Over the past few months the design team at Substrakt has built brands for many exciting clients, providing the gamut of art direction, print & packaging design.
Whilst our projects cover many disciplines, we endeavor to showcase our work in equal measure.
We have come to realise that these projects, and their processes, can sometimes get lost behind the Substrakt’s strong digital portfolio.
So, what did we do about it?
We created Distrakt. A separate area to exhibit our work in a straight-forward way.
It also serves as an outlet for our inspiration stream; archiving our finds and loves for everyone to share.
This project was delivered by our resident branding heroine Claire Hartley, and Ryan Dean-Corke, new team member who has proved himself as a highly proficient web designer.
It was a great pleasure to deliver this project, as the blog is a great asset to Birmingham. Chris Unitt and the CiB team are about to launch a shop in the Bull Ring http://cibshop.wordpress.com/, exciting stuff, so we wish them all the best and look forward to doing some serious browsing!
Yikes! Just noticed it’s been over 2 months since we posted. So here’s a wee update…
Firstly, we’re pleased to welcome a new web designer to the team. Ryan Dean-Corke is a very talented web designer who joined us towards the end of January, and has already been producing some pretty special work (watch this space) . Good to have you on board Ryan!
Secondly, we have been working on some pretty cool projects…
We have just uploaded a website for The Pump, a hub for youth work and activity in Kitts Green, Birmingham. This was a great project to work on, and gave us a chance to get the young people involved and produce something that everyone was happy with.
http://thepump.org.uk/
We have also uploaded some other websites in the last couple of months that you may have seen in our portfolio. These include:
Over the next couple of weeks we will be announcing the launch of some current projects, including a new website we’ve been developing for the NHS, a website for the Light House in Wolverhampton, and a website for Selco Builders Warehouse.
We’re also working on some exciting branding projects, and there will be more about this very soon.
Last Thursday I was privileged enough to attend the Chitterlings dinner at The Vaults in Birmingham organised by Type. With a small number of just 16 of us it was a great opportunity to meet with like minded individuals who share my passion for design.
The venue was great, we met in the bar where I discussed Typographic Horizons with Nathan from Smile and then we continued through to the Soprano room. Our place names were beautifully made by calligrapher Paul Antonio and the menus typographically designed by Katie and James from Supercool. It was all rather impressive!
Our guest speaker was typographer, designer and author John D Berry, President of ATypl (Association Typographique Internationale) who has won numerous awards for his book designs. He spoke about his experience over the years, his love and understanding of the past and future of typography, as well as the pathways throughout his career.
It was a lovely evening fuelled by fine wine, fabulous food and most importantly the opportunity to meet really interesting people! I will look forward to the next event…
Substrakt are a young and seriously fun new media and design agency who are growing organically at a reassuring pace.
We work on exciting web design and branding client projects and are constantly pushing ourselves to ensure our work is of notable high quality.
Our current team of 7 has room for 1 more, someone who can work closely alongside the managing director to assist in project and account management, as well as general studio management.
This person will need to be highly motivated and have a natural passion for the web and graphic design, as well as a strong acumen for business.
It is essential that this person has, at least, a basic knowledge of web design and development, in order to effectively comprehend and relay knowledge between clients and designers/developers.
Responsibilities will include:
- project management
(we use a very helpful online tool called Basecamp to assist with this)
- account management
(maintaining communication between clients and Substrakt team)
- studio management
(generally helping out with resource management)
- new business
(occasional help with quoting, proposals and pitches)
We are looking for a committed person… in other words, we don’t plan on going anywhere and just want to get bigger and better, so it is hoped that someone joining at this stage will grow with us and enjoy the benefits of doing so.
If it sounds like this is the job for you then please get in touch directly with the managing director, Andy Hartwell, andy@substrakt.co.uk
NB Candidates must have a good sense of humour and taste in music.
Our work has been published in the British Design 2010 publication! We were approached back in April to include our work in both the Branding & Graphic Design and the New Media Design categories. Jim and I were lucky enough to attend the launch party at the Design Museum last wednesday to pick up our copy! Here’s some pics…
Claire has put in some stunning work to ensure Substrakt wins Best Pumpkin at Fazeley Studios’ halloween bash tonight. Surely the champers is ours? See for yourself!
