In the short video below, we share an example of a virtual underground station designed to replicate a real-world experience. As you will see, the possibilities are almost limitless. We can design a fully immersive virtual experience, unique to your brand.
Within the tour, multiple features are shown that allow your brand to communicate core messages and keep your attendees engaged throughout their virtual journey.
If you would like to explore the full tour, amongst other virtual experiences, please contact [email protected] to request an interactive demonstration.
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We anticipate the future to be a hybrid model offering both physical in-person exhibits and events, as well as virtual versions. These dual online and in-person meetings require having a platform that can complement both.
Intelligent design is at the heart of everything we do. We balance strategy with creativity to create beautiful branded environments & communications. It simply means the thinking comes before the doing, every time.
Phoenix Wharf, the Bristol-based interior design and branding agency specialising in hospitality and retail, has announced the completion of a new scheme for innovative bakery business The Bristol Loaf, who, together with other local artisanal partners, has launched a new community foodie hub in Bedminster, in the south of the city.
The Bristol Loaf was initially set up in 2017 by entrepreneur Gary Derham, whose background includes working for local hospitality operator The Assemblies. The Bristol Loaf ‘s first outlet was a single-unit bakery and café in the Redfield area, before expanding into a second unit and becoming a successful, high-end, artisanal bakery products supplier to many other local businesses, with a retail and wholesale product range that includes sourdough bread and great-looking pastries. ‘The first bite is with the eyes’ remains a founding credo of the business. The retail arm of The Bristol Loaf also built a reputation for serving outstanding coffee.
The ongoing success of the Redfield site led to the expansion into additional premises, taking the opportunity to re-locate the business’s baking operations at the same time, with the original Redfield site remaining open as a café. The new venue will also host an expanded food and drink offer, sourced not only from The Bristol Loaf, but from a number of other specialist operators, effectively creating a mini foodie hub for Bristol. Located on Bedminster Parade, the café-store sits within Engine House Developments, a boutique, mixed-use development, taking up the entirety of the site’s ground floor, with 240 sq m front-of-house space and 90 sq m back-of-house.
‘The vision for the new undertaking’ Phoenix Wharf Associate Creative Director Emma Carter commented, ‘is an ethical supermarket that is accessible to all, where customers feel very welcome to spend time and relax.’
The Bristol Loaf will be retailing its own takeaway bakery produce in the space, as well as offering café customers a menu that includes coffee and pastries and a deli offer encompassing soups and sandwiches, quiches and salads, plus drinks such as smoothies and kombucha. All the produce will be locally-sourced and all dishes made from scratch on-site. Local operator Hugo’s Greengrocer is taking a 25 sq m space within the offer and there will be two other specialist producers present: The Bristol Loaf’s new sister brand, wine specialist The Bristol Vine, and local cheesemonger Two Belly.
Design Brief
The brief for the new site was to create a community foodie hub that widened The Bristol Loaf’s offer but was still visibly linked to the original venue. The business’s commitment to sustainability meant initiatives such as using heat generated by the kitchen ovens to heat the whole space, with the smell of freshly-baked bread also filling the air. A fully-digitised order system will prevent any paper wastage, whilst the timber from former baker’s tables from The Bristol Loaf’s first premises has also been sanded back to minimise signs of wear and tear before being re-constructed as tables for the new venue’s café.
‘For the interior look and feel, the client asked for planting to be a really stand-out, nature-inspired element, building on the presence of plants in the original Redfield site’, Emma Carter commented. ‘The materials palette is both rustic and tactile and includes white tiling and the extensive use of solid ash timber for shelving, corridors and even ceiling panels, alongside brick and raw, exposed concrete, ensuring the overall aesthetic is the antithesis of a slick, super-polished look.’
