We are thrilled to announce that we’ve been shortlisted twice for the Solutions Awards 2019. These design award nominations represent the fifth consecutive year we’ve been recognised by one of the print industry’s biggest annual award events.

The two projects that have made the cut this year are an elegant brochure with superb print finishing for personal concierge service Thadeus London and our latest longform winners book for the Shine School Media charitable project.

People always say this sort of thing, but in a particularly demanding year it’s genuinely so gratifying to be recognised, particularly in the context of the illuminati of the print business. As we head towards the awards ceremony in November with fingers crossed, we’d like to particularly thank PurePrint, who were involved in both of these projects and also co-sponsor the Shine project with us.

I never get tired of ‘a first’. A completely new experience that takes me (and the team) away from everything we’re used to and then leaves me wondering what other new horizons are out there to conquer next.

We’ve just completed one such project – a website for an interior designer in Riyadh. I think the fact that Yasmin Alsdais is a woman isn’t necessarily that remarkable to me, but in the context of her business which is growing fast and being hugely successful in Saudi Arabia, it’s most definitely a different (and very admirable) story. Given both that fact and the ease in which we worked across two continents, I’m particularly proud to be associated with the endeavour.

It’s been a great experience and opened up a fresh avenue designing for Saudi business in London which I hope is the start of a new chapter of work.

Whether designing a website or preparing a branded image for a LinkedIn news post, whatever we seem to do, our work has a constant hunger for good photography.

Inevitably perhaps, I’ve always had a point of view on the shots we are given to work with. In a nutshell this is: for a brand, consistency of quality and visual style wins.

The rather wonderful thing is that these days, I get to have a say in how that part of the process works. In the last few years, in a rather subtle way, working with a client in the process of creating a bespoke business image library has increasingly become central to my work.

It’s our sixth year working on the Shine School Media Awards project and every time we get involved, something fascinating comes out of it that none of us expected.

The Awards programme recognises talented young people from around the UK who produce a school newspaper, magazine, podcast or website. Each summer, nominated students gather at Stationers’ Hall in the City of London for a day of workshops, talks from industry experts and of course an exciting and frequently moving awards ceremony.

Our design job is to create an overall look for each year’s awards including a ‘step and repeat’ backdrop for photos or selfies, a day programme and a forty-plus-page book of the winning and highly-commended students and sponsors’ ads.

Our goal each year is the same – to create a fantastic piece of modern print design.

We’ve been working with Matt and Emma Simpson on the branding of their skiing business Alpenglow since 2014. Giving shape to their business plan, we devised their launch branding with its bold elegant icon. The project then became a textbook example of web design for startups.

Chiefly an online business, from the outset they wanted their website to be a clever hybrid of online booking and personal concierge service. Human interaction, testimonials and recommendations has ended up at the centre of all successful online businesses over the last ten years – so their instincts proved to be dead on from day one.

Since the launch we’ve done assorted updates to the site, for instance working on the chalet pages, creating new icons and designing additional feature pages. These are the usual requirements of a site of this kind as a business grows. However we find it satisfying that even as we see a massive reboot of the site this week, it’s still a recognisable evolution of the design we brought to market with the team at Alpenglow five years ago.

A year ago, we were hard at work completing the launch website for talent and literary agency Northbank Talent Management. The result of months of work, that site launched on the 31st May 2018. The project was a rebranding of what had been up til that point Diane Banks’ eponymous literary agency. With a single move, the business had a completely fresh start.

The new name and branding expanded into a wide range of print and social media as well as, most visibly, an expansive website which we custom-designed from the ground up. From a standing start and completely new URL, Northbank’s website now has sometimes several hundred visitors a day. Exciting stuff.

There’s more to come too. Today we’re unveiling a surprise – over the last few weeks we’ve been designing a sister brand as a standalone entity: Northbank Speakers.