Hello, I’m Mark. I make things on the Internet, and I’m chuffed to little pieces, to join the Substrakt bunch as their shiny new Web developer. (I am shiny.)
Some people might know me through my work with Rhubarb Radio, whose website Substrakt designed and I built. I also gave a talk at this year’s Moseley Barcamp about developing stuff from scratch. I run a successful web application for Twitter users, make podcasts and put in occasional appearances on Rhubarb.
A week is a long time in technology, but when it’s packed full of interesting things to do, it certainly flies by. I’ve now been at Substrakt for 7 days, and I’ve packed a lot in already. After a year working for myself, it’s great to be back in an office environment, and especially one as vibrant and friendly, and to cap off an exciting 2009 with a new position at a well-respected and growing firm is a real joy.
I’m hoping to bring my back-end dev skills and front-end know-how to the party, and help develop some of the exciting new projects the team have got in store. And any excuse to play with audio and video tools will add just a little to the already amazing pool of talent we already have here.
So that’s me. I’m @moxypark on Twitter, so come and say hi if you fancy a chat. I’ll be posting my occasional thoughts – when appropriate for public broadcast – here, and on my personal site when they’re not.
Smiles all round here at Substrakt as we are pleased to announce our involvement in some pretty exciting projects that we will be busy with over the next couple of months:
Light House
We were successful in winning the pitch to re develop the Light House website. We were really keen to work with the Light House on this project as it looked like an ideal project for the Substrakt team. The Light House is at the impressive Chubb’s Lock Works building in Wolverhampton, definitely worth a visit if you haven’t been…
Light House aims to increase the enjoyment and understanding of technologically – based media, in particular film, video, photography and creative media and to emphasise their importance to the cultural, social and economic life of Wolverhampton, the West Midlands and further afield.
We’re extremely pleased to be working on this project with the Light House team and aim to have the website launched early next year.
Punch Records
We have been working with Punch Records on a new web presence, the website will be launching early November and aims to effectively communicate Punch’s work and allow the team to successfully integrate their growing social media presence.
Punch specialise in a range of music events and touring productions including spoken word, theatre, dance, film and visual arts. Punch is also an official Arts Award centre.
Producers Forum
We are delighted to be working with Producers Forum after winning the pitch to re develop their website.
The aim of the Producers’ Forum is to push the West Midlands forward as a vibrant centre for film production by supporting the region’s film professionals, whilst providing them with networking opportunities and high quality training from leading industry experts. Our aim is to put the West Midlands on the map by utilising the region’s talent and facilities to create a sustainable film industry.
A main part of the web development is to implement a members section which will enable user to join and build up their own profile pages as well as effectively communicating with other members. We’re looking forward to getting stuck into this.
Website due to launch in November.
Selco Builders Warehouse
We’ve just had confirmation that we’ve won a great new contract and will be working closely with Selco Builders Warehouse. We’re re developing their web presence in order for them to effectively display their vast product range online.
(I’m in the process of doing up my house so am well into the old DIY at the mo… hoping i can sort a cheeky membership)
Last, but by no means least… NHS
We’re obviously very pleased to add the NHS to our client list. We are working on some web development with NHS Birmingham East and North. Not too many details to dish at the moment, but we’ll update when the 1st stage of the project is complete.
Oh, and finally…
We are super chuffed to have an awesome new web developer, Mark Steadman, who will be introducing himself on the blog shortly.
I spent 4 days in the fabulous city of Helsinki in Finland earlier this month attending 2 events, Blender! and CEB (Creative Economy and Beyond). It also happened to be design week in Helsinki so there was some cool stuff happening.
My invite on the trip was thanks to BCU’s invovlement with a project called ‘Creative Metropoles: Public Policies and Instruments in Support of Creative Industries’. This project presents shared vision of 11 European cities on creative industries and creative economy. There was 4 from the West Midlands who traveled including myself, Steve Harding (head of BCU corporate development), Kerry Thomas (Fused Magazine) and Nina Lakeberg (BCU). (special thanks to Jon Hickman for thinking of me and Substrakt!)
