Welcome to the second Decoder newsletter. Hasn’t this year flown by!? So much has happened but here are some snippets of news that might be of interest.
Please feel free to comment on the content of the newsletter by emailing info@decoder.co.uk
We’ve been delighted by the reaction we’ve had to the Glenfiddich Christmas gift packaging produced this year with recent press coverage in the likes of Marketing, Brand Republic and Scotch Whisky websites.
It’s been great to be recognised by the client and industry on the quality of our design work. But equally important to us, the project went swimmingly well. With no prompting (as you can imagine!) the Brand Manager from Glenfiddich’s Global team, commented: ‘‘I believe it’s been the best and the most efficiently run Christmas pack development project to date – running well ahead of schedule throughout the design and pre-production process thanks to the impressive initiatives and flexibility from Decoder’’.
The gift packs should be on the shelves now for the Christmas market and we hope that the dramatic uptake across all global markets will bode well for sales. Here’s the Brand Manager again: ‘Certainly it was the strength of the design that won over markets that traditionally opt out of the global offering.’
Revisiting briefs can sometimes be the toughest of jobs. After last year’s success, in August we took a fresh look at the advertising campaign to promote the Computing Careers recruitment site for client VNU. This time we wanted to talk directly to candidates on the look out for new jobs in particular sectors, like networking or gaming. To achieve this, we produced this versatile campaign that could talk to all or those in these specific sectors, using the idea of badges to show a specialism or skill. Designed to be an in-joke to those in the industry, we used, for example, a leopard print badge for software development (the next release of OS has the codename: leopard) and ‘Next level’ for those gaming enthusiasts and specialists. The campaign is now appearing in print and online and we’re hoping to continue month-on-month increase in traffic.
After years of modesty and let’s face it – shyness – we’ve decided to let the rest of the marketing and design world know what we’re all about. For the first time, we’ve signed up to be on the industry online directory New Design Partners and you can see our entry here.
An interesting project earlier this year was to produce a corporate ID for technology start-up Acara Systems based in Silicon Valley, California. They apparently produce TCAMs, which stands for Ternary Content-Addressable Memory! Despite offers to take the brief face-to-face, we worked remotely on this and produced an identity and roll-out guidelines that included a nice little marketing campaign using branded iPods.