more upbeat note, our prints are still available at a different outlet! Ethos is a flower and gift shop in Brindley Place and they now stock SMILE prints!