The café area includes 58 covers in total: 44 at the tables and 14 at perch/bar seating along the scheme’s full-height storefront glazing, with a wooden ledge counter and upcycled stools. The tables are in a variety of 2- and 4-seater arrangements, coming together easily to cater for larger groups. Bi-folding windows along the glazed wall enable the site to have evening opening presence onto the street front, whilst signage and branding is mostly hand-scripted and low key, allowing the company’s products to do the talking.
Visitor Journey
As visitors enter, they’re greeted by a floor-to-ceiling bread display, so that the bakery offer is clearly communicated. The entrance area is glazed and open with plenty of room for buggy-parking. The planting is visually-dominant from the get-go. ‘We blacked out the 4.1m high ceiling’, Emma Carter explained, ‘and created troughs almost a metre down, clad in ash timber slats and travelling the whole ceiling perimeter, housing a number of large, trailing plants. The troughs also conceal the electrical cabling, whilst criss-cross wiring creates structural support for the irrigation system.’
Immediately to the left is the Hugo’s Greengrocer store, followed by the main café counter service area, with the café itself taking up the rest of the open space. The two additional offers are The Bristol Vine, which includes a wine-tasting station, featuring all colours of wine, along with expert reviews and guidance and cheesemonger Two Belly, offering a curated selection of cheeses and suggested beers to accompany them, both of which are located against the rear wall.
The bakery area includes a takeaway sales area; a central freestanding bread display behind the counter; a pastries area for customers to help themselves en route to the till; a chiller for the display of the deli café food offer; a hot-food area under heat lamps; a 3.5m coffee station with ample space around it for collecting drinks and the till area. Care has been taken to avoid pinch points for kitchen staff, waiting staff and customers collecting coffee, whilst at the same time separately zoning out the kitchen, counter and bakers’ spaces.
Lighting over the café seating area features clustered paper lanterns to create a soft and homely feel, whilst feature lighting over the counters is in the form of reconditioned factory pendants, offering a soft, lower level glow above the service and coffee counter areas. Flooring is an existing concrete-look tiling, which, where damaged, has been additionally concrete-screeded to ensure a safe overall level. All the counters are clad in white tiling apart from the rear counter, which is made up of wooden slats.
The back of house area includes large-scale fridges, loaders, ovens, mixing areas and shaping tables and is out of sight of customers, although some areas of prep are visible front of house to provide an element of theatre, for bread shaping, for example and lunch prep.
‘The whole design process has been a joy’, Gary Derham commented. ‘Emma from Phoenix Wharf really understood our company’s ethos and has been able to turn our ideas and vision for the space into something practical and very beautiful.’
Photography credit: Franklin & Franklin
Lawless and Inspired have combined to bring together the UK’s best emerging street-artists and their influencer networks, allowing agencies and brands to tap into visual culture. Artists include Jody Thomas who created the 15m high Greta Thunberg wall mura, which highlighted issues of climate change and was featured on the BBC, across national press and went viral on social media.
The Lawless Inspired partnership aims to harness the power of today’s creative pioneers, to deliver physical/digital projects that excite and inspire. Alex Kopfli, Director at Inspired notes ‘by joining forces, we essentially offer agencies and brands a turn key solution, delivering creativity through artistic talent, brought to life by impactful real-life productions merged with digital creativity. The concepts are then distributed to an authentic and sizable audience online through our network.’
Since Lawless launched during the Covid Pandemic, the niche influencer agency has started working with brands to deliver artist-led creative solutions, adding a stamp of cool and credibility to brand campaigns and executions. Lawless Studio has already built up an impressive roster of artists, with the likes of Jody Thomas, Jack Watts, Nerone, Bond Truluv and Shay Casanova, reaching a significantly growing audience of 760k followers as a combined network, quality audiences loyal to each artist they follow, and trend setters in their own right.
Josh Moore of Lawless Studio calls out Inspired’s ‘exceptional track record in delivering first-class brand experiences for the likes of Wavemaker, Mediacom, M&C Saatchi and Fuse’ is the missing piece to the puzzle of delivering stand out creative solutions.
