Thompson Brand Partners

Metal

To coincide with the opening of their new HQ, we've just finished a raft of lovely new stuff for the super cool arts organisation Metal. 

They're moving into Chalkwell Hall in Essex (in fact it's the opening party tonight) and they asked us to help celebrate this event with a whole host of supporting printed materials using the new identity we'd put together for them.

We're particularly pleased with the results, hope you agree.

Recent work

We thought you'd like to see some of the recent - and not so recent - work we've just photographed as part of an awards submission.

We really like it. Hope you agree.

And if you're a senior designer or design director who'd like to play a big part of keeping our creative standards high, then we'd like to hear from you - because we're hiring. 

Drop me a line with a CV and some work samples (you know the drill) and we'll take it from there.

we thought you'd like to see

Design + North = Talent

This year, we're sponsoring the Northern Design Competition. It's been going for around four years and is open to any student designer in the North of England. This year, there was literally hundreds and hundreds of entries.

We're always spouting off about how good the North is, and how good our designers are, so we thought we'd better put our money where our mouth is.

So for the next three years, we're sponsoring the awards event and the graphic design category. We're also judging a very special prize on the evening - the Real World prize. This is the student whose entry, in our opinion, has the potential to make the most difference in the real world. We came up with this prize because there's so much nonsense talked about design in certain circles about how it's airy fairy and non essential. Obviously we beg to differ.

Anyway, the awards are on the 18th June in Leeds and the chair of the judges is Wayne Hemingway. Full report on the winners to follow.

Buying design

From where we sit in the design industry, I think that most of us think purchasing our services is pretty easy. 

I believe that the industry view is that most clients inherently see the benefit of design - and the instantaneous benefits we can deliver to their organisations and bottom lines.

Well, we're wrong.

And we've known it for a long time. A regular feature of any new pitch has been the 'value added' element and the hard sell to the dyed in the wool FD who looks at any company that talks about 'brand' with deepest cynicism. We've all been there, the marketing team wheeling us in to win the management team over with passion and ideas.

But we forget the hardest thing is truly understanding what we can deliver and on top of this, the people who are tasked with  buying these services often don't have a clue what we're about. 

Yesterday I sat on a Parliamentary Consultation Committee on design procurement and the meeting's sole aim to try and  bridge the gap between public sector procurement of design and the people buying the services. As most us know who are involved in this sector, it's very complicated and the rules are completely different to the commercial sector. I think the main challenge with working with the public sector is navigating the complicated procurement systems and often the companies who are geared up for the process, do well. It all comes back to understanding the well documented issues of ITTs, PQQ, tenders etc etc.

I'd be very,very interested in hearing from anyone out there who's had a bad public sector procurement experience so I can add it to my response back to the parliamentary committee who are dealing with this. Let me know, we may see some change.