Just printed, our new brochure “In Brief”
We are always so busy helping everyone else with their marketing activities that the words ‘cobblers’ and ‘children’ spring to mind when it comes to promoting ourselves!
It’s now been just over a year since our change of name to Greenfisher and we felt it was high time we shared some of our more recent work with everyone.
‘In brief’ says what it is on the tin. We’ve been tackling some really diverse and interesting projects and we hope you’ll be interested to see what we have been up to.
If you would like to receive a copy simply email Stephen@greenfisher.co.uk
Is the logo dead?
Recently there has been much talk in certain circles about whether the logo is dead. Naomi Klein, an award-winning journalist, even wrote an international bestseller entitled ‘No Logo’. This book was aimed firmly at corporate brands and their perceived bully-boy tactics.
‘Was the logo ever alive?’ is the real question. So many businesses think of branding in terms of their logo. What do they really expect from an inanimate object? Yes it can look great but do they really think that this represents their brand? True brands elicit an emotional response. Think Apple or Nike. How many truly achieve that? For the majority of businesses, their brands will never be household names, but that doesn’t mean that branding can’t play an important part. The important thing is recognising the role it can play. Branding is about the experience. It embraces every aspect of interfacing with an organisation – its people, business premises, the services provided or products offered. Prior to experiencing the brand it’s all about the promise – what will it be like to work with this company? This is when communications, language and image play an important part alongside the people delivering the message. And the logo? Well it’s a signature that reminds people of these things. But please don’t expect it to do too much on its own.
Four new websites launched!
We have had a busy end of the year, in the last month we have launched four new website projects… here’s a quick overview of each of them:
Revolution Events are one of our oldest and most prolific clients, we have a great working relationship with them. Our latest website for them showcases their new event, focussing on sustainability within the procurement sector, we designed the logo and branding as well as the site itself. The work is not over once the site is launched, we will be producing print ads, online advertising, event flyers, brochures and programmes. We even create online information portals leading up to the site build, where suppliers and stand builders can find any relevant information they need…
The event site can be found here: www.spssummit.com
Morris & Blunt are a local building contractors, we designed a nice, clean simple website for them to showcase their talents. Our work included designing, programming, location photography and copy writing…
www.morrisandblunt.com
The Colchester Theatre Group needed a new website to showcase their shows and provide information for the actors. We designed a WordPress based website so they can edit and add the content themselves. The design enables them to create feature shots for each show on the home page, all edited and created within the content management system. The site has a lovely feel to it, and it was great to work on an arts-based project.
You can view the site here: www.colchestertheatregroup.org
Just Maternity Jeans was a project created by a good friend of ours, we helped her with the design of her new web project selling a wide range of fashionable maternity jeans. Working with her web developer, we focussed on the branding, website design and illustrative graphics. We also coded the html for the programmer, he took our files and integrated all the back-end functionality for the eCommerce and produced the rest of the pages. Why not give her new business a boost by recommending her site to anyone who’s after ‘nice’ maternity wear!
www.justmaternityjeans.com
A flash site that isn’t
Websites benefit greatly from some movement to add interest and be more dynamic. Generally these moving elements have been created in Flash – sometimes whole sites. However, with the growing importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Flash elements have become more problematic because of their poor performance in these search engines. Now with the rapidly increasing consumption of websites on smartphones such as iPhones and Blackberries as well as other mobile devices such as iPads, there is an even bigger problem – they don’t support Flash technology at all. This is a major problem for web developers especially given that around 95% of online advertising uses Flash. Apple for one remains staunchly anti-Flash, stating that they will not allow the Flash plugins to run on their mobile products, leaving developers with websites that when viewed on the iPhone or iPad do not offer the complete experience they were designed to give.
Web development is an ever-changing beast and we try to keep up with the latest approaches, taking stock of what is happening within the industry and spending time researching new techniques and methods. Whilst we had long-abandoned wholly Flash-based websites, favouring sites built using common CSS/HTML programming with just small sections of Flash to create interest, we recognised that we needed to find a solution to this problem, not least for our own site.
So, we took it upon ourselves to deliver a ‘Flash-less’ website that will be viewed perfectly on all devices, including the iPhone and iPad without losing the motion and dynamic elements we had designed in the first place. The main concerns were the randomly generated case study imagery on the home page, and out entire catalogue of projects. Our new design has utilised some of the new animation techniques that do not require the use of Flash. For those of you with an inclination to wear an anorak, a new breed of Java Script called JQuery is the driver for these sections of our site, alongside further use of CSS and HTML. We were able to create an image slider consisting of a few JPG files, and for the projects we used a clever gallery method that also used simple image files animating within a gallery framework. To the viewer there is little difference – unless of course you are on a smartphone where the experience is now comparable with viewing the site on a PC.
The benefits have been an interesting learning curve for us, the excitement of making JPGs move across the screen without the use of Flash, the added bonus of better SEO performance (we can now add tags to our image files within our new animated sections) and Stephen can read our site properly on his iPhone! Of course, all future web projects for our clients will benefit greatly from this.
Our new stationery
At last we have taken delivery of our new stationery! Beautifully printed by Ospec (letterheads & compslips) and istprintingservices (business cards).
The letterheads & compslips were printed onto a nice white paper stock, with one Pantone colour and the logotype foiled in metallic silver.
The cards were more complex…. we sandwiched two paper stocks together, a white and a chocolate brown to give us a lovely thick finish, the type was rendered in a combination of litho and foil block printing.
Lovely!