eatsleepblog

Protecting Brand Identity Gone Crazy?

Whilst browsing through the internet a small story on the BBC website caught my attention immediately, due to it being focused around what you may call a Brand Identity. The story goes like this. At a Glasgow theatre one of the characters in the pantomime involved using a nurse's outfit with the red cross displayed across the hat and tunic. It has been revealed that the British Red Cross had contacted the theatre running the pantomime to remove the red cross from the costume as the use of the red cross is "a special sign of neutrality and protection recognised by all sides during armed conflicts. It was said that the use of the Red Cross even in this light hearted and innocent manner would harm the neutrality and peaceful nature of the Red Cross. So in answer to my question, has protecting brand identity gone crazy? Oh yes it has, oh no it hasn't. Apologies about that it wasn't my idea! 

You can make your own mind up about that but from my point of view I would actually agree with what the British Red Cross did. At the end of the day they do lots and lots of peace work in countries that are involved in conflicts and at the end of the day I feel it is wrong to take the 'micky' out of something that saves peoples lives. The Red Cross played a vital role in helping thousands of injured troops throughout the first and second world wars, therefore I feel the organisation probably deserves more respect than to have its logo/brand used in a pantomime.

If would like to read the full story please follow this link the BBC Website. If you would like to put forward your own views on this please don't hesitate to leave a comment here.

Matt

We're Back!

After a very nice and relaxing two week break from the studio we returned bright and early on Tuesday morning just before 9 o'clock. Finding ourselves taking a few hours to get back into the swing of things after lots of turkey, stuffing, chocolate, crisps and alcoholic based beverages. I may not be speaking for all of us there but I certainly am for myself! I did plan on writing on here sooner than this but unfortunately other things take priority for myself in eatsleepthink design studio. It has taken me till now to work through the back log of quotes, work in progress sheet updating and invoicing. As for Gary and Mike it has been more of a steady re-introduction with a quiet stream of new work and proofing stages returning to the studio. However is this just the calm before the storm? This is very much possible as we are hoping to get a number of pieces of new work in from a few clients at the start of next week, as well as continuing feedback on the design work we have been working on this week.

Hopefully I will shortly have some new topics of work to write about shortly, so please check in shortly again for more eatsleepthink topics.

Matt

eatsleepthink Wish You A Very Merry Christmas

The time has come for eatsleepthink design agency in Sheffield to send out its electronic Christmas Card to all clients and associates. This probably relates and reflects in some ways my blog a couple of months ago about what I called the Electronic Take Over in fact more so than that it definitively demonstrates the whole point I was making. A few years ago this would be leaving the design studio as a number of printed cards being picked up by a courier to be delivered to different addresses across the country.

Anyway back to the card. Eatsleepthink have always produced a Christmas card with a association or link to one of our clients. Over recent years this has been with Get Connected, however this year we felt that the direction should change and through Volunteering England being so proactive in promoting the importance of Volunteering this year and a big society. We are happy to be able to produce this 2010 Christmas Card in conjunction with Volunteering England. There is a Christmas Message with the card which talks a little bit about Volunteering and how something which is so simple can make a massive difference to more than just the person you are directly helping. This may not quite make sense at the moment but once you have read through the Christmas Message you will understand.

Here is an image which links through to the Christmas card we have produced, with a little help from two of Mike's sons to draw and design the animated people in the card.

We hope you like our Christmas card design as you will have seen there are two parts to the card firstly there is the flash animation part which has people dancing around who have gifted themselves as presents (Volunteering). Also as I mentioned above there is a separate section to the card which contains a heartfelt message from Mike.

See you all in the new year, thanks to everyone who has been reading my blogs over the last 9 months since I joined eatsleepthink. I hope you are looking forward to what 2011 brings.

Matt

It's Almost Here

It is Monday 20th December and there is therefore only 5 days until Christmas, after the big build up with office parties, meals and shopping etc we are now getting down to the business end of Christmas where we are winding down our computer's or in our case Mac's to gradually ease into the holidays. Only joking this is the design studio of eatsleepthink based in Halfway, Sheffield after all! 

It looks like we'll be working right up to the wire which for eatsleepthink is lunchtime on Tuesday 21st December but we wouldn't have it any other way. Once we reach this time tomorrow we will be packing up once everything is complete and going off home to enjoy a well deserved two weeks off. However lets hope we don't get too lazy over this period as we will need to be ready to get straight back into the swing of things on Tuesday 4th January 2011. There may be a little excess body weight on our return but let me assure you that this will not effect the speed of our response.

So from everyone at eatsleepthink we would like to wish everyone a Very Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year for 2011.

