I was given this flyer / coupon the other day.
Hard to see from these terrible photos, but printing on watercolor cotton paper is an awesome idea. Strong (you can hardly tear it), textured, rough edges, it has a really unique feel.
We shall be using this for something interesting 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…
*This role has now been filled*
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.
No agencies please.
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 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.
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.
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.
Website due to launch in November.
(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)
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.
Our recent acquistion of CG Media and other stories was featured in the Birmingham Post yesterday:
