In 30 seconds I managed to kiss Kate Silverton, Sarah Falkland and receive – on behalf of the IE team – ‘The Creative City Award 2008/9’ for ‘Best Brand’! Not bad going.

We’re a familiar sight at ‘The Creative City Awards’ – shortlisted 4 times for awards – and now winners!

It was a great night. Certainly the best of the past 4 years – not least due to the excellent work of Aquila, whose video work, graphics and titles all added an additional splash of style to an already glamorous evening. Video due to be uploaded today.

IE were also shortlisted to win the ‘Outstanding Innovation Award’ for our work on ‘Periscope’ – IE’s online studio management system, launched just a few weeks ago at the Plus International Design Festival. Find out more and get yourself a 40 day free trial at the Periscope website.

It’s been great to see Birmingham waking up, over the last 5 or so years, to the importance of its creative sector – an industry that now accounts for nearly 10% of the city’s economy.

Alongside our ever-increasing strength in web and interactive media, branding has always been right at the creative heart of IE’s service offering. To win an award for our own brand is genuinely flattering. It’s one thing to successfully build our client’s brands but so many creatives neglect their own.

A strong IE brand means a more visible business and that means it’s easier to reach our clients and easier to recruit great creatives. Competition is fierce and knowing what we stand for – innovation and excellence – really makes a massive difference.

IE was born and bred in Birmingham. To stand amongst the 400-or-so members of Birmingham’s creative community attending the Creative City Awards 2008/9 and be celebrated as an example of excellence was almost as exciting as kissing Kate!

“Lorem ipsum” Is something I’ve been interacting with and passing to clients for approval almost everyday of my 10 years as a graphic designer but yet I still don’t know what it means. Surely it means something?

Lorem ipsum is the beginning of a passage commonly used as dummy text or placeholder text by designers to mock-up a page layout, or a web page for a visual presentation.  It’s used to show how the type will look, font, size, layout, before the actual copy is available.

lorem ipsum can also be a useful tool to direct the focus to the look and feel of a visual presentation and away from the textual content, as when presented with a design for a page layout for example the viewer tends to focus on the textual content rather than the overall presentation.

It’s also known as “greeking,” perhaps as a nod to the phrase “it’s all Greek to me.” Its ‘words’ supposedly approximate the frequency with which letters occur in English, and at a glance look pretty real, although I would argue that it feels over punctuated.

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I strayed across a feature in Campaign and thump! – my inner frustrated copywriter was struck with a bolt of inspiration and enthusiasm.

Campaign reports how Radio 4’s Beanz Meanz Rhymz brought together copywriters from one of the world’s most high-profile agencies with several eminent poets to explore the relationship between the two disciplines. Poet Matt Harvey was tasked compose a poem/ad to sell the top 20 words used in slogans. Top 20 words as follows: you, your, we, world, best, more, good, better, new, taste, people, our, first, like, don’t, most, only, quality, great, choice.

Being IE’s unofficial poet-in-residence - and also relishing every opportunity to plug the agency’s work – I decided to see if I could rise to a similar challenge and incorporate adland’s top 20 words into a poem that really sells the team and their skills. I’m not sure how it compares to Matt Harvey’s efforts but I must admit I’m quite impressed with the results!

At IE, our people are more than first-rate,
Better than the best, among the world’s great.

At IE, we like quality, good taste we offer,
Fresh new ideas to you, we would love to proffer.

We don’t shy of solving problems, both web and design,
Only excellence we bring to all matters online.

For all commissions creative, a most prudent choice,
With your brand in our hands, you’re sure to rejoice.

I was lucky enough a couple of weeks back to visit the Plus design festival here in Birmingham.

Not the most expansive design event, it still managed to bring together an exciting mix of eye candy. Housing a short collection work from students to industry, this concrete carbuncle turned out to be quite deceptive.

It was a small yet interesting mix of interactive and reactive media, hand crafted typography, photography and computer generated imagery. All of which managed to bring a big smile to my face.

The highlight has to be talking to a lady called Linda who at the time was demonstrating calligraphy. Not only were my eyes tantalised by the beautiful lettering, but also my ears were tingling. She informed me of a Museum in the Jewellery Quarter called the Pen Room that teaches calligraphy classes.

I also spoke to a group of students calling themselves “smile” who blew me away with a simple idea I wish I’d took the initiative to start whilst I was at University. These few elite gems started a design group whilst studying and now have an impressive back catalogue of work.

Finally my eyes were attracted to the arresting visuals on light boxes from clusta, which reminds me very much of images in a book recently published called Lemon Poppy Seed published by Die Gestalten Verlag.

Weird mixed visuals appear to be becoming a trend. The new James Bond film has a a very slick introduction and example of this, check out the design group who made it – MK12 at http://www.mk12.com/ to see some pretty interesting work!

I read this article this morning, Strategic Design: 6 Steps For Building Successful Websites.

The approach is very similar to the principles which we built our web service offering on 7 years ago, and is the simple pragmatic results of some of the sound usability research that’s been done in academia.

If you are thinking about commissioning a website for your charity or business at the moment then it’s worth a read before you get going, it may just give you a different way of thinking about what makes a website ‘good’.