Matt

How You Can Create A Splash

Following my blog last month about how our advertising campaign has made a splash right across Europe, if you haven't yet read our We've Created a Splash blog post please follow the link to it. It is now time for you to see how in this design agency in Sheffield we were able to create these eye catching paint splash illustrations. The example I will use to show you is the tree which was created for the Growth advert of the Dow Coating Materials advertising campaign. The production of these is a very painstaking process and it is vital to get the initial pencil drawings perfectly detailed and approved before moving into a lot of detail with colouring and shading etc. Here is what at the end of many hours hard work is produced.

Here is the original of the scan in of the initial stage of the illustration when it was simply at a pencil stage. This was actually the second draft of the rough design as there was the first stage where the outline of the illustration needed to be approved before we were able to move onto this stage.

Here is now a breakdown of the gradual progress of colouring in the illustration initially with flat colour before eventually adding the lines and shading to create the effect of the paint flowing and being splashed rather than being static. There were many more phases to the colouring of this however both you and us would have been here all day placing them in for you to view them. We have therefore carefully chosen a selection of the phases to represent the volume of work as accurately as possible.

Once you have an illustration similar to the final stage above you are pretty much ready to have your very own advert. All you would now need to do is supply eatsleepthink with some text to work in tandem with the illustration to get your message across. You now have your very own advert created by eatsleepthink design agency based in Sheffield, England.

As always I welcome your comments on this and hopefully you like what you see and now have a greater understanding of how we were able to achieve these brilliant splash illustrations. If you would like more information about this please contact us on the email address detailed on our website.

Matt

 

Are We In The Arctic?

What an experience these last 10 days have been if you live in the North East and Midlands area of England, we have experienced what I can only describe as crazy weather over this period so much so that not only is it the worst weather a 19 year old like myself can remember but also people much older. A number of records for Great Britain have been set including the coldest day in November ever recorded was smashed by a temperature of -20 degrees Celsius set in Scotland. In and around the area of the eatsleepthink design studio which is situated in Halfway, Sheffield almost 2 feet of snow have been recorded along with temperatures of -12 degrees Celsius. This resulted and still is resulting in very bad traffic disruption and for anyone not living within the immediate vicinity it was impossible to get into work from Tuesday to Friday last week. This unfortunately included Mike and Gary who both live at least 15 miles away from the office. This left poor old me to work my way into the office by using Sheffield's only efficient transport in snow, the trams. It must be said though that this didn't affect our ability to work though as we had been able to pre-empt this with Mike and Gary taking home with them all relevant paperwork and details of jobs. Through also liaising with myself in the office we were able to run the business remotely as effectively as is possible. I must say it was an eventful week particularly on Thursday upon being locked inside the building for about an hour, all I can say is I'm glad it wasn't any longer. Just when you think everything is back to normal and now Mike is going on a trip to Prague for an Awards Ceremony called the European Excellence Awards 2010 as detailed in our European Excellence Awards blog topic from earlier in November.

Matt

NSS Flyer

It has been a while since I posted a publication that we have designed for Volunteering England. Due to this I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to show you the NSS Flyer which is really quite different from what we usually produce for VE. With the main bulk of materials we have designed and produced from this design agency in Sheffield we have had to stick to the brand guidelines produced sometime ago for Volunteering England. The reason why this publication didn't stick so tightly to the guidelines is because both eatsleepthink and VE felt that it would be beneficial to be slightly different due to the even greater importance of the document.

I am sure that just by looking at the first page you can see quite a big difference in the design and layout compared to other VE publications such as Influencing Up Brochure and the October edition of the VE Magazine.

   


Attached above are the two inside pages of the flyer. This flyer was a very important document for Volunteering England as it was used to show its support and show how they are aiming to incorporate the idea of becoming a big society through volunteering. The big society which is one of the coalition governments big ideas for improving quality of life in the country needs to be shown to have the support of such charities. We feel that volunteering is an ideal way to start to incorporate this idea into the wider community. It could be said that in the form of volunteering their has already been a big society in the country for many years. This flyer is therefore inviting people who want to get involved in this idea of the big society to go along to the nearest conference.

 I feel this page is a great way of showing how the idea of the big society can be influenced and grown with the aid of volunteering, the use of pictures of volunteers to make up the shape of the main counties in the country is quite a simple idea but is very effective in getting across VE's message. 

Thanks for reading, any comments are welcome.

Matt

 

 

i-Pad Brushes App

After updating some of our software and hardware in the studio last month and purchasing an i-Pad Mike has been arriving at work almost every day like a little school kid. He came into the studio the other day showing us this app called brushes and what he had managed to produce within the space of about an hour of what he called doodling at home the evening before. Now if this is simply doodling I'd love to see what it would have looked like had more time been allowed. Here is the first stage of the illustration.

This is like the i-Pad brushes equivalent of lightly sketching your illustration onto a piece of paper using a pencil. Following this the lines were deepened and further detail produced to give the illustration more depth, here is the next stage of the illustration.

