The Southwest’s biggest Annual Open Exhibition returns for 170th year
The RWA (Royal West of England Academy) is delighted to announce the return of its renowned Annual Open Exhibition for the 170th year, running for an extended period, from 9 September 2023 to 14 January 2024.
This dynamic and varied exhibition features painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, and mixed media submissions and is a showcase of some of the most exciting artists from across the country and beyond.
Amongst this year’s selection panel were invited artist Charmaine Watkins; President of the RWA Fiona Robinson; artist and Rabley Gallery director Meryl Ainslie, and Academicians Dallas Collins VPRWA, Lucy Austin RWA, Angel Lizon RWA and Karl Singporewala RWA. They assessed every artwork on its own merits, anonymously, before being able to bring down the 4000+ entries to just over 400. No mean task when the standard of work submitted was so high!
Alison Bevan, RWA Director, says: “This year above all others, we have been quite overwhelmed by the variety and standard of artworks submitted by every kind of artist, from long-established veterans to fresh new talent just finding its artistic voice. No matter what kind of art you enjoy, we can promise every visitor will find lots to love!”
The Annual Open reflects the RWA’s ongoing commitment to championing world-class art in the region and creating opportunities for new and emerging talent. It includes in excess of £10,000 in prize money, including the £5000 Academy Prize and a £4000 Other Art Prize.
All the original artwork on display is for sale not only in the galleries, but also online, with prices starting at less than you’d pay for a furniture-shop print. Buying art helps support both the artists and the RWA, which is a completely independent charity (1070163) delivering life-enhancing creative opportunities for young people and adults across Bristol.
Tickets to the Annual Open Exhibtion are £8.90 (concessions available), or for just £15 you can buy an RWA Art Pass, which allows unlimited access to all our ticketed exhibitions as many times as you like for a whole year. https://www.rwa.org.uk
On August 1st, Park Street based agency Dirty Design unveiled their rebrand. Timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the company’s founding by Charlotte Hockey-Berry in 2003, the new look is a huge development from the previous creampuff logo and signature Pantone 806 pink.
After a tumultuous few years which saw the unexpected loss of their founder, the Dirty Design team felt it was time to take stock and find a way to mark the progression of the company and acknowledge this new chapter, while still paying tribute to their roots.
The fresh identity expands on the existing colour palette with the addition of primary and secondary shades, which are paired with a bespoke font and set of unique and fun illustrations. The new Dirty Design logo is said to “reflect who we are as a company today; it’s personal, flexible and friendly”.
“After many years of putting our own visual identity on hold, we finally decided to practise what we preach and give ourselves a long overdue refresh. We pride ourselves on being a friendly and approachable agency, and our aim was to show that in our new look. It’s been great fun working on this with the other designers and collaborating with the whole team, to develop a style that suits who we are now and the company that Charlotte started 20 years ago.”
– Steve Harris, Head of Design
The rebrand marks an exciting time for the agency, who this year are expanding their work within the charity sector, including producing all design assets for this years YoungMinds #HelloYellow campaign, supporting national children’s charity Barnardo’s in design for various campaigns, and creating a fresh look and feel for the Motability Foundation’s direct mailer pack.
“I’m so proud of the whole team. Our new Dirty look is simply fabulous, and although light years away from the original it still portrays what we’re all about; a creative and fun bunch – and of course it’s still very pink! I’m so excited to see what the future holds and for us to continue to do what we do best, produce stunning designs and provide outstanding account management – to work with and support our incredible clients.”
– Lucia Boccacci, Managing Director
You can see the full rebrand in action at Dirty Design’s website; dirtydesign.co.uk. You can also watch their 2023 showreel below:
Cameron Balloons, a renowned leader in the hot air balloon industry, is proud to announce the launch of their groundbreaking app, Sky Sketcher. This innovative web application empowers users to unleash their creativity and design their very own personalised hot air balloons, revolutionising the way enthusiasts engage with the art of ballooning.
With Sky Sketcher, users can embark on a unique and immersive journey, where they have the freedom to customise every aspect of their hot air balloon envelope. From selecting colours, materials, and artwork to exploring different balloon models, the app offers an unparalleled level of customisation and personalisation.
One of our primary goals at Cameron Balloons is to make hot air ballooning an accessible and interactive experience for everyone,” said Will Offer, Senior Designer of Cameron Balloons. “SkySketcher represents a significant leap forward in achieving that vision. We wanted to provide a platform that allows individuals to turn their imagination into reality and design a hot air balloon that truly reflects their personality and style.”
