eatsleepblog

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

Monday 15th November

So it begins once again the hectic life that is eatsleepthink design agency returns. Mondays are always busy with work coming in following the end of the last week and through company procedures which are always scheduled in on Mondays. These procedures are mainly my responsibility and they take the form of our main production meeting to sum up all of the work we have planned in for the next few days, also we have what we call our work in progress sheet (WIP) which is to be sent out to every one of our major clients for which we currently have live work going through the studio. We feel this not only helps our client for scheduling priority of work but it does actually help ourselves plan ahead and keep a track on the status of work. Mondays also involve for me liaising with our company secretary with invoices and costs for which we have sent out and received over the course of the week. Whilst I have been kept occupied by these tasks as well as many others, Gary has mainly been focusing on upgrading our website with our latest work etc as well as also managing other bits and bobs going through the studio. Mike has also been focusing on one main project which has been looking into a marketing report produced by an associate of ours and has been looking at how to improve their business strategy and who is currently their target audience.

That was a short and sweet summary of what has been going on today!

Matt

Printers

Printers are possibly one of the better inventions ever made by man. The ability to place ink onto pieces of paper with unbelievable amounts of accuracy at the speeds they do was unthinkable of a few decades ago. It would be impossible for most people to now imagine what life would be like without having the use of a printer. Despite this I can't help but wonder why makers of printers such as Epson can't make them more efficient in the use of ink, not only because of the cost but also due to the valuable resources that we use to make inks. It seems like we go through a cartridge of Yellow ink almost every week unbelievably. You may be wondering why the Yellow but if you have ever received one of our invoices you will probably realise, it is likely to be because of the orange box we have towards the top right hand corner. This has come to the forefront as a topic on the blog because we have just had to order three more of the Yellow cartridges (T0804), and it doesn't seem two minutes since we were last ordering some. Then again time does fly at eatsleepthink in this Sheffield design studio, so it may be longer than it seems since we last ordered some ink. Anyway we have ordered some more ink from Amazon as unfortunately work would be made very difficult for myself in particular should we run out of ink at anytime. Thanks for listening to me ranting on about printer ink, it has certainly helped me vent some of my printer ink related frustration.

Matt 

Exhibition Stands

For major businesses across the world exhibition stands are excellent ways of drumming up business and getting your business noticed in the exact field that your working in. For example of this Dow Chemicals have recently taken part in a paint coatings show called Eurocoat in Genoa, Italy. Therefore they were in need of a eye catching but yet simple exhibition stand that would allow them to attract clients and present themselves in the most professional and innovative way possible. Cue eatsleepthink a little design agency situated on the outskirts of Sheffield, England. Having already created the whole advertising campaign for Dow Coating Materials which I have already blogged about and is linked here, as well as producing work for Dow Angus we were in the perfect position to understand exactly what was needed by Dow Chemicals and how to produce it. Here is the final drawing which was produced by eatsleepthink design before being sent to the people who were producing the stand in Italy, hope you like.

In the space of about 2 weeks we have gone from this digitally produced visual to the final product which was in place on schedule for the Eurocoat show, Genoa, Italy on the 9th November - 11th November. Here is a picture taken of the exhibition stand in its full flow during the show. It is very pleasing to see how busy the stand was, in fact it looks like Dow could have actually done with a few extra metres space for the stand.

The corners of the stand were separated into four different teams of Dow Chemicals, as can be seen there was the Dow Angus corner, Dow Microbial to the right, Dow Coating Materials in the far corner which can't be seen and Dow Construction to the left. The screen on the Angus corner is also featuring a flash movie presentation which we produced for them.

Thinking about it I actually never posted you the picture of the stand design that we produced for Dow Coating Materials when they were at the Paint Istanbul show in Istanbul between the 23rd - 26th September. As the saying goes better late than never. This was different in the sense that this was solely for the Dow Coating Materials team of Dow as opposed to the stand for Eurocoat which was for four different teams of Dow.

 

These are all of the exhibitions stands eatsleepthink have produced for Dow so far however hopefully we will be working on another in the near future.

I hope that you like the stand designs that we have produced and welcome any comments you may have.