‘We now have the production capacity and logistical know-how to give brands access to creative pioneers and allow them to create amazing content, to give credibility and authenticity to brands through their output, and also reach huge dedicated followings through their social channels.’
One of the tools we used during discovery were sacrificial concepts. They enhanced discussion with participants, and provided a foundation for the upcoming design sprints.
Here, we’ll explore what sacrificial concepts are, and why they are useful.
Sacrificial concepts are a tool originally developed by the design firm IDEO. They are used in early research as a stimulus for discussion, and are different from presenting prototypes later in the design process for the purposes of testing or validation.
Sacrificial concepts are:
Sacrificial concepts can be a powerful tool to enhance discovery. For the health and wellness project, they gave us a deeper understanding of people’s attitudes and needs, which enhanced the research insight, design principles, and set of personas from discovery.
We entered the design sprints with a better idea of how much information different people wanted and why, what type and depth of information they wanted, and how they might want to engage with the service.
Mace & Menter are specialists in service design, user research, discovery and prototyping for public services, health and the third sector.
To find out more, contact us on 020 7193 8952 or email [email protected].
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Where to start when planning a digital project can be extremely confusing. You might well need a new website, but there is also effective ways to improve your existing site using data and limited investment.
We talk to Piers Tincknell, from Atomic Smash, about Iterative Design, something they just happen to specialise in.
Our part-time User Experience Design (UXD) course will teach you all the key skills required to research, define, design and develop digital services based upon user-centred design principles.
The programme’s industry informed curriculum will teach you how to approach problems creatively in order to design the next generation of great apps, websites, and digital products whilst preparing you to pursue opportunities to work as a User Experience Designer.
Students will be taught the fundamentals of User Centred Design and learn to validate ideas by looping through the design process starting with User Research, Rapid Prototyping, User Testing and Iteration.
You will also be introduced to industry standard creative software tools and working processes whilst working on a real client brief.
Alongside this practical application of learned skills and techniques – you will be able to demonstrate your ability to successfully manage a project from concept to launch; combining commercially sought after skill-sets – through the application of research, design and technical development.
Students will finish the course competent in:
Our part-time User Experience (UX) Design course has been developed to help anyone looking to up-skill or change career and move into the ever increasing number of roles in UX Design.
It is aimed at people looking to learn the ‘mindset’ and application of User Experience Design to digital projects (both agency and client-side) – and to gain a deeper understanding of the methods, tools and processes of working as a UX Designer.
This programme would be useful for anyone hoping to expand their knowledge of UX Design methodologies, tools and processes.
This course is ideal for:
(This is by no means an exhaustive list.)
Check out our students reviews
Sign up for a taster workshop
For any other information please do get in touch with Nicola nicola[email protected]
“I come from a creative and entrepreneurial family originally from St Thomas, Jamaica. My granduncle founded the Voice newspaper, my grandfather is a Reggae artist and my Mother is CEO of her own fashion company, so I like to think that influenced me to pursue my own dreams and carve my own path in life.
“Like most boys growing up in the 90s I was a big fan of anime. Shows like Dragon Ball Z, Pokémon and Naruto were regular scheduled programming at my home in Fishponds. It was my desire to recreate these shows in my spare time, through pencil and paper, that led me into art.
“Drawing wasn’t my strong point so it was hard to excel in art class, probably in part to me only being interested in drawing characters from my favourite tv show at the time! I was also into video games but, oddly, because I thought they were such a cool medium. I think I grew up in a time where video games were just beginning to be acknowledged as an artform, much like film and tv, and not just something that turns kids into ‘mindless zombies.’ I loved how video games placed you in the mind of the protagonist and allowed you to put yourself in situations you could only dream of before.
“Fast forward and this underlying love of psychology, art and computer screens coupled with a strong sense of ambition is what led me to where I am today – seeking to explore a career in UI/UX & Tech.
