Some sunny news

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As a Founder Partner of Creative Choice, a consortium of lead government suppliers, we are delighted to announce that we have beaten off some very stiff competition to win the Department for Education’s CMS Outsourcing Contract for the next three to four years.

As you would expect, we are over the moon with this news but, before we all nipped off to the pub for some champagne, crisps and dancing, we designed and sent this initial email to all our public sector clients. Based on some of our creative work that helped to secure the contract, our email campaign will keep everyone updated on the implementation of the Creative Choice operational procurement portal, before going live in July 2011.

The Alternative London Tour

We recently attended the (FREE) Alternative London tour. This street-art focused tour takes you through the streets and back alleys of London’s East end and lasts around two hours. The tour features in Time Outs Top five things to do in London for free. Gary, the tour guide, is a passionate follower of the street-art scene and quite knowledgeable about the local history too. Altogether the tour covers over 50 artists, including work from Stik, Roa, Otto Schade, The Toasters, Conor Harrington, Space Invader, and Ben Eine.

Check out examples of their work below!

Otto Schade – The UK and Ireland!

Artist Unknown – Paste up of little doors scattered near Bricklane!

Woman in a burka with stik man!

Roa's Crane

Conor Harrington

The Toasters

Branding in a heartbeat

We have recently developed and implemented the new brand identity for Equivital – a beautifully designed, cutting-edge technology product which has a leading role within the health, elite sport and military sectors, where real-time precision monitoring and data collection not only saves lives, but also helps to improve human performance.

The Equivital LifeMonitor is a market-leading multiparameter body-worn, wireless monitoring device, capable of measuring contextual health information in real-time. Designed to enable secure and accurate data in mobile, free-living environments, the Equivital product has a very exciting future and we are proud to have been instrumental in its launch.

We were commissioned to design the initial identity (and complementary style guide) and to apply it to a large range of marketing collateral. This included the product hardware, software icons, packaging, brochures, folders, banner stands, the (soon to be launched) website, data sheets and a range of promotional items.

Launched on 14 February 2011 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, initial feedback is that the new brand identity set people’s hearts racing – and what’s more, we have the data to prove it!

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David Shrigley

Lately we’ve been enjoying and trying to understand the work of David Shrigley. His book ‘What the hell are you doing’ is a celebration of the surreal world of one of our finest contemporary artists. And his short animation highlighting the dangers of Government cuts to the Arts budget is inspired. Enjoy!

10 Girls Doing It!

A friend of ours is co-hosting a three-day, graphic design exhibition, starting this Friday in East London.

She is part of a creative collective of 10 girls who are showcasing some of the design work they have been tirelessly producing, over the last six months, for their Masters course.

They put together this lovely little viral ad to drum up interest in their show.

If you fancy seeing what the girls have been getting up to, pop down to The Rag Factory, 16 Heneage Street, E1 5LJ from 17-19 December.

Visit www.10collective.com for opening times and Design Week for more information and further promotional material.

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Tight deadlines!

With the pre-christmas rush we’ve been dealt a few tight deadlines of late. But, after stumbling across these stunning sand sculptures online and learning about their turn around times, we should count ourselves lucky.

The above pictures are from an Annual Sand Castle competition held on Cannon Beach in Oregon, USA. The competition starts when the tide goes out, giving entrants about 6 hours to complete their sculptures (and have them judged) before the tide comes back in and washes their works of art away!

You can view further samples of these wonderfully hand-crafted sand sculptures here on our Facebook page. I’m sure you’ll agree that this is pretty nifty work, regardless of the time scales.

Right, I feel all inspired now, so it’s time to swap the old bucket and spade for the Mac and mouse and crack on.

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Apple-1

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This week the very first version of the Apple Mac computer, Apple-1, was sold at Christie’s for over £130,000. Originally launched in 1976 and dispatched from the garage of Steve Jobs’ parents’ house, the Apple-1 marked a revolution in the development of personal computers at that time.

The article brought back memories of the day nineteen years ago that we bought our very first Mac – an IIsi. It was a huge step for us at the time to invest in our first production computer with nobody who knew how to operate it.

Our shiny new Mac came with 40-MB of hard disk space, 2-MB of RAM and a mighty powerful 20mhz processor!

Our industry took a great leap forward with the addition of these computers, it was a really exciting time. Production times could be greatly reduced and, more importantly, we were now in control of quality – no more relying on weary typesetters using extraordinarily complicated machines that designers didn’t understand.

Macs are fantastic, they make the design process a lot slicker and quicker, but as always it’s important to remember that, like a racing car, a Mac is only ever as good as its driver. Great design is driven by great ideas and clever concepts, and in 19 years I haven’t seen a Mac come up with one of those on its own yet!

Unfortunately pressing [] [SHIFT] [D] doesn’t produce you a fully designed advertising campaign.

Lisa Suckling
Account Director

Kidbrooke Post 16

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Bentley Holland has produced and delivered the 2011 Kidbrooke School and Specialist Arts College Post 16 prospectus.

By using bold colours, strong typography, illustration, student quotes and dynamic photography by Adam Scott, the prospectus not only outlines in detail all the courses Kidbrooke School has on offer for Post 16 students, but it visually portrays the diverse and hugely energetic learning environment provided by the School.

This is the first project we have produced for Kidbrooke School and we really look forward to working together on many more.

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We have a winner!

We’re pleased to announce Laura Holmes as the winner of our Halloween competition. A cinema gift card is currently making its way to her, hopefully arriving in time for Laura and a friend to catch Paranormal Activity 2 or another scary movie of their choice. A big thank you to everyone else who submitted an entry. You can view them all here.

The Big Bang and everything that followed…

With the success of our Halloween Flash game and subsequent Christmas E-card pitch wins, we’re really getting into our animation here at Bentley Holland. We love this animated flipbook that video student Jamie Bell produced for his AS Art course. It took Jamie something like 2,100 pages, 50 note pads and 3 weeks to create this 3-minute video.

Takes me back to my student days when you had a month to complete a single project and the working day started at 2 in the afternoon and finished at 6pm, after which you’d head down to the SU for a well-earned beer. Ah, the good old days…

The song is French Cancan by Jaques Offenbach.