Letter T found in our balcony railings and in the brickwork of the building opposite our studio

This time, with the idea of creating a bit of decoration for the studio, we decided to look at found lettering – which basically meant going out looking for shapes that resemble letters of the alphabet in and around our office building – Ts, Hs and Ss in particular. One self-imposed rule being that the letter forms had to be unintentional. We wanted to put our own stamp on this and photographing individual letters of the alphabet from signs and graphics wouldn’t do that.

Letter H found in the chrome door handle and looking down at the radiator

Being interested in typography and also something of a keen photographer, Chris bagsied the job and had a great time strolling around spotting and snapping these letterforms. He quite quickly gathered together several different options for each letter.

S is for stairs and steps

“Although it was the company initials I was looking for in particular, after a very short time searching, I found myself seeing all different letters of the alphabet in all manner of places.

“This turned out to be a very useful observational exercise, one that transformed the way I view my surroundings, so much so that I’ve decided to go on and collect a complete alphabet of found letters. Watch this space for more found letters.”

This defaced coin served as an effective way to encourage their supporters and to gain the attention of the public. The one pence piece was such low value and so widely distributed that there was never any chance that the Royal Mint would recall them. The unsullied image of a female Britannia on one side, and the defaced portrait of the balding, old King Edward on the other, was especially appropriate to the message. Each letter was stamped individually by hand, giving the message a bold savagery. The customised coins would pass through countless hands and the message would be read by many people, spreading like a virus. It may have been civil disobedience but it did less damage than slashing the “Rokeby Venus” in the National Gallery.

This coin is on display at the British Museum and it is part of their “History of the World in 100 Objects”.

“It’s always a good idea to be visible in as many places as possible, but if you do not have someone dedicated to managing your social media presence, you should pick and choose where you want to invest your resources. Think about your target market and whether they would benefit or enjoy watching videos by your company.”

Uploading photographs to Facebook or Twitter is now a simple process, but previous methods of video capture and upload to social media sites have been complicated and sluggish. Vine, Twitter’s answer to the popular Viddy and Tout apps, attempts to make this process as immediate as possible, and largely succeeds. Vine has easy integration with Twitter as you would expect, as it is owned by Twitter, but Viddy and Tout are also great microvideo apps too, Viddy even has filters to create different effects.

Vine’s main strengths are easy of use and directness. Controls have been simplified to the bare minimum, you press the screen to record, and release to stop. You only have six seconds of record time so this is can be a challenge, in the same way that 140 characters on Twitter is a challenge, but this forces you to be creative and concise. There are no editing tools built into the app yet, which again is a challenge as you can make no mistakes. This is Vine saying it’s OK to make mistakes, we don’t want highly polished movies, we want raw, creative snapshots of your life.

Some companies and individuals like have embraced the medium, here are some examples:

Cadbury demo of egg chopping

MacDonalds Tic Tac Toe battle

Teach something new in 6 seconds

Erik Marinovich, Joshua Tree

Vine does have stability issues, some movies can be corrupted and fail to upload as we found out to our great dismay while trying to document our daily ritual of toast making. The developers have some work to do there to make it rock solid and they had better do that fast or users will become frustrated. Trust is key with any new application.

So can Vine help your brand grow? If you think video is suited to your customers then a definite YES. You wouldn’t currently use Vine as your main video capture method because of the stability issues. But as a quick, immediate and intimate way of engaging with your customers with video, Vine is an exciting development and with the power of Twitter behind it could flourish.

Here are some of Andy’s Vine videos, our very own welsh Hitchcock!

Light ball

Shadow boot

Electric wall

Elephant vortex
(Tip: Vine only shoots in portrait! Although of course Andy fully intended this artistic angle…)

After showing my initial ideas to the team, we settled on the idea of creating our own temporary tattoos and presenting them in a tattoo themed card. This idea had evolved out of my attempts to make something of the ‘Tatt’ part of our company name.

We’re very much in favour of the printed Christmas card here in our office and always strive for something that will be both memorable and something that our clients can interact with and will hopefully want to show around. Everyone seemed confident that this would fit the bill and so I set to work researching tattoos to try and establish the right sort of look.

Image courtesy of @jcreedy

Once I got started, drawing the tattoos up turned out to be great fun and after we agreed that the containing Christmas card would mimic retro 1960s novelty packaging it all came together quite quickly.

We’ve had a great laugh ‘inking up’ in the studio and by the sounds of it our clients have too. We have even given a few sheets away on twitter and to some of our neighbours here at the Chocolate Factory for which we have received a great response.

So, a successful campaign all round – though I have to say, I’m glad it’s someone else’s turn next year.

Have an Ink-redible Christmas.

I used an all-over cable pattern and knitted it on smaller needles than normal so as to get a firm, bouncy, protective fabric. It is knitted in the round, like a sock. It is not difficult, honest, but I wouldn’t try it if you’ve never done any knitting before – I’d start with a scarf.

You will need:

Less than 25gm of any double knitting weight yarn
Oddment of contrasting colour, double knitting or finer
Set of 3mm double pointed needles
Set of 2.75mm double pointed needles
3mm circular needle (if using magic cast on)
Cable needle
2 stitch markers (scraps of contrasting colour yarn will do)

Gauge:

18 stitches = roughly 5cm in cable pattern. The fabric is very stretchy, and clings to the phone rather than being loose.
12 rows = approx 5cm, but this is not important as you simply knit to the length of your phone.