Matt 

The Electronic Take Over

Whilst writing my post about the Volunteering England magazine it got me thinking about how we seem to be moving away from traditional forms of sending people (clients) news. Over the last decade we have seen a large movement into the world wide web, and this is now being utilised by organisations through the use of E-Newsletters. So from the prospect of this design studio have we noticed a change in the type of work we receive over recent years. In the past eatsleepthink as one of Sheffield's leading design agencies we have produced many magazines for a wide range of clients including present and old clients. This includes magazines for Greenstones a chartered accountant posted in Peterborough, a magazine for Get Fresh and a newsletter for Rand Newsletters. Although all of these have come and gone we are still producing a hardcopy magazine for Volunteering England and are currently working on the November edition of this. As a design agency we seem to be noticing a slow move away from the sort of publications like this that are physically produced, and we seem to be moving into an age where a lot of news sources these days take electronic form only. For instance E-Newsletters are now becoming more and more popular throughout our client base, I feel that this is the influence of below the line activities such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Of course you cannot place links to your account on these sites on a magazine. I still feel there is a place in the world for magazines as their are still many people who value the efforts made to customers services by producing a quality well thought out magazine. There is also the added factor for E-Newsletters that they are environmentally friendly compared to a magazine which when thousands of copies are being printed is taking another tree from earth, and therefore reducing the earths ability to absorb the CO2 emissions that we are constantly pumping into the atmosphere and further accelerating the global warming effect. That's enough of my verge into the Geography of environment and sustainability. Here are a selection of magazines which eatsleepthink design has produced over the years with a brief description of who the magazine was for.

As mentioned above we produced a magazine a few years ago for our client Greenstones Chartered accountants and here is a spread of the pages featured in this throughout a number of the issues.

 
Here are the pages from the Get Fresh magazine that eatsleepthink designed a few years ago well before I joined this progressive and passionate design agency in Sheffield. As I am sure you have been able to gather from the pictures this magazine was about having a healthy lifestyle and it was essential that we were able to design this in such a way to reflect this.

 The above is not a magazine maybe the clue is in the name Rand newsletter. Again this was a new document that we had produced a couple of years ago that was to be printed and sent out to clients. Whereas now a days we could probably produce the exact same design but rather than sending this to a printers it would more than likely be moved into html so that this could be sent out as an E-Newsletter to all subscribers or clients using a mailing E-Newsletter site. 

I hope that you have enjoyed my topic of choice here and I welcome any of your comments on this subject.

Matt

VE Magazine October Edition

As mentioned in my last eatsleepthink post sometime last week I did mention that my text topic would be about a Magazine that we have produced for our client Volunteering England. After keeping you in suspense about this I have finally been given the go ahead to give you a sneak peek at some of the pages of the magazine that has been designed in this small but busy design agency in Halfway, Sheffield. This document was previously produced in house by Volunteering England however such is our value for money and quality of work produced VE felt it necessary that this important document should be given that bit of flair in design terms whilst still sticking with our usual guidelines set up for publications produced for Volunteering England. This is the first edition which eatsleepthink has produced therefore before placing content in that we were given, we were required to build a template design for it taking the new design away from the old in house style and also keeping consistency throughout all of the other editions. Now I have attached a selection of pages from the 20 page magazine and hopefully you will like what the designers at eatsleepthink have done with the design.

This is the front cover design of the magazine, as you will notice compared to other publications the magazine is quite differing due the minimal use of the VE Orange throughout the document, but in particular the front page which is above.

Obviously magazines are to be more text based as it is a way of notifying people of all the goings on in the organisation that may effect the reader. As it is text based this limits the number of images and bits of design flair that could have gone into the document. Therefore it is really important that as a design agency we make the document look as visually interesting as possible whilst still being very professional. 

So there you have it we have given you a peek at 5 pages from the 20 page magazine designed for Volunteering England by eatsleepthink. Hopefully around this time next month I will be posting November's edition of the magazine for you to look at, and by then it will be less than a month until Christmas and the New Year! Scary isn't it.

Thanks for viewing my blog, comments welcome.

Matt