blog.strakt

We have been very busy on the run up to Christmas so haven’t had time to develop any festive techy bits for your enjoyment, so sorry about that! We do wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy new year though.

We are closing down now, and will be reopening on the 3rd Jan. I am off to Australia for New Year, woohoo! then back in the office on the 18th January. Substrakt will be running as normal in the capable hands of Jim, Carlie, and Chris.

We launched a new flash web site last week for MADE. This web site was for a successful project they’ve been running titled ‘Making Sense of Places’. Check it out

We have just managed to add a few updates to our site detailing a few other projects that we have completed and are in the middle of. We also added an alternative CSS style sheet for those who couldn’t handle all the brownness!

Here’s a bit of an update on life at Substrakt (well overdue I must add, definitely going to make more effort on the blog).

Updated site and brand

For those have visited our blog before you will notice the re-vamp, this is to match our newly styled web site and slightly tweaked brand. We felt that we had developed considerably since the last site and branding, so wanted to have a bit of an overhaul.

www.substrakt.co.uk

Our new strap line is ‘creative communication’, we felt this portrayed our services and the way we work with clients more effectively. Previously, ‘web – print – ident’, although our main services, was too specific. We have recently been involved in projects where we provide full marketing and advertising packages and want to move forward with this type of service, so just marketing our core skills as separate entities didn’t really cut the mustard.

New addition to the Substrakt team

We welcomed Carlie in late September, a talented graphic designer, who recently graduated from Bath Spa.

Architecture

We have been working on several architecture and urban design projects:

MA Urban Design

We completed a prospectus for the MA in Urban Design at Birmingham School of Architecture.

School of Architecture Centenary

The school are due to celebrate their 100-year anniversary next year. We are currently working with the school to develop a brand identity to mark this special occasion. Alongside marketing the Centenary and the commemorative ball, we are creating a web site that will offer the alumni a chance to reunite.

Lovejoy

This successful land planning company with offices in Birmingham and London have been working with Substrakt to develop numerous pieces of design work. We have produced documents that have helped them present development plans.

CUDOS (Centre for Urban Design Outreach and Skills)

The centre advances excellence in urban design skills by developing community-centred solutions in housing, neighbourhoods, and the wider built environment. Substrakt have branded and are in the process of developing marketing material for CUDOS, and the development of a web site in the near future.

MADE

MADE web update

We are giving MADE’s web site a bit of an overhaul with a new style and some technical developments. This will be finished and uploaded at the end of next week.

‘First Site’

Based on a previous project, ‘Youth Space’, MADE (Midlands Architecture & the Designed Environment) are running a creative communities project titled ‘First Site’. This project develops models of practice for young people’s creative participation in the built environment. We are creating a brand, followed up by a web site, which allows project participants to display project work and discuss issues.

Other projects:

Jibbering

The new site is up, promoting Jibbering’s spectrum of activity as well as hosting their online record shop.
www.jibbering.co.uk

Advertising

We have recently been working on an ‘advertising’ job, creating Christmas promotional material for the Old Square shopping centre in Walsall. Liaising with the Express and Star to take advert space and distribute leaflets.

In 2002, when my friend James Kelly and I started building web sites forged with the table and the spacer gif, we often looked to the greats of that time for inspiration. One thing that seemed unanimous across these sites was their choice of hosting; they all sported the ‘hosted by (mt)’ logo. It was the wide spread adoption by these design-focused companies that has given mediatemple it’s reputation, least in my mind. Back then, our sites were hobbies, learning experiences, or for favours & friends. We would never have needed, nor afforded such hosting requirements.

Given this humble anecdote, it’s surprising that 5 years on I find myself transferring the sites we manage to a mediatemple dedicated virtual (dv) server.

Good things come to those who wait.

We have just uploaded our brand new site. Hope you all like it, any feedback is warmly accepted… even the bad stuff… we can take it! www.substrakt.co.uk

Welcome to our spanking new blog, styled up in line with our brand new site (due for launch mid march). We hope to keep this blog regularly updated with any of our news and projects, and just general interesting stuff that we come across. We have also invited our good friends ‘the architects’ to come and contribute, so there is likely to be some architecture related topics too.