As you can see the illustration now features more detail and deeper outlines of the character. Following this the app then enables you to place shading and much finer detail onto the illustration making it look much more realistic and three dimensional. Here is the product of the next stage of development that Mike went through.

You can definitely see the finite detail which Mike has produced with the help of the app. Now all that was left to do was place colour into the illustration and we have a very professional illustration/drawing that has been produced 100% without the use of a pen, pencil or paper. This of course also has the added advantage of being environmentally friendly in terms of paper usage, although of course more electricity is used so many complex calculations would have to be gone through to actually see whether this increased or reduced Mikes carbon footprint, however I won't bore you by attempting to do this now. Here is the first coloured version of the illustration which doesn't feature the lines as above.

It may look a little weird at the moment but this is because the lines are not on top of the colouring. This is actually the last stage of the production whereby the app places the lines of the illustration on top of the colour to create the final product. Here is the finished product below.

It is quite amazing really to think that all this has been simply done on an app for the i-Pad, especially when previously this would have required many drafts of drawings on paper before scanning in to be placed into illustrator and add definition and colouring to the drawing. Of course there is the one clear advantage of this which is when making a mistake the whole process doesn't have to start again you can simply undo your mistake and carry on.

This is why the i-Pad was such a sound investment for the company, not only can it be used for such creative and enjoyable purposes as this but also the i-Pad can be used for much more formal purposes such as when we are pitching to a possible client we can display our portfolio of work on the i-Pad as well producing sketches of what we can produce whilst in the meeting.

Ironically whilst I was thinking about this topic for the blog yesterday I went on the BBC website and noticed this topic about an artist who has been solely producing work on the i-Pad. Whilst at a show in Paris called Fleurs Fraiches, David Hockney had revealed pieces of work he had produced on the i-Pad by placing displaying the artwork on a number of technological canvases. If you would like to read more about this story please follow this link to the BBC story.

Thanks

Matt

European Excellence Awards 2010

This is currently a very exciting time for everyone involved with eatsleepthink, as I am sure you will have gathered from the title we have been entered into the European Excellence Awards 2010. For those of you who have not heard of this award please follow this link to the European Excellence Awards 2010 to get an idea of the importance and scale of these awards. We have been put forward for this award thanks to the advertising campaign for Dow Coating Materials we have produced in conjunction with Gibbs and Soell Public Relations. If you wish to actually see our name on the shortlist you will need to click on shortlist from the homepage and then scroll down to section 36 of the list. It is very fulfilling to see our name mentioned alongside so many massive international design agencies, not because we don't have the talent, drive or passion to produce work that is recognised in this way but simply because we are a relatively small agency based in Sheffield, an old industrial city in England. It certainly feels like a David versus Goliath sort of situation, especially when we see who we are competing against in our category such as 180 Amsterdam with their client Deutsche Post DHL and Leo Burnett Romania with their client OMV Petrom. If you would like to view the advertising campaign we and Gibbs and Soell produced for Dow Coating Materials please follow this link to We've created a Splash, this is the blog I posted about a month ago about the campaign featuring the artwork of all the adverts. This has resulted in Mike having a very nice trip to Praque, Czech Republic on the 9th December.

Here is the logo for the European Excellence Awards 2010 and I must say it is a really catching logo design. For an award such as this it is really important that the logo is top class especially as awards will be going to people who themselves have created top class designs and advertising campaigns. We have been getting even more excited at eatsleepthink if that was possible, after looking at the trophies that the winners receive. The trophies are a 3D version of the logo and are very eye catching, should we win this along with Gibbs and Soell and of course Dow Coating Materials this would be up there as one of eatsleepthink's biggest ever achievements. 

Thanks for reading.

Matt

An Anniversary Cake

Today is a very special and emotional day in particular for Mike Marshall and Gary Jones, if only you were here you could sense this in the atmosphere of this studio in Halfway, Sheffield where eatsleepthink design agency has been based for the past three years. Today marks the first anniversary of Gary's first day as an employee of eatsleepthink, ever since this day the company has been able to expand due to the capacity to manage our workload being doubled. Effectively it is this increase in workload that eventually lead to myself joining eatsleepthink in March so that Mike and Gary could solely focus on design. To celebrate this occasion Mike had been to the supermarket before work and bought a cake for Gary and we have all had a slice and I must say it was very enjoyable. Here is a picture of the half eaten cake that Mike took a little while ago. I advise against looking at this if your hungry as it may result in you trying to eat your computer monitor, which I wouldn't advise. 

I know what your thinking 'it looks at little sickly' but I can with 100% conviction confirm that it is not sickly at all in fact it has to be ranked in the top 5 cakes that I personally have ever eaten. Anyway I think thats enough of unhealthy food based topics for a while at least. I hope I will have something similar to blog about on the 29th March 2011 when I am 1.

Hope you enjoyed this little blog.

Matt