“Growing up I knew very little about the creative industries in Bristol. I think that’s what pushed me to study in Cambridge (Lord Ashcroft International Business School), but it was being away from Bristol and coming back that really opened my eyes to how vast and booming the city is which is why I moved straight back. So when I found out about the BMAA and that it was essentially a nosedive into the industry, I knew I had to apply.
“The biggest challenge I faced in my career was definitely making my first ever film, especially when it’s for a nationwide platform like the BBC and will be watched by thousands of people. The opportunity came about through the BBC New Creatives scheme. Managing a whole crew and cast of around 20 people whilst writing and directing a film is about 100 times harder than it sounds! But it was fun and the end result was well worth it.
“Now that I’ve won the BMAA and am travelling to Texas next week it’s hard to pin down what I’m most excited about. The food, talks, art exhibitions, film screenings, the robots… Or the world renowned ‘Southern Hospitality’? Honestly, I’m not too sure. But what I am sure of, is that I am excited. Funnily enough, I’m not really nervous about anything. My perspective is just ‘enjoy it’, take what comes with Texas and the internships as enjoyable experiences which I no doubt will learn and gain a lot from.”
Upon his return from SXSW, Okori and the BMAA runners up will have the opportunity to take part in a series of paid internships at local agencies. For more information about supporting the BMAA and offering a paid internship for Okori and the runners up, click here.
Bristol Media would like to thank our 2020 headline sponsor, ADLIB, for supporting the BMAA. Thanks also to Babbasa and the growing list of agencies who have committed to making a difference: Armadillo CRM, Tallt Ventures, McCann Bristol, Mr B & Friends, Oakwood, Immediate Media, Epoch Design, Halo, Torchbox and Diva.
If you’re thinking of joining, or simply need a reminder on how to make the most of your membership, we’ve created this guide to highlight the benefits of joining our community of creative sector individuals and businesses in Bristol and the South West. So, read on for 9 reasons to join, or stay put…
Won a top award? Published a brilliant thought leadership piece about creativity or innovation? Launched a new showreel and want to get the news out there? We want to hear about it! Members can self-publish content on the Newsfeed as much and as often as they like, and if it’s really good, we might even share it with our 31.8k twitter followers, or publish it in our newsletter.
Our jobs board is the go-to platform for creative industry jobs in the region. Last year, over 750 creative sector jobs were advertised by our members, who can take advantage of unlimited advertising for absolutely no cost. If you need proof that it works, our member JonesMillbank recruited ALL of their team through adverts on the Jobs board!
You may have been to a Vision keynote event before where we invite a world-class speaker to Bristol to share knowledge and insight around current hot topics. Members receive preferential rates, saving anywhere between 30-60% of a non-member ticket. Plus, we’ve recently introduced an offer where freelancers can take advantage of Vision keynote tickets for £10. We provide a networking lunch before each talk, so it’s a great opportunity to get to know fellow creative industry professionals or catch up with old contacts over a buffet lunch. Visit the Events page for more.
Are you looking to promote your business? Partner with a local agency? Want to bag your next freelance gig? Our online member directory allows you to create an individual member profile with contact details and the ability to showcase your latest work. Make sure you keep your profile updated as we regularly point businesses to the directory who are looking for agencies and freelance resource.
If you’re hosting a local event, head over to the Events page, submit the form and we’ll publish your event in the calendar. Just make sure it’s relative to a creative sector audience and is within the South West and you’re good to go.
We work with local businesses to ensure members get the best deals possible for everything from free legal advice to restaurant discounts, coffee subscriptions to team away-days. Our mobile membership cards allow you to claim these exclusive deals and discounts, plus they are available for your whole team! Lunch at The Florist then? Check out the full list of member perks.
We’re firm believers in training and professional development. How else will you develop the skills of your team or attract and retain top talent? We bring the knowledge to our members through a series of intimate workshops and skills sessions, so you can benefit from high-quality training at a competitive price. Check out the latest workshops here.