The first event, Blender! was held at Aalto University Design Factory and aimed to give creative companies the opportunity to discuss the future of the industry and how doing business is affected by global changes. We were divided into groups and discussed the trends and weak signals relevant to our businesses, we then selected 2 themes to discuss in depth. The objective of these discussions was for the group to focus on the themes and develop a new business idea. Our business idea was an interactive platform called ‘Grandmother’ a concept inspired from attempting to oppose the ‘Big Brother’ concept. This is a blog post for another time i think!
I met several really interesting individuals and companies, especially a chap called Tuomas Siitonen from Part. We had a great discussion about projects involving new media within the built environment and i see a great opportunity to work with Tuomas and Part in the future.
CEB (Creative Economy and Beyond) was a 2 day international conference on the creative economy. There were several fascinating presentations, 1 of which that I found especially relevant and interesting was a talk from Professor Joachim Sauter from the Berlin University of Arts. Joachim runs a company called ART+COM that produces some pretty amazing interactive media solutions. I wrote a brief post about 1 particular interesting ART + COM project on a brand new blog Substrakt has started called Architekture. (more to come from this blog soon)
We managed to get to the launch of Design Week held at Helsinki’s impressive Cable Factory (seems like it’s standard for all good creative venues to be old factories!). It was inspiring to get close up with the Helsinki creative scene and experience the type of work the city is producing.
All in all a fab trip and I highly recommend the city to anyone who fancies a visit. So thanks again to those people who got me involved.
We uploaded a website for The Social Investment Business on Wednesday. This project was led by Futurebuilders, a great client whose website redesign was completed by us a few weeks ago. The Social Investment Business website needed turning around in less than a month, including design, content development, site build and testing ready for the launch event yesterday.
This site has more features to come including the expansion of a blog / resource section and the integration of social media including image feeds from Flickr and video feeds from Vimeo.
It’s been an exciting month at Substrakt so far, so here’s an update:
The 1st bit of big news is Substrakt’s recent acquisition of Bristol based CG Media. This came after working closeley and very successfully on a series of projects with director Chris Garrett. This is a really positive move for Substrakt as CG Media has a wide range of regional and national clients including the English Table Tennis Association, the BBC, CNET and Visit Britain. This acquisition also gives a massive boost to the Substrakt team and enables us to continue expanding our service base as well as targeting new markets from our Bristol office at the Tobacco Factory. Chris and his team are already very knowledgeable about the Bristol market and have a great reputation in the area. We saw that we could achieve a great deal by combining our skills and resources.
We have a number of London based clients, such as Cushman and Wakefield, DTZ, The Social Investment Business and CABE. Over the past few months we have been winning more and more work from London so decided we needed a presence there. We have also been collaborating on projects with web company Spring Digital, who are based in Big Studios, at Smithfields Markets. It seemed like a natural step to establish a satellite office there.
Meanwhile, we have welcomed a new team member to Birmingham HQ, Josh Hart. Josh is pretty famous on the web front in Brum for his awesome work on the All Brum family of websites, including livebrum.co.uk, digitalbrum.co.uk and artbrum.co.uk.
Our website will be amended accordingly with the addition of new team members and new studio locations when we can tear ourselves away from some awesome client projects.
We have also just launched a website for Futurebuilders. It was great to work with Futurebuilders on this project, who have a committed team of web editors who were keen to bring the company up to date with social media and web 2.0.
We are also extremely pleased to learn that we will be continuing to work with Futurebuilders on a new website for The Social Investment Fund, due to launch on the 11th September.
I was invited to judge the Daily Telegraph New Media Award at the Young Enterprise Regional Finals held on the 18th June at Aston University. I was judging alongside Lara Ratnaraja from Business Link, and Matt Clugston from Clusta. We were hugely impressed by the quality and high standard of all entries.
With more than 5,500 schools and colleges participating in our programmes, Young Enterprise currently reaches more than 350,000 young people a year from primary school right through to university.
The businesses and volunteers that support Young Enterprise take an active role in building a better-motivated, educated and enterprising workforce, at the same time making a real difference to the existing lives and future potential of young people who live and attend school in their area.