All-over cable pattern:

Rounds 1 to 5: * P2 K2. Repeat from * to end of round.
Round 6: * P2, slip next 3 stitches onto a cable needle and drop at front of work, K 2 and P 1, then P 1 and K 2 from cable needle. Repeat from * to end of round.
Rounds 7 to 11: As rounds 1 to 5.
Round 12: P 2, K 2, insert second stitch marker.  * P2, slip next 3 stitches onto a cable needle and drop at back of work, K 2 and P 1, then P 1 and K 2 from cable needle. Repeat from * to end of round, which will mean knitting again the four stitches knitted at the beginning of this round, before the second stitch marker, in order to finish the cable. This sounds wrong, but it works. Don’t loose track of the beginning of the round though, which stays where it was. Remove the second stitch marker.

Method:

Cast on 48 stitches using 3mm needles.

I hate sewing up so I used Judy’s magic cast on ( http://knitty.com/ISSUEspring06/FEATmagiccaston.html ) and the 3mm circular needles. I don’t advise trying to do this on the double pointed needles, as it is impossibly fiddly. You don’t have to use Judy’s magic cast on if you don’t fancy it, you could use any other method as long as you end up with 48 stitches in the round on double pointed needles.

I put a stitch marker at the beginning of the round so I didn’t get lost.

Knit in all-over cable pattern until the cover is just a bit longer than the phone, ending on either round 3 or 9. I knitted three repeats, ending on round 9 of the fourth repeat.

Switch to contrasting colour yarn and 2.75mm needles. Knit three rounds in P2 K2 rib. Cast off in rib, removing stitch marker.

Sew up bottom cast-on edge, if you didn’t use Judy’s magic cast on. Weave in ends of wool.

I took some reasonably nice photos and used my typographical skills to the fullest (within the constraints of the eBay text editor, that is). The listing was complete and went live.

We wouldn’t see any activity until the last five minutes of the auction in a week’s time, so I told myself to forget about it until then. However, almost immediately we got a message from someone asking us how much we would take to remove the item from eBay.

Being an eBay novice this was pretty exciting

I never thought the boiler would have any interest, let alone such an immediate response. So I accepted an offer and arranged for the guy to pick it up a day before the end of the auction. As the week went on I felt more and more uncomfortable about the guy I was dealing with. He kept on rearranging the pick up time and was quite obtuse when chatting. I wasn’t sure I could rely on him, so I left the item on eBay.

Saturday was D DAY. He of course didn’t turn up, he called on Sunday morning to say he was finally on his way from Scotland, but by this time I had pretty much decided to back out of the deal and keep the item on eBay. This was sealed when I found out that you can’t remove an item 12 hours before the end of the auction anyway – it is against the rules, in fact removing the item and selling outside of the auction is against the rules so I needed no further reason to carry on with the deal.

I texted the guy to let him know. He called straight away accusing me of trying to ask for more money and being generally aggressive. He eventually accepted that my mind was made up and hung up, not before saying ‘good luck with the listing’. I thought that was strange.

As the auction reached its climax the bidding heated up, it quickly reached the price that the other guy had offered and carried on going, £300, £400, £550, £650, £695 and ended. £695… I couldn’t believe it. It was was too good to be true so I looked at the profile of the person who had won.

Alarm bells started ringing

They had two pages of positive feedback, but alarm bells started ringing when I saw one entry that said something like ‘… Do not deal with this person, paid them and not received goods, won’t answer calls or emails!!’ Then I saw confirmation that something malicious had taken place: the first two entries saying how great a buyer this person was were from the same guy who tried to buy the boiler off me.

I was pretty shocked that they had taken this action, I assumed that this person had no intention of paying and it was somehow revenge for not completing their deal. I have reported the user to eBay and hope they can sort it out. All of this fuss for a second hand, old oil boiler. I think if we had the time over again we would have just put it in the garden and made a post-modern sculpture from it.

To eBay or not to eBay that is the question, and the answer is yes but be careful and don’t talk to strange men who are not really from Scotland.

The British Museum is currently displaying the early visuals in the “Shakespeare: staging the world” exhibition that runs until 25 November. It is a very fine exhibition that goes a long way to define our national identity.

The branding had to convey these key messages: passion; consumer champion; enthusiastic and enabling; independent; knowledgeable; trustworthy.

Because this was going to be rolled out as a Twitter avatar in the first instance, it was important to create something bold and simple. We looked at a number of concepts, before settling on developing the universal ‘okay’ gesture to communicate a seal of approval, working in a tipped glass to add not only the wine element but also the aspect of expertise, as a professional wine taster will often tilt the glass to check for colour before tasting.

“I needed an agency I could trust to help me develop a brand identity for my new business. THS was my 1st choice. THS has a wicked combination of the personal touch & a talented team of designers which means they just get it. They got the context of what I was trying to do and what I wanted my brand to stand for and executed against my brief brilliantly. I now have a totally unique graphic identity and avatar that I’m using across my digital platforms that will create real value for my business.”

High Street Sommelier.