We worked on a huge range of projects in 2011, spanning identity design, website design and development, marketing and copywriting. Each of these services are becoming central to our increasingly integrated approach to brand identity and strategic design. We’re in the process of redesigning our portfolio, which will demonstrate our approach.
Being an ambitious team with big aspirations, one of our biggest (and by far the most demanding!) clients is James Good; we’re constantly striving to improve our own communications.
In October 2010, we sent the first edition of Good Stuff. Our objective was to demonstrate best practice in the creation of a newsletter, from a design and copywriting, and even a photography perspective. We wanted to produce something that represented us perfectly, giving people an insight into what we do and our level of creativity, but also something that would be relevant and interesting to you, our readers.
To that end, Good Stuff is a mix of business-related topics we think you should know about, things that have caught our attention that we think you might find interesting, things we hope will amuse you, and ending on something completely different, which we hope will make you think differently. Amongst all of this, we throw in a few things about us - it is our newsletter, after all!
A newsletter is the right medium to perfect a brand’s tone of voice - we’re relaxed, but our opinions can be fairly strong, and we’re not afraid to voice them! A real sense of our personality runs through every edition. When it comes to design style, like all of our communications, we find that simplicity is the way forward. We hope that the uncluttered layout makes our newsletter a pleasure to read. It’s long, but the layout is designed to encourage readers to dip in and out.
The result is the right balance of selling ourselves, and giving you stuff you want to read, all achieved with a real sense of personality. We receive comments following every edition of Good Stuff; mostly highly complimentary! We’ve also been thanked in person on numerous occasions for our newsletter - imagine that, being thanked for our marketing materials!
Taking a wider view, Good Stuff has raised our profile, amongst the design community and our target market. At the same time, it’s served to educate our audience about the importance of what we do. We doubt we’d have had the same response from the bog-standard ‘what we’ve been up to this month’.
What Good Stuff has proved, is that investing the time in creating something a bit different is well worth it. In 2012, we want to take Good Stuff even further. We’re hatching a plan, so watch this space!