I was keen to become more involved with Young Enterprise, but unfortunetly haven’t got the time to commit to business volunteering. I have now been invited to join the Young Enterprise as a board member. Joining the board will allow me to become closeley invovled with the programme and assist in developing future strategy, vision and objectives. I am certainly keen to take my experiences with web, new media and social media to the table to help ensure the programme keeps up to date with technology in order to enthuse potential participants and effectively communicate and promote Young Enterprise.
Oftentimes, a site ‘template’ is designed; common areas like headers, footers and backgrounds look pleasing enough, but the central content pane gets little design consideration. Successful web design has to consider this content first and foremost. It is, after all, the crux of the site.
This can often be the case where concerns a site managed with a CMS. The balance between designing each content type / area on an individual level to best suit its purpose and the clients’ ability to manage this content themselves is a difficult one to strike.
Designing each content type / area to best suit its purpose also adds levels of complexity, both in terms of development (affecting time and budget), and to the client who has to manage it – there’s often more work required adding, formatting, categorising, and chosing the position of content.
This extra effort however, provides a much richer user experience, and a comprehensive site that feels well designed, well thought out – not merely a site with a pretty template holding content that feels like an afterthought, disengaged and disjointed within its confines.
Recently I’ve found myself writing the above, or words to this effect, as rationale to various clients or other members of our team. It’s a process 37signals also employ, referring to the process as Epicenter design.
We have just launched a new website for our sister company Subcom. The website needed a redevelopment as Subcom’s services have developed considerably since incorporation last summer. Subcom specialises in touch screen solutions, and after starting out purely selling screens now works with clients on bespoke solutions including touch screen development, kiosk systems, EPoS and digital signage.
Subcom has started colloborating with Substrakt on a regular basis offering clients both the hardware development and the software applications. Recent colloborations include kiosk development for West Midlands Police (see image below) as well as the upcoming Golden Square project.
The Subcom website features the latest Wordpress plugin to come from Substrakt. This is an e commerce plugin called Shopstix and will be available in beta by the end of July.
A good foundation is the best way to start any project, that’s why a few months ago we started looking at how we could improve the default templates we use to build the majority of our sites. We decided to take the awesome WP-Blueprint and put it on a diet, compressing and combing the default stylesheets into a single lump. This made quite a bit of difference. Next we streamlined some of the JavaScript libraries that we used and looked at the fastest and easiest way to serve them up.
What we ended up with is Redprint a blank but incredibly fast WordPress template for building great sites.
Redprint gets a an A Grade on all Client Side YSlow tests.
It’s total size is only 52.5K on an empty cache.
Uses sensible CSS defaults from Blueprint, so if your familar with these it’s very easy to get started.
We’ve added in support for jQuery, SWFObject and all the hooks for Google Analytics, plus there’s a neatly defined functions.js to keep all of your jQuery out of the way.
We’ve been using Redprint in house for the past couple of months, now we’ve decide to open it up to outside contributors, this means that you can use the same superfast template that we do and share your modifications back with the rest of the world.
Visually Redprint isn’t anything special but under the hood it’s a well formed blank canvas ready for your theme to take shape.
If you’d like to get notified when the template is updated start Watching the project and finally if you’ve got ideas for additional features or would like to make some changes Fork the project and start hacking.
We have just had news that we won the international design competition for the design of Golden Square, in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, as part of a team led by Capita Lovejoy’s Birmingham office, beating over 100 international practices in the process.
Golden Square is being created as one of the first new projects in Birmingham City Council’s ‘Big City Plan’, which will see the city centre transformed over the coming years. The proposals for this new public square seek to create an exciting, iconic and inspiring space, which would act as the focal point to the Jewellery Quarter.
Our part of the proposal was to implement digital media technology, providing visitor information facilities as an integral component of the scheme – connecting users of the square to the facilities and businesses within the Jewellery Quarter. This is a great opportunity for Substrakt to work closely with sister company Subcom to provide innovative touch screen display solutions.
We are working with Birmingham based blogger / social media consultant Chris Unitt (Meshed Media) to develop a West Midlands creative jobs board.
The primary aim of the website is to advertise jobs within the West Midland’s creative industry, but it will also be a blog detailing latest news within the industry, tips from industry leaders and interviews to help potential employees improve their skills and industry knowledge.
The website has been launched, but is still a work in progress so feedback is welcome.
