1541 Marketing

My wife's new business has opened up a creative avenue for me.  Not only have I designed her website and her business cards but I've just done a banner ad for the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland (out in the May 2012 issue, hopefully).

Actually, it's not an entirely new idea (as it's based on one of the images we use on the website and on the business cards) but at least it did get me back into GIMP again and helped refresh a few of the skills I'd forgotten I had.

As noted before I'm not at all keen on the normal corporate approach or images and so have gone for something that I hope that you won't see very often in a sober and traditional Scots lawyers' publication.

The idea was to do something striking, intriguing and simple that would catch the attention and draw the reader in, even if only for a few seconds.  In other words:

1) "Hey, interesting image"
2) "Eh, 1541?  What's that supposed to be?"
3) "Ah, I get it."

Something like that anyway. As the Journal has a circulation of 20,000 lawyers we reckon that if we get one new client (or just two small jobs on the back of it) it will be worth it.  Ah, creativity!

St Peter and St Cuthbert

January was a busy month for some reason (I don't know why because I didn't achieve anything) but at least I've got off my hurdies (that's a Scots word, you'll just have to look it up) and got the beer making going again.  The 1541 IPA, I made previously, was based on a kit of Munton's IPA, which came out rather lacking in the malty body, hoppy finish and creamy head that one would expect (just about everything really).  My beer labels were eye-catching though (see earlier post and photo below with guitar and beer bottles in situ).

Therefore, although I'm sticking with kits for now, I'm going to try this St Peter's Ale, which I got from my local and very helpful beer-making shop at Bruntsfield, Edinburgh called Alba Homebrew.  It should be good as St Peter's is a real brewery and you can buy their intensely hoppy bottled beers in Waitrose and elsewhere.  Alba is the Gaelic name for Scotland, by the way.

I started it this morning so it'll be a few weeks before it's ready and my plan though, is to repackage it as 1541 St Cuthbert's Ale.  Obviously this is for my own use and amusement and not for sale anywhere.  I'll be working on the labels next so watch this space/blog.  Cheers.

Another 1541 Banner

It's been a hard week this week, although with the reward of a few work-related days in Bucharest (maybe) in December to look forward to my thoughts turn to pleasing colours and shapes.  Funny that.  One of these is an image I've used on the company website which I thought I'd share.

It has tone and direction and movement and a story perhaps and is calm and I like it.  Strange to think then that it is just a random collection of paint marks on a wall that when framed and photographed looks a bit like art!

1541 IPA Bottles

Just evidence that I actually did use the labels I'd designed for my home-brew project.  I stuck them on with Pritt-stick so I hope they come off again when I have to re-use the bottles.

You may or may not notice that I have two types of bottles there: the outer two formerly contained Deuchars IPA and the middle, slightly more elegant one, had Harviestoun's Bitter and Twisted in it before I put them to good use.  I should add that both are excellent Scottish beers - and the bottles are quite useful too.  My beer is now conditioning in the shed and should be ready by mid-November, I reckon.

1541 IPA

Being a rather eclectic chap I'm always looking for new activities and interests.  The latest is beer making.  This has been prompted not only by my creative urges but also the exasperation that a pint of decent beer in the pub in Edinburgh (Deuchar's IPA, for example) currently costs £3.30.  Yes children I can remember when beer was less than a pound and in fact recall fondly the days (c.1986) when a pint (of McEwan's lager, admittedly) cost 64p in the Queen Margaret Union Bar at Glasgow University.

The exasperation comes in when you consider that, even with blatant profiteering by the oil companies a pint of beer is still four and a half times more expensive than a pint of petrol (at £1.35 a litre say, or approximately 78p a pint)

The point here is that petrol is the finite resource, not the beer, unless there are whole bunch of beer wells in the North Sea or (crivens!) Saudi Arabia running dry that we weren't told about. Anyway, once you've collected the kit and the empty beer bottles, making beer is not only cheaper (it works out at about 50p a pint) but it also allows one to be creative, as mentioned above.

In preparation for bottling my first batch of India Pale Ale (IPA) I decided to make up some labels in GIMP and as an added wheeze I'm going to use them as light-hearted marketing for my partner's new business (mentioned below).  So here are the labels I've designed using the banners from her website (which I designed), the company name (well, I am a Director, you know) and even the fonts we use (Georgia and Lucida Sans Console, if you must know).

You can see how they link to the 1541 banners I posted about earlier and also the heading of this very blog.  I'm intending to bottle it tonight so here's hoping that once conditioned (takes about two weeks) that the beer tastes as good as I think the labels look....

1541 Banners

My partner has recently set up her own business and I've been working on her website in Drupal.  I'm not an expert in such things but I have had fun designing her site.

The simple website template we chose (Danland) has enabled us to emphasise the modern, intelligent and interesting approach that the company is taking.  One feature of Danland I liked was the slideshow type banner where we could select what images were shown; and one of the things I've been doing is tracking down, and/or trying to make, what I consider to be interesting images for the banner.

I was keen on orange as this gives a website impact (well, I think so - see the picture at the top of this blog) and of course orange complements blue.  The above banner was adapted from a royalty-free image I found on the web.  In contrast the following image is based on a photograph I took (copyright me!) whilst we were on the remote South Atlantic island of St Helena earlier this year (March/April 2011).

This shows two distinct species of lichen we found at the top of Flagstaff (a hill), at an elevation of about 650m.

If I can find out what species they are I'll let you know.  Or in fact if you know please feel free to comment on this post. That said, one of my colleagues recently discovered eleven species of lichen that were formerly unknown on St Helena, eight of which were previously undiscovered by science.  Now there's something to have on your website.