Every summer at Stationers’ Hall in the centre of London, there’s a day of creative celebration. The Shine School Media Awards rewards the talent of secondary school students around the UK who are working, sometimes entirely outside their schooldays, to better themselves and forge the path to their future career.

We’ve been a contributor to the Awards programme now for five years, giving our time to this fantastic endeavour.

It’s a great portfolio example of our work when we design for charities.

Over the past few months we have been working with executive search business Fraser Giles Partnership. With extensive expertise with the hospitality, retail, travel and leisure sectors, they spend their days finding the perfect people for the perfect roles.

In fact for this particular design agency, they were the perfect client. It’s as though, enjoying a ‘good fit’ by instinct every day, they just knew. We began our work for Fraser Giles Partnership with a brief for a new website but that proved to be just the starting point for this project rather than the defining parameters.

By the end of our work we will have effectively been rebranding an executive search firm – but in such a way that it enhances rather than departs from where they’ve been.

We’ve recently completed work on the first phase of a new project for our long-time property management client London Base.

The team had a requirement for an imaginative solution to how to present the detailed information that comes with each apartment. This could be from the mundane such as wifi passwords or how to operate an air conditioning unit to something a little more trip-enhancing such as cultural information about the neighbourhood.

Having worked on a series of menu design projects recently we had seen some prototypes of the sort of custom design folders that many luxury hotels use. These are leather-bound, hard-wearing and still very beautiful. With this in mind, we pitched the idea of this sort of folder to the London Base team.

We’ve just completed the layout and artwork of a long handbook – proving once once more that print is very much alive and kicking. People love reading a physical object, so where it’s needed digitally, it just finds different ‘ways of being’. In this case, we have a book which has an initial print run then will be used in tandem as a digital publication.

Our client for this has been FAB – the Federation of Awarding Bodies. FAB is the leadership team that guides further education awarding organisations in the UK. FAB works across the FE sector – including government departments, regulators and funding agencies.

The first creative project for FAB is a classic example of print design for further education – a dedicated handbook for its members. It’s turned out particularly nicely – and is a great example of detailed, user-friendly information design.

We have just completed another major piece of print as part of our long-running series of work for the political think tank Policy Connect.

This project is the latest report for the influential cross-party body the Higher Education Commission. Entitled ‘One Size Won’t Fit All – The Challenges Facing the Office for Students‘, the report was published last week to wide media coverage and a great launch at Portcullis House, next to the Houses of Parliament.

We always enjoy these reports as they provide a challenge to find a fresh way of presenting quite dense, detailed information. However this one is a particular success as a set-piece of new political report design.

With its bold, graphic cover it stands out a mile and supplies the report with a great identity as its finds its way into the hands of higher education policy decision-makers.

This time last year we were celebrating our nomination for the print industry’s Solutions Awards for print design – our brochure for the Shine School Media project we support had just been recognised in the Environmental category.

This was a real thrill because, as a small agency, we tend not to worry too much about awards. They are nice when they happen (and clients love them) but the whole process of payment and reward from the major prizes has sometimes felt like a but of a cash cow rather than something that is all about the talent. However, in part because the project we were nominated for was such a personal labour of love for me, this one felt rather different. And then – we won.

Isn’t it funny how winning changes everything? Firstly in terms of how you feel about the work you did. It feels… golden, special, recognised. Somehow it stands apart from the rest of the work this year and becomes more significant. And then, secondly, winning again becomes somehow less critical. It won once, so attained this fantastic standard. Wouldn’t winning again be somehow… greedy?

Well possibly, but we certainly have been nominated again!

Our work for Shine this year has been shortlisted for two Solutions Awards for print design, in both the environmental category but also the paper section too. We might have a sneaky nomination in best design too. I thought it might be worth putting down a little more detail how our work relates to these two categories and how we came to make the decisions around that work.