The features of SkySketcher are designed with user-friendly functionality in mind. The app provides an intuitive interface, ensuring that even those new to ballooning can effortlessly navigate and create their dream aircraft. Users can experiment with colours and patterns, incorporate their own artwork, and find the perfect looks effortlessly.
SkySketcher allows users to visualise their creation in 3D. Adding this extra dimension provides users with a sneak peek into what their custom hot air balloon will look like floating high up in the sky.
“We are thrilled to introduce Sky Sketcher as a game-changer in the ballooning community,” added Offer. “It’s an app that encourages creativity, fosters self-expression, and allows users to engage with the world of hot air balloons like never before. We want to inspire a new generation of balloon enthusiasts!”
SkySketcher by Cameron Balloons is now available, bringing the joy of designing custom hot air balloons to the fingertips of users worldwide. To learn more about the app and start designing your dream balloon, visit https://www.cameronballoons.co.uk/skysketcher or follow Cameron Balloons on instagram or Facebook.
Redeemer City to City is an international non-profit organisation with a heart for urban renewal – seeking to recruit, train and resource leaders to start new churches and strengthen existing ones.
Studio Floc were invited to create the identity and event collateral for Redeemer’s ‘Hub Weekend’; a high-profile fundraising weekend based in New York City.
Campaign idea
Taking place at the 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge, the driving idea behind the event’s campaign was one of connection, with delegates travelling from all over the world to join for the weekend. Studio Floc used the idea of connecting people and creating paths to new places as the core concept. This was rolled out across an extensive design suite of event collateral which was used in the lead up and throughout the weekend.
Never ending connection
At the heart of the event’s design concept was a vast illustration, created in-house to capture the breadth and vitality of life in New York City, the home of Redeemer City to City. Subtle details in the cityscape worked to honour other global partner cities. The mural, formed from continuous line drawings, was then, paired with type and colour, used both in sections and as a whole piece across the event assets.
Colour and typography
Supporting the illustration-heavy campaign was a subtle, yet extensive typographic system that was driven by the elegant serif, Chronicle Text (Hoefler & Co). Alongside the typography, a stripped back colour palette of navy and alabaster were used as the foundation for every design.
At the event
As part of the event, Studio Floc recreated the core illustration and hand drew a 17ft x 9ft mural in the atrium of the 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge, as a visual centrepiece to the event. Other designed collateral at the event included; table numbers, name cards, place cards, menus, bespoke fabric napkins, tote bags, information booklets and cards, signage, wayfinding, video creation and much more.
The Hub Weekend was a great success in raising money for the continuation of Redeemer’s work in cities worldwide. Studio Floc are already working on the event design for the next Hub Weekend in 2024 and look forward to further collaboration with Redeemer City to City in the future.
“Studio Floc are my go-to designers for event collateral. They are creative, sensitive, timely, very fun to work with, and brilliant at bringing my often-incomplete vision to a finished, effective, beautifully designed product. I’ve already recommended them to others and will continue to do so.”
Susan Thorson
Manager, Communications
Redeemer City to City
Having started the process in 2021, they join around 70 other companies in the region who are committed to making business a force for good.
B Corp Certification is holistic, not exclusively focused on a single social or environmental issue. To achieve certification, a company must:
saintnicks achieved a score of 88.9, but as with any company to gain the certification, they acknowledge that this is just the beginning of a commitment to do even more.
“We’re incredibly proud of the work we’ve done to become B Corp Certified, but we’re just getting started. We’re committed to continually reviewing our standards across the board, to not only maintain our efforts, but improve them.” said company Director, Chris Price.
“We’re very proud to be working with some brilliant clients, who are also committed to making positive changes to their business, so it’s a journey we’re going on together.” Price added.
Read more about the journey to becoming B Corp Certified on the saintnicks website.
BRAVA today announces the appointment of professional voice actor and performer, Sally Bailey, to the coaching team
Sally has been a professional voice actor for the last 11 years, working at a high level across narration, commercial and characters. Her impressive career spans over 30 years across radio and TV, starting as a breakfast presenter on Galaxy 101, moving on to co-host the network evening show, Core/Music Control, for GCap Media plc and then co-hosting the breakfast show for Capital FM, South Wales.
