Every January, wine importer Maison Marques et Domaines holds a tasting of their new portfolio of wines at a central London venue. With buyers from across the UK attending, MMD hand each visitor a spiral-bound notebook covering all the exhibitors and wines.

Experiencing perhaps dozens of wines in a session, this notebook acts both as each visitor’s guide to the event and reference to the tasting.

We were approached by Maison Marques et Domaines to create a new version of the notebook that felt both considered and professional, giving a fresh look to the piece. Having worked in this industry for many years, it’s a real pleasure to complete this piece and create some new print design for the wine trade.

How best to convey a sense of exclusivity? Whenever designers face the challenge of creating something that stands out, the best way is to define the brand in a distinctive way. That’s great but in a world of aspiration, the fundamental question is… how?

Devising the brochure design for lifestyle management business Thadeus, we quickly realised that they work in a very distinctive way. So designing for them could follow this lead.

A simple way of describing this difference is to say that Thadeus are as likely to be sourcing a pair of limited edition trainers as an Hermès handbag.

There’s a combination of thoroughness with informality and they apply the same vigour to both searches.

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.