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.
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!
This weeks coffee table is adorned with spare nuts and bolts, instructions and a lovely little promo piece that we’ve been given.
This week we decided that it’s time we up our organisational game.
So we combined an archive system with a new desk which has given my work area a new lease of life. I have a more private section behind the archive now which will be great for getting away from the computer.
The archive is a collection of alphabetically organised boxes in which there are smaller boxes for our clients. It’s a central storage location for collected inspiration and printed samples for our clients - super useful stuff for our growing list.
We had a few of these Bass Festival embossed booklets which are well put together. I’m really looking forward to The Mostly Jazz Festival, so this was a nice teaser to receive.
Last week on The Coffee Table I wrote about “Not My Type”, which has since been featured on Creative Review. This week I want to show you a little bit about my process.
I was originally dead set on doing a 3-dimesional N with intense drop shadows or cutouts in the floor. A little something like this…
But really, this wasn’t that thoughtful. I liked the cleanliness and colour and I’d spent a lot of time on the 3D element to it, so decided to keep that. I wanted to experiment with the realms of readability. I wondered how far I could push the boundaries without losing the ability for it to be understood. I kept pushing and pushing - some of which were just utterly ridiculous - but decided on an exploded view.
I liked the results but knew it needed more. I decided to use an isometric grid system to keep the 3D feel, but put in tricks that meant that the image couldn’t possibly be set in 3 dimensions. I wanted the audience to question the realms in which it was set.
Each point leads to another along the grid system. No single point is left out. I enjoyed the challenge of this game I had put myself into and it wasn’t easy either but the result was a nicely balanced composition that holds true to its questioning nature.