Sally moved to voice acting full time in 2012 and has voiced hundreds of commercials for clients including Pukka, GAME, Costa, Coca Cola, Thornton’s and Cartoon Network. Her TV presenting credits include a series of animations on historical figures for BBC Bitesize and documentary narrations for Channel 5 & Everyman.
Sally will join principal coach, Melissa Thom, as senior commercial coach at BRAVA.
Melissa Thom, CEO and founder of BRAVA said:
‘We are delighted to welcome Sally to BRAVA. She has been a colleague for many years and the breadth of skills and expertise she brings to our offering as a professional voice actor and performer, is impressive. She has exactly the right approach as an educator and is a genuinely lovely individual. Sally will help us develop our offering to provide personalised training in voice acting, at the highest level.’
Sally Bailey said:
‘I am over the moon to be joining the BRAVA team. Being a voiceover is one of the best jobs in the world and working with people embarking on their career is both tremendously exciting and a complete honour.’
To find out more about BRAVA go to www.brava.uk.com
Unfold are a design and development agency based in the heart of Bristol. We work with the founders, marketing or technical leads of SMEs, startups and innovative corporates to help them increase revenue and profitability or save them time (or ideally both!).
Over the past five years Unfold has seen a lot of change. We’ve grown as a team, embraced new challenges and opportunities, and welcomed many new clients along the way.
We felt it was time to take a moment to properly reflect on our journey and how we’ve evolved as a business; to understand who we are, why we love doing what we do and how we make a difference to our clients’ businesses.
Today, we are thrilled to share our newly revamped website with you, showcasing our full range of services, the impact we create for our clients, and ultimately the Unfold way of doing.
Unfold started five years ago with the objective of building beautiful, user-centred websites and web apps, which provide exceptional experiences for end-customers and fantastic results for businesses. This mission remains at the heart of what we do, but has evolved significantly as we’ve expanded our expertise, knowledge, team and client base.
As a result our service offering has grown to encompass five key areas:
Our method for analysing and refining concepts, using the latest insights and trends, will show you where the big opportunities lie, reduce risk and produce real results.
Together we define, develop and deliver different design solutions by putting the customers’ needs at the centre of your website.
Our expert team of engineers are experts in dealing with complex requirements and creating intelligent, flexible solutions to match.
We’re serious about growing your business by providing the CRO tools you need to engage and convert higher-quality leads.
We don’t shy away from taking over existing projects and fixing difficult bugs, in fact it has become a core speciality of our team.
Day to day that means we work with the founders, marketing or technical leads of SMEs, startups and innovative corporates to help them increase revenue and profitability or save them time (or ideally both!).
At Unfold we take a user-centred approach to our clients’ work. Meaning that we seek to put the end-customer at the heart of everything we do, from design, right through to development. This approach enables us to produce outstanding and technically complex websites and platforms that have a real impact for customers.
We push boundaries and challenge thinking to transform our clients’ vision into reality. We’re focused on building close, transparent partnerships that drive innovation and achieve shared goals.
We’d love to hear what you think of the new site! Please feel free to get in touch and share your thoughts with us.
Do you have a project in mind or would you like some expert advice? Perhaps you know a friend or colleague that might benefit from working with us? If so get in touch and see how we can help you achieve your goals.
We’re also in the process of expanding our team. If you’re interested in working with us we’d love to hear from you!
And finally, stay updated on the latest news events and valuable resources from our team by following us on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Whether you’re an employer looking to attract and retain the best talent, or a job seeker looking to negotiate a competitive salary, you’re in the right place.
How do the salaries in your workplace compare with industry averages? Take a look into the average pay packets for jobs across Events, Marketing, CRM, Digital, PR and Sales – download the Henry Nicholas’ 2023 salary guide here.
It’s an urban myth that the modern attention span has shortened to less than that of a goldfish – let’s clear that up first*.
However, the fact that we’re living in a world of content, content, content coming at us from all angles is certainly not fake news. When there’s so much easy distraction out there, how do you hold someone’s attention?
This becomes an even greater challenge when that message is a bit complex, dense or tricky to understand. Here’s where traditional communication methods can fall short.
It’s time to deploy some interactivity ⚡️
Why, though? Well first up, here are some statistics to mull over…
☑️ Only 10% of people remember what they hear
☑️ This increases to 20% of people who remember what they read
☑️ But a whopping 80% of people remember what they see and do.**
That makes a pretty great case for communicators to give people something to both look at and take part in at the same time. The people we’re trying to reach are no longer passive onlookers. Instead, they become active participants, influencing and being influenced by the content they’re engaging with.