If you remember the Bristol Media barometer – a valuable tool providing insight into the local creative sector – then good news. We’re teaming up with a partner to create a bespoke report to benchmark business performance, and explore the trends, insights, opportunities and threats facing creative agencies in Bristol & Bath. More info coming soon, so watch this space!
Last, but certainly not least. Collaboration is at the heart of what we do at Bristol Media. We believe that Bristol is one of the most creative and innovative cities out there and it’s achieved this status by organisations and individuals working together. We champion our members in the creative sector and encourage collaborations as much as possible, so keep us posted on your blossoming partnerships.
Collectively, we’re greater than the sum of our parts
Our mission is to put our region on the map as a world-leading centre of creativity and innovation, so that we inspire talented people to work here, attract customers and drive growth. Being localised to Bristol means we can be the eyes and ears on the ground, but we can’t do it without our members. So, if you’ve yet to become part of our community and would like to take advantage of the above, and more, join Bristol Creative Industries today.
Charities are starting to innovate digitally. Innovation teams are spluttering into life, and some charities are building new digital products and services that will reach new audiences, create new potential income streams and increase their impact. But it’s slow, hard going. Why is this?
Do charities have the desire, the imagination? Do they have the vision at board level? Is risk-aversion the big blocker? Do funding models stymie innovation? Or do previous failed attempts mean they’re once burned, twice shy? Frankly, do they have the guts?
All of the above and more is probably the answer. But, here, I’ll focus on overcoming the barriers to charities adapting the type of modern, agile product development process that drives digital product innovation from the civil service to Silicon Valley.
Let’s kick this off with money. In charities, procurement teams and budget holders like to know what they’re buying. They like big specs, clear outcomes and fixed costs. They’re less keen on Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), iterative development, testing learning and pivoting – uncertainty. Unfortunately, that difficult stuff is at the heart of agile project development.
If you aren’t ready to totally change the way you procure, a starting point is to break projects into small, affordable chunks. Assuming you are working with an agency partner: start with an innovation workshop; if that works take an idea forward in a ‘design sprint’ (roughly £15k to £25k); iterate on it; run story mapping to build a roadmap. Make each stage a micro-tollgate like a mini government service standards assessment. This way projects actually get started so they can gather momentum, and they ‘fail fast’ if they aren’t worth pursuing.
An example of this in practice is MQ Mental Health who are building a new product to engage the public in mental health research. MQ leveraged the prototype we built with them in a design sprint – to attract funding to build an MVP. MQ have funded this whole product development one step at a time, using the quality outputs of each phase to help engage the funders of the next. This can be slow, but at least it’s moving.
Be creative with the process too. We recently ran a Design Sprint with Sue Ryder (who are building a new in-browser video service to provide bereavement counselling and support ) with a ‘money back guarantee ’ – if they weren’t completely satisfied with the design sprint, they wouldn’t pay a penny. This gave the procurement team the confidence to sign off the initial phases of the project, while both teams got stuck into it with extra enthusiasm.
Creating a product culture in the charity space is tough. There’s not much experience about, yet experience is a really valuable component. We believe that the critical piece of the puzzle, is an engaged, skilled, empowered, client-side product manager. A good product manager keeps development aligned to business objectives and holds delivery teams to account, whether internal or external (this is particularly important when working ‘agile-ly’.)
This may all sound challenging for most charities – accepting more risk, changing funding and procurement models, developing an effective product culture – so let’s make it simple.
Here is a formula that might help you kick start innovation in your organisation:
Finally, try to remember agile projects can (and do) fail. Particularly, if you don’t have the right processes, people and culture in place. And failure is scary in the charity sector; especially if it threatens your public image. Nevertheless, ‘fixed scope’ innovation is an oxymoron. Leaders need to be brave enough to be prepared to fail.
Well-run product development processes, as outlined above, fail early, which helps. Something that doesn’t help is annual budgets. Ben Holt said in his valedictory post about the Disruptive Innovation Lab at Cancer Research UK, “disruptive ideas need to impact strategy with an eye on the future, not the annual planning cycle” and that is something we should all try to keep in mind.
