A few months ago a very talented young designer called Holly spent some time with us on placement. We wanted to give her a little shout out on the blog having recently completed a lovely piece of work producing this book on second hand book shops. We’re welcoming Holly back to 383 Project for another stint over the summer and look forward to hearing all about the process! Nice work Holly.

Working on an illustration of this scale presented a few design challenges. We had to ensure that the backdrop was visually engaging and took cues from the fashion trends emerging this Summer, as well as being clean and simple enough to still look great at a distance when viewed from the upper balconies in the centre. We used lots of reference images to come up with the final desired look and went through many sheets in the sketch pad to come up with a concept that we felt would suit the overall style.

Once the main elements were worked up in the sketchbook, it was scanned in and replicated in Illustrator. It was a long and time-consuming process, but all made worthwhile when we first saw it printed and set up in the Centre.

We’re working on plans with Bullring for lots more exciting events taking place throughout the year. You can sign up to Browse: Bullring if you want to be amongst the first to know what’s next!

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve been appointed by Chevrolet to handle their social media efforts across Europe.

As part of appointment we will work specifically to roll out an improved social presence for the brand across a number of European countries on Facebook. To kick off the account we’ve already built interactive applications for Chevrolet Racing and helped support the online launch of the new Chevrolet electric car, the Volt, in the UK, Germany and Turkey.

This is a great name to add to our portfolio and representative of our increasing capacity to service creative campaigns across multiple markets. Typically messaging in different languages can be a logistical nightmare and so we’re delighted that Chevrolet have tasked us with solving these problems.

You can view some recent work for Chevrolet in our portfolio – we’ll add in further campaigns as they get launched.

Last week we launched the new website for Benjamin Ryan, a premium hair and beauty salon based in the heart of Birmingham.

Benjamin Ryan approached us with a brief to design a new website from scratch. They aspired to create a site that more accurately reflected how dedicated the team there are to their craft. The insight was that the staff at Benjamin Ryan are known as creators of beauty, so why isn’t their site as beautiful as their product? We set about trying to fix this.

To make sure the site really got the client noticed we decided to go with a darker, simple overall look & feel. We wanted to give Benjamin Ryan the opportunity to showcase their work and creations on their website. The content managed montage of images on the homepage allows them to do this, generating black and white versions on the fly and caching them as necessary for speed.

We paid close attention to the smaller design details in the background, and also added some subtle visual effects to the navigation, in-keeping with the site’s design.

You can take a look at the site here: www.benjaminryanhair.co.uk

It’s that time again when in classic 383 tradition things go a bit silly and we set a little Christmas project out in to the wild. This year is no exception, and so, without further ado, we give you Jumpify.me. Why? Because everyone loves Christmas jumpers.

Jumpify me allows users to pick photos from their Facebook albums, and try on a number of delightful pieces of seasonal knitwear. We hope you enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed making it. Happy Christmas.

We’ve just launched a neat little Christmas campaign on Facebook for our friends at Bullring. As Christmas is the season of cheer we decided to build them an app which would hunt out user’s most miserable mates and cheer them up with the opportunity to win some ace Christmas bundles.

We’ve been working in house for quite some time on sentiment analysis tools for Facebook and Twitter and so the opportunity to roll some of those ideas in to a Facebook application has obviously been great fun. We’ve built the app as a true canvas application which matches users statuses against a database of known words with a ‘happiness’ rating attributed to the syntax.

We also really went to town on the design – creating a Christmas spirit ‘machine’ visual to help hunt out the Scrooges amongst us!

We’re delighted to announce the culmination of several months worth of work here at 383 as a host of new radio sites launched last week. Earlier in the year we were awarded the digital accounts for midlands radio stations BRMB, Beacon, Wyvern and Mercia following a competitive six-way pitch held by station owners Orion Media.

Last week we re-launched all four station sites and will now continue to work on eCRM, social strategy and digital engagement amongst the stations audiences and it’s advertisers.

We’re delighted to be working with Orion Media during what has been and will continue to be a transformational period for them. The stations have undergone an extensive re-branding process and our challenge now is to bring their core proposition to life by creating truly local and multi-platform brands.

The sites themselves have a few neat features for the techies amongst you including integration with third party APIs for news, traffic, weather, YouTube and Flickr, a bespoke user system and a custom HTML5 streaming media player. The player automatically finds and displays the last 7 days of content allowing users to listen again, as well as automically generating Podcast feeds. Each show page has a YouTube and Facebook section to automatically pull in relevant updates and encourage user participation. Registrations are made easy through integration with Facebook and Twitter allowing users to signup for competitions through their chosen network.

We’ll follow up this post with a small series of articles from our developers to cover a few of the most interesting development challenges in more detail.

(We were also pleased to see this site with a speedy writeup of the new versions, thanks for the comments… http://radioandmarketing.com/2010/10/31/brmb-and-the-rest-of-the-orion-media-network-get-new-websites/ )

We’ve been delighted to be involved in the event on two fronts, both delivering all the on and offline creative for the main Style Birmingham Live advertising itself, and also producing a host of creative work for Bullring’s main event, ‘The Show‘.

The Style Birmingham creative was designed to be clean and simple – appealing to the city’s fashionistas and making the most of advertising the host, George Lamb. In addition to the offline billboards and 6 sheets we’ve also produced a Facebook campaign to strategically boost ticket sales whilst also building Style Birmingham’s following within the channel.

The creative for The Show has been a lovely job to work on. The show will be a visual extravaganza and we were briefed to create a look and feel that reflects the opulent trends emerging on the high street this season. As well as a microsite and offline creative we have also produced a range of motion graphics which will be played during The Show. As the microsite will only be online for a few more days, here’s a quick screencast for posterity!

You can catch Style Birmingham from the 24th-26th September. Times for The Show at Bullring are also available on the microsite.