Let’s explore the awesome potential interactivity holds in fostering meaningful understanding…
Capturing attention & boosting comprehension
Humans are nosey creatures and we’re naturally drawn to interactive experiences. Engaging our natural curiosity and prompting us to explore and participate means that complex topics become instantly more approachable, relatable and enjoyable.
The Luna 9 studio often employs this what’s-coming-next, storytelling style technique for creating explainers. It’s often attached to a topic that’s either very detailed and tricky to grasp, or – let’s face it – kind of dry.
To combat this we have to put the power in the user’s hands and make them want to learn, instead of just hoping that they pick it up. Scrolling explainer pages are a light version of interactivity that enables hands-on exploration. You’re encouraged to keep going (and learning) to uncover the next cool thing – while still giving you the power to explore at your own pace.
Check this out in action for the explainer page we created for Pepper Bio…
Personalised learning
True, it’s not school and there’s no exam (promise!), but everyone learns at their own pace and has different preferences when it comes to uncovering and digesting information.
Leaning into this fact with interactivity lets your audience embrace this individual nature and delivers your message with more accuracy.
It’s refreshing to be able decide what’s most relevant to you and choose what you read, click or watch – which enhances the retention of what you’re reading as it’s putting your needs front and centre. Everyone loves that!
We’ve used this tactic in interactive infographics and games for projects that have a vast amount of information to communicate, and the audience spans across lots of sectors and disciplines. Instead of shovelling absolutely all the info onto people, which is guaranteed to cause overwhelm, we structured the interactive journeys so that users can quickly recognise themselves in the opening screens.
From here they’re able to select their own paths, variables and options as they move through the graphics, so that they’re always in control. Fun!
This means they can track down tailored content that’s useful and most importantly – valuable – to them. Message delivered.
We employed this approach in creating the SME Net Zero challenge for BSI – check it out here.
Focusing all-important context
To avoid hitting snoozeville early, hard-to-understand topics are always going to need a little bit of context to convince your audience to stop and take note.
If you can’t relate stuff to real-world scenarios, then it’s usually asking too much of your audience to think in the abstract… Which means they’re unlikely to keep caring about your message. Bummer.
Interactivity can bridge this gap though, by providing examples and simulations that can really helps the people you’re trying to reach to join those dots between theory and practice.
We explored this element of interactivity with our Energy Landscape Map. We began with with a simple, visual grounding of the content, drawn as an easy-to-understand map for how everything works together as a network.
From here, the information is then layered on top, letting you whizz around at your leisure and uncover different levels of detail depending on what interests you, but all the while grounded with the knowledge of how it all interlinks back on the map.
Check our our interactive Energy Landscape Map here…
So – what’s the all-round benefit of interactivity?
Simple! It boils down to the seeing and the doing. Combining the two with an element of storytelling can make even the most complex of subjects easier and enjoyable to explore.
Get in touch at [email protected] or sign up to our newsletter for news, updates and morsels of inspiration from the Luna 9 studio.
At JMP, are delighted to welcome Matt Joy to our growing team, joining as Managing Partner.
Matt has a wealth of industry experience, having spent more than 10 years in the sports industry, and most recently four years at a strategic brand agency.
His previous roles have included five years as Marketing Manager at Stoke City during their Premier League golden years, before moving south and helping create the Marketing team at Bristol Sport during the rebuild of Ashton Gate. Following that, he spent four years at Mr B & Friends in Bristol.
In regards to his responsibility at JMP, Matt will be a crucial cog in our ability to excel as an agency, offering additional strategic insights and creative campaigns to our clients.
Managing Director Joe Meredith expanded on this.
“It’s a significant role, the biggest addition we’ve ever made to the business,” he said.
“It’s something that I feel we’ve both wanted to happen for a long time. Everything just needed to align. Matt is in a position to elevate the offerings of JMP and I’m really excited to work with him to take JMP to the next level ”
Matt expressed his excitement about what lies ahead, for both himself and JMP.
“I’m really looking forward to it,” he said. “I’ve known Joe since I initially moved to Bristol and how he has grown the agency in that time has been great to see. It’s an exciting time to now get involved and add to the recent successes.
“My role is going to be quite broad but ultimately I will have a real focus on the growth of the agency. First of all to define who we are, our offerings and identify where we can add real value to our clients, both current and new.”
Matt joins our newly-formed Senior Leadership Team, alongside MD Joe and Operations Director Vicki Theobald.