Posted: December 11 2009 in Work
Made Magazine is hot off the press and looking stunning (but what magazine wouldn’t with Cosmopolitan Magazine’s Sportswoman of the Year, Jessica Ennis on the cover?). And like all the best things, it was made in Sheffield right here at Iris.
The project for Iris clients, Creative Sheffield, began as a brief for an all-purpose communications piece to sell the city’s many social, economic and sporting attractions to the outside world. We came back with the idea of a magazine. But not just any old city magazine. We knew it had to be a damn good page turner. We also knew it needed to look the business. So we paid particular attention to writing and commissioning interesting, well-written, original editorial content. Meanwhile our designers got down to the task of giving it the look and feel of a glossy, high quality, perfect bound periodical. Read the full post…
Posted: November 5 2009 in Work
We have recently been lucky enough to work with UNICEF to assist them with their attempts at promoting a number of good causes through their Inspired Gifts web-site. UNICEF sell gifts that make a difference, with the aim of making your gift-giving go much further than ever before. Read the full post…
Posted: November 4 2009 in Work
Wax Lyrical, one of the UK’s largest home fragrancing companies, were looking for a new brochure design which would help them to position their luxury range of candles, interior fragrances and diffusers to a more discerning, upmarket audience.
We designed a brochure in the form of a scrap book of ‘fragrance notes’ and other ‘cuttings’, to give an insight into the things that had inspired the Wax Lyrical perfumers in creating the new range. Snippets of inspiring copy were interspersed with an eclectic mix of inspirational recipes, interesting facts and fragments of material, textures and images of fragrance ingredients. Read the full post…
Posted: October 29 2009 in Work
We’ve been doing quite a bit of mobile web work here in the Iris web labs over the past few weeks, and with even more on the horizon, we thought it only right to shed a little light on the whole thing.
Not only have we given our blog a mobile makeover, we’re currently under way with an exciting project for the DCSF, which involves creating a shiny new mobile version of the news channel we recently built for them.
This is testament to the increasing popularity of the mobile web. Access to the Internet via mobile handsets is improving quickly, thanks in part to fantastic smart phones such as Apple’s iPhone, Palm’s Pre and the extensible Google Android platform to name but a few. Recently forecasted figures make impressive reading:
- Mobile ownership will rapidly increase year on year up to 2013, when the number of owners could be as many as 5.8 billion. Current figures put the number around 4.3 billion, up from 2.7 billion in 2006.[1]
- Sales of smart phones grew by 27 percent in Q2 2009, the fastest growing sector of the mobile market.[2]
- 6 out of 10 people around the world now have access to a HSPA network, which is faster than the current 3G networks.[3]
With many types of phone, come many different screen sizes and capabilities. The biggest challenge of design and development for the mobile platform is acheiving a consistent experience across a vast range of available handsets, from entry-level through to high-end smart phones. The main restraints for mobile users are text input coupled with large amounts of data, and in turn, scrolling. Kept to a minimum, a mobile site can be much more useable on handsets with restrictive input and slow connections.
On the flip side is the new breed of touch-equipped smartphones. These are making the mobile web easier to view, use and access for increasing numbers of people. Alongside greater coverage of high-speed networks, it’s no surprise the mobile web appears to be going from strength to strength.
Our project for the DCSF is certainly proving both exciting and interesting, we can’t wait to show you the results, but until we’re finished, you can check out Iris’s mobile-ready blog right here. Two versions are available, one for WAP users and one for you lucky smart phone owners. Pay a return visit to this blog through your handset’s browser to see it in action.
References
- 1. Portio Research Mobile Factbook 2009
- 2. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1126812
- 3. http://www.3gamericas.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=pressreleasedisplay&pressreleaseid=2451
Posted: July 30 2009 in News, Wins, Work
The government has just announced plans to create a new UK City of Culture initiative in 2013. And what better advertisement for Sheffield’s credentials for the role than the fact that the brand design for the initiative was created right here in Sheffield by Iris.
Iris were shortlisted for this prestigious assignment in June and went on to win a 3-way pitch after submitting a range of designs and ideas for the project. The chosen identity incorporates two ‘C’s, one contained within the other, to symbolise the part that cultural excellence plays within a city. Read the full post…
Posted: July 20 2009 in Work
It’s in a bag. Inside a box. And dropping onto your in-tray in a few days time if you go to the ProCo website and ask for some.
A little while ago, our good friends and clients over at ProCo asked us to come up with a mailing piece to demonstrate their prodigious, almost magical, web-to-print capabilities. “Do something a bit different,” they said. “And while you’re at it, let’s see if we can’t stick two fingers up at this depressing recession doom and gloom cobblers”. Knowing ProCo as we do, and they’re a very upbeat bunch who genuinely enjoy what they do, we understood where they were coming from. Read the full post…
Posted: July 13 2009 in Work
Every Child Matters home page
Three websites into one. Over 10,000 individual pieces of content. Multiple content owners. A range of other partner companies. A six-week time scale. Our web migration project for The Department for Children Schools and Families (DCSF) certainly was a monster task. The brief, in a nutshell, was to bring three different existing child-focused government websites into one huge, standardised, rationalised, all-singing all-dancing site under the Every Child Matters banner. Read the full post…
Posted: June 18 2009 in News, Work
Taste and smell are the two senses that are usually ignored in marketing communications. Yet, used with a bit of imagination and flair they can be incredibly powerful. Catch the whiff of an aroma or a familiar taste and you can be instantly transported back to a specific time in your life. So, when our clients at The University of Sheffield wanted to mail out something a bit different to their alumni we suggested they send a little bit of Sheffield in a bottle. Our solution was a neat ‘A Taste of Sheffield’ box containing a bottle of the sublimely spicy Sheffield delicacy, Henderson’s Relish, together with a dinky little Henderson’s Relish recipe book. The idea was to capture their attention with a whiff of nostalgia about wintry Sheffield student nights, bags of chips and steaming hot pies enlivened by a splash of Hendersons that would make them want to stay in touch with the university and support their ongoing alumni campaign. The pack also serves a secondary purpose as a quirky giveaway to important visitors to the university and as an unusual gift at international events.
Posted: June 18 2009 in News, Work
The new menus we designed for Little Chef are hot off the press. We’re currently working on a review of the Little Chef brand and the new menus are a taste (see what I did there!) of what’s to come. We wanted the menus to start to reflect some of the personality of the direction the brand is moving in. It’s about Britishness and being playful, which is what Charlie (that’s the name for the character in the logo) stands for. We chose to have different images on the covers to evoke what the British summer means to people. Inside, a series of menu icons have been designed to highlight key new dishes and provenance. Lots more to come on this as the brand begins to roll out.
Posted: April 24 2009 in News, Wins, Work
Iris are about to embark on creating a new online experience for Sheffield Hallam University’s Training Foundry website. As well as visually improving the site, we will ultimately be looking to increase online sales. Based in Sheffield City Centre, the Training Foundry is one of the region’s premier ICT training organisations offering Microsoft, Adobe and Cisco authorised training in internet and web authoring, project management, databases, wireless networking and office applications. Work on updating the look and functionality of their existing site begins next week.
