Visit the Birdcage website at birdcageeskmills.com

Once it started going in front of clients it was important that our website had the same look and feel, so that prompted us to take a fresh look at the website entirely.

Wireframes

With our previous website, we chose to make the blog the main focus of the site. While this worked well for showcasing our most up to date work and articles, it didn’t enable us to communicate what we do as effectively as we would have liked.

The wireframing process helped us nail down what content we wanted to bring to the forefront of the website, and the hierarchy of that content.

Design & Implementation

We already had colour pallet and visual style for the design of the site. Our typography pallet has traditionally consisted of Futura for any headings and Helvetica Neue for the blocks of text.

For this design, we wanted all of the copy to be rendered in HTML and CSS rather than relying on images for the headers. This required us to deviate from Futura as it isn’t licensed for embedding using the @font-face property.

We decided to find an alternative that suited our visual style while offering the flexibility we required in the weights available. The headers are therefore served up in Proxima Nova via Typekit. For the body copy we have used Helvetica Neue, and the accent font is Goudy Bookletter 1911, again via typekit.

In the work section, we’ve given the imagery more space to shine in a simple but functional template, and if you head to the about page you can find out all about the individuals that make up the team!

That just about wraps it up for this post. More from me soon, and I believe Ross will be posting about the design award we won last week! That’s sure to be a treat!

The projects deliverables include:
- An identity for Albany Street Residences
- Signage
- A sales pack with inserts
- Stationery
- E-newsletter
- Website

www.albanystreetresidences.co.uk

We are nominated in the Craft category, for our work for Hawke & Hunter. Also nominated in this category are Freight, Navy Blue, Tayburn and White Space.

Keeping the name, we refreshed every other aspect of the marketing material including the brand, development website, site signage, press and online advertising and sales brochure.

Aimed at first-time buyers and small investors, our aim was to keep the marketing simple, fresh, open and up-front – hanging everything on the development’s two main selling points – the great location and (due to the Administration) the great prices.

We developed a simple, modern and recognisable brand and tagline that would allow the marketing to achieve high visibility and quickly communicate the development’s USPs.

www.edinburgh-horizon.co.uk

Horizon
a great deal… now within reach

Ian McGeechan: Good coach. Nice guy. Thinks with his tongue out.

As I rest and prepare my liver for this weekend’s Calcutta cup match (tickets courtesy of Strawberry Scotland – thanks Aidan), I thought I would give this blog a rugby theme.

In a past life, as I may have mentioned before, I was a rugby player.

And I had the good fortune to play under two of the finest coaches in world rugby – Bob Dwyer, World Cup winning coach with Australia and Ian McGeechan, Grand Slam winning coach of Scotland and five times British and Irish Lions coach.

Whilst my time as a player wasn’t covered in glory, it did teach me a few lessons in life – some of which I find extremely useful in the running of H&A. I thought I’d share them with you – you may find it useful too…

Lesson 1 – Get the basics right

Bob Dwyer: Like Rolf Harris, only angrier with more swearing

In my first year out of school I played under Bob Dwyer at Leicester Tigers. The game had just turned professional and Bob was enjoying great success with Leicester at the time.

As a bright eyed and bushy tailed whippersnapper I was biting at the bit to find out the secrets of word cup winning rugby that Bob held the key to.

I was expecting great things. I was expecting devastating moves. I was expecting complex game plans. I was expecting superhuman team mates who could run through walls and who ate lesser men for breakfast. What I got was something completely different.

What we did:

The first few weeks we had fun. We went away. We played every sport you can think of. We got to know each other. We started to feel like a team and we started to understand what made each other tick. We developed an understanding of what we were good at as individuals and what we could do to maximise these advantages.

We learnt what we should be eating and when. We covered when we should train and when we needed to rest. We were given training routines which focused on achieving the core attributes needed to play the game – speed, strength and power. We trained really hard. It was horrible.

Once we got on the training ground I thought it would get complicated – it didn’t. What followed was endless repetition of the basics. Mauling, mauling, mauling. Bob spent a lot of time with me – helping me unlearn the bad habits I had accumulated. But all in all, it was exactly what I was doing at Harrogate U19s. Only much, much more of it with much, much bigger people. Bob was uncompromising and training was relentless – and if you made a mistake Bob made sure you knew about it.

The results:

I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed. I wanted something much sexier. Professional sport was meant to be far more exotic than this. It wasn’t, but the results spoke for themselves:

We were fitter than the opposition. We made less mistakes. The opposition scored less points. We scored more points. It worked.

Lesson 2 – Keep it simple

My time at Leicester was cut short by a change of management. Bob Dwyer got sacked and Dean Richards took over. Bob liked me, Dean didn’t. I was asked to leave.

My next stop was Northampton under the guidance of Ian McGeechan. McGeechan is well known as one of rugby’s great thinkers. His mild manner and thoughtful approach was a real contrast to the fire and fury of Dwyer, but it was his ability to communicate effectively which struck me most.

Rugby from the outside can appear to be a very complicated game. But under McGeechan it was very simple. We had a plan and everything we did was geared towards it.

Geech understood that for his plan to work, he would have to get everyone to buy into it. The 18 stone hooker from Argentina, the flamboyant winger from France, the angry prop from South Africa, the scrawny substitute from Edinburgh…. you get the idea.

He achieved this by talking about the plan in every session we had. The coaching and fitness staff talked about the plan in every session they had. It was so simple,10 years on I can still remember the plan:

- Shift the point of attack (2 passes)
- Contact on your terms
- Recycle quickly
- Repeat until gilt edge opportunity arises.
- Take it

We knew the plan inside out. We talked about it in training. We talked about it on the pitch. I knew what to do when I had the ball. I knew what to do when other players had the ball. I knew what was going to happen next. So did my team mates.

The plan worked. Northampton won the European Cup because of it. It worked because the plan was simple and everyone understood it.

Lesson 3 – Passion

Both men had a vision of how the game should be played. Their style and approach differed greatly but their passion for their vision of the game was striking.

When they talked about it you felt it. Whether it was on a freezing, wet training ground at 9am on a Monday morning or minutes before kick-off. It was infectious and it was powerful. Because they were passionate about it, we were passionate about it.

Their visions brought people together, it got the best out of everyone involved and it drove the success that both teams enjoyed.

If at the weekend Scotland manage get the basics right, have understood Robinson’s plan and are passionate about the task in hand then we will stand a chance. If they don’t they will fail. For those of us not donning a Scotland shirt at the weekend, I’m sure its not a great leap to see where the lessons in business may lie.

My tips:

Get the basics right – Think carefully about what you do and how it fits your customer needs. Get the right people to perform the right jobs and make sure the structure is there to support the delivery of your product – time after time.

Keep it simple – Make sure your customers understand what you do and why they should use you over the competition. Put yourself in their shoes. Speak to them in plain English. Choose a unique position for your firm and reinforce it at every opportunity.

Passion – Have passion for what you do. Share it with your team. With a clear vision of where the firm is going and a passion for getting there you can achieve great things. If you’re not passionate about it, you should think about doing something else.

p.s. if you’re off to the rugby this weekend, have a look at the programme – we have a nice little ad in there for one of our clients. See if you can spot it and let us know what you think.

Cheers, Ross