What are we working on?

I never fail to be surprised at the sheer diversity of projects we work on in any one month. Offering the full creative services spectrum means our talented team never know what could be coming in next. This month it all seems to have been digital. We have been doing a lot of video editing work for a museum website, finishing building a Flash website for an agency, providing project management consultancy on a social networking site build, building some data capture functionality for a charity, and pitching for a new website project. It’s funny – some month’s it’s all print work, but at the moment the focus has been online. As well as this variety of projects, we have also been working hard on our Big Stories campaign, which is starting to reap rewards. The offer seems to be being very well received by our target charities, and we’ve had some nice compliments about the microsite and DM pack. Hopefully we can convert this into some new clients and make some new Lavish friends in the coming months.

Persuasion

I’m reading a good book at the moment. ‘Persuasion – The art of influencing people’.

There are some interesting facts around the importance of body language and non-verbal communication. In the 1960’s, Dr Albert Mehrabian conducted a research study that concluded that the impact of a message could be classified as 55% visual, 38% vocal and 7% verbal. Meaning that our body language and tone of voice are infinitely more important than our actual words, in day-to-day communication.

It is interesting in this day and age, when so many of our relationships, friendships and business communications are conducted over text, email, IM, Facebook, Twitter etc how much we are losing in the message, by not focussing on the delivery. If 93% of the impact of our message is based on what you see and how it sounds, our listeners are only actually focussing 7% on what we are actually saying.

So even with all the technology available to us today, it shows that a bit of good-old fashioned ‘face-time’ can’t be beaten.


Persuasion is by James Borg and published by Pearson.

Who would win in a fight?

So, as a bit of light relief we have started a regular debate with our favourite bar staff at St John.

The 'Who Would Win in a Fight' debate started like this:

Who would win in a fight between a duck-sized horse against one hundred horse-sized ducks?'

We got a variety of answers - but the common consensus was that the duck-sized horse would win. Reasons given included 'enormous webbed feet that would squash the horses' - right through to 'ducks are evil'.

This week's animal-based fight conundrum is:

'Who would win in a fight between one human-sized ant against one hundred ant-sized humans?"

Early indications are in favour of the ant-sized humans... based mostly on the concept of conscious thought and our ability to invent weapons of mass-animal destruction.

Although Madge is valiantly fighting the corner of the human-sized ant - but only on the basis that he/she/it could run faster than the time it would take the hundred ant-sized humans to invent anything...

Your comments / thoughts / ramblings are welcome...

Challenging Times

As we approach the middle of 2008, the challenges facing charities and not-for-profit organisations continue to grow. The global credit crunch is adding even further to the problems of fundraising in a society where donation fatigue is a common problem and disposable income is at a 15 year low. For all charities and not-for-profit organisations, maximising marketing budgets during these times is top priority. This still needs to be married up with producing inspiring, creative work and marketing campaigns that deliver fundraising results, be it acquisition of new donors or retention of existing ones. We have recently put together a marketing campagin aimed at this issue. At Lavish we have many years of experience of delivering cost effective, budget-driven creative projects to audiences in both the corporate and charitable sectors. Our charity clients include: Crisis, Public Concern at Work and The Carbon Disclosure Project. Our 'Big Stories' campaign was launched last week with a DM piece and supporting microsite, and initial responses have been very encouraging. We are following up with calls and currently arranging appointments. We are approaching 75 hand-picked charities in the London and surrounding areas, and are looking forward to talking to them more about how we might be able to help. Take a look at our microsite: www.bigstories.co.uk

Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Apple today previewed Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the next major version of their operating system. Rather that rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation.

Snow Leopard is optimised for multi-core processors, taps into the vast computing power of graphic processing units (GPUs), enables breakthrough amounts of RAM and features a new, modern media platform with QuickTime X. Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 and is scheduled to ship in about a year.

Read more at: Digital Arts

For more information see Apple

Tea

Like most offices around the country, who makes the tea, and when, is a hot topic in our studio!

More anal than most we have even created a tea style guide, which gives pantone references for all of our tea choices and is stuck on the wall! No-one can say we don't take our tea making (or colour management) seriously!

I came across this innovative way to take the pain out of the tea rota:

Make The Tea

Loss

On Easter Sunday we found out that the wonderfully talented tattooist Jason Saga had passed away. I didn’t know Jason that well myself, but Madge has been seeing Jason for over two years, and proudly wears two beautiful and vibrant Japanese half-sleeves created by him. Your relationship with your tattoo artist is a very special one, as it is essential you build a connection. They were just starting to plan a large Hanya back piece, and I can remember Madge coming back from his appointment and telling me how excited and keen Jason was to start working on it.

Hearing about Jason’s sad and untimely death has left a shadow over our week, and only now has the sense of shock and disbelief begun to lift a little. Our hearts go out to all of the people who knew and loved Jason and everybody who’s life he touched. His legacy lives on with every person that carries his ink.

Stacey

View some of Jason’s amazing work at Saga Tattoo

Cobblers children

So the quote is not original. We’ve all heard the one about the cobbler being too busy working to make new shoes for his children. Well I find internal projects are our version of the poor old shoemaker’s time management issue. We always seem to have a full ‘to-do’ list of marketing materials to create and internal projects to finish. Blogs to write (yes, more than once every 8 weeks), showreels to compile, animations to finish and tailored campaigns to our target sectors are only a few of the things that never seem to get crossed off the list. Every small to medium business owner I speak to suffers from the same problem, and there are plenty of surveys and management training books that seem to back up the feeling that there are not enough hours in the day. The only trouble is, if you don’t keep up to speed with your own marketing activity then new business leads can suffer and before you know it you’re playing catch up. So this month we’ve worked hard. Our Head of Business Development started on 1 March, which has given us a fresh impetus. By the end of the month we will have finished our new CGI showreel, launched a targeted offline and online campaign for the not-for-profit sector, and refocused our sales and marketing activity for the rest of 2008. And we will be posting our blogs more often…watch this space.

Time to start the Creative Services Blog for real

Hello all, or possibly no one for now. I think the time has come for me to finally start to write down what we do here at Lavish. There are many of you who blog regularly and I want to be out there with you. I want to share from day to day, or possibly week to week, our trials and tribulations. Our problems and successes. I also want to get technical from time to time, posting screengrabs and asking questions of our readers when or if we get stuck on something. Basically “Information Sharing” is the name of the game. There are many of us working in the field of Creative Services and I think it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on our posts. I’m told they call it “Communication” or even “Networking”. From now onwards you’ll all be hearing from myself and Stacey on a regular basis. Speak soon. Madge...

You've got to start somewhere

I've been sitting looking at my computer for 20 minutes, typing things then deleting them. It's difficult to know where to start and what to write. I suppose once you get into the habit it becomes easier - like most things. So, I think I'll start with an introduction. That seems like a polite thing to do. Hello. We're Lavish. Well, that's the name of our company. We specialise in the thing we love most - delivering creative projects. Because we put all of our focus on delivery, it means we have a very wide spread of expertise - and we get to do some very interesting things. A snapshot of the sorts of things going on in our studio today: modelling, surfacing and rendering some 3D characters in Lightwave, organising a large corporate event for a multi-national, delivering an exhibition stand for Motorexpo 2007, pulling together a creative pitch for some new business and finalising an identity and guidelines for a new law firm. So, you can see it's pretty varied. And pretty busy. I'd better get on with it...