Innovation products need a new, flexible ‘as and when’ funding approach, one where funding is aligned to goals or outcomes, rather than ‘project scope’ and that is something the sector will have to keep working towards.
Torchbox run a free Charity Digital Innovation Series of breakfast events. Here you can see the details and video of their last one, for Heads and Directors of Digital – where the discussions were on this same topic of challenges and success of Digital Innovation. Keep up to date on all Torchbox events on Twitter.
This article first appeared in Charity Comms.
The Yeo Valley Café, which opened earlier this year in London, featuring an interior design scheme by award-winning South West designers Phoenix Wharf, has taken GOLD this month in the Hospitality Interiors category of the London Design Awards 2019.
The café-store-office space, Yeo Valley’s first outlet away from its Blagdon, Somerset HQ, is an engaging, inviting showcase for the leading organic dairy brand, offering customers a dine-in café, grab’n’go produce area and mini retail store, as well as a work and meeting space for staff on the site’s upper storey. Bristol-based designers Phoenix Wharf ensured the customer-facing ground-floor offer had a friendly, unpretentious and fun feel with its ‘warm and cool’ concept – featuring a white and bright ‘cool’ retail area to the right, and a warmer ‘natural’ sit-down area to the left, underlining the brand’s countryside origins and authenticity.
Standout features that caught the judges’ eyes in the scheme include a ceiling feature in the form of a stained-glass-style light-box installation, showing an abstracted map of the Yeo Valley farm HQ in Blagdon; a lighting feature made up of 19 different pendant lamps set at different lengths and a cottage-garden mural by long-time brand collaborator, artist-illustrator Natasha Clutterbuck. The store’s highly-original loos have also featured prominently in press coverage. Designed as ‘Blagdon Station’ underground toilets, as a link between the London and Somerset sites, with curved tube-tunnel corners and ‘pomegranate’ wall tiles, sourced from H.E. Smith, the original London Underground manufacturer. Further details include tube-type platform signage; a ‘priority seat’ sign above the toilet; an ‘All Change Here’ baby change unit; a ‘Loo Roll’ tube-style roundel; a platform-style floor detail saying ‘Mind the Gap’ and a ‘Way Out’ sign.
‘We’re really thrilled with this win’, Phoenix Wharf’s Associate Creative Director Emma Gullick commented. ‘It puts the South West firmly on the map and shows just how much talent and creativity we have here, capable of the highest performance at national level.’
The London Design Awards are one of 10 global city-based awards across three continents run by DrivenXDesign, a global community of designers, thinkers, strategists and design lovers. They provide recognition across the design spectrum, are cross-disciplinary and are currently held across three continents. The awards celebrate and honour the role of design and the skills of designers, while recognising all aspects of the design process, including product, digital, interiors, architecture, graphic, textile, events, fashion, advertising, food, experience, and publications.
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Photography credit: Franklin & Franklin
For further information on Phoenix Wharf, please contact Caroline Collett of Caroline Collett PR Ltd on T: + 44 (0)1297 444179 M: + 44 (0)7801 270598 E: [email protected]
About Phoenix Wharf
Phoenix Wharf is a design consultancy specialising in branding and interiors concepts for ambitious hospitality and retail brands. Founded in Bristol in 2015 and independently owned, the consultancy’s mission is ‘inspiring change’. Known for its youthful approach and reputation for fresh thinking, Phoenix Wharf has won and been nominated for several national awards and has worked with a wide range of clients, from start-ups to established heritage brands, both local and international, including Space NK, The National Trust, Ensemble, Craghoppers, The Gro Company, Gill Marine, Gymshark and The Richmond Building at Bristol University. Along with sister creative companies Ignition (exhibitions, events and experiences) and Caroline (strategic communications), Phoenix Wharf forms part of Istoria Group.
www.phoenix-wharf.com / www.istoriagroup.com
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