We were approached by author and physiotherapist Nick Sinfield with a solid concept for a book about a new approach to solving back pain. After reviewing his text and system, we planned, photographed, designed and artworked a 100 page book ready for self publication by Nick’s company Therapy Programmes Ltd. The book has become a great success is on its second print run.

To support the sales of the book we created a simple website that allows direct purchases of the book through PayPal.

Get your copy of this great book at: www.backpaincompany.com

We come across a great new way to send large files over the internet without the arduous task of massive emails and FTP directories.

We Transfer is as good as it get. Not only that it looks great, (checkout the timeline animation) but, quite literally, it simply works brilliantly.

Needless to say with file size getting bigger and broadband getting faster it’s been a pretty useless tool. A definite contender for our 2010 Web Awards*!

wetransfer.info

*Not that we have any awards but if we did it would be contender.

The 960 grid as perhaps regarded as the web design grid. Workable, simple and flexible this Photoshop layout really helps when putting those first pixels to screen and the template saves a few minutes ’set-up’ time too.

So here, as a gift in this time of Yule, please feel free to download.

960-grid.psd.zip (16kb)

Off the back of the success of last years campaign a new group of Heroes were chosen by Central Bedfordshire College for 2010. As with the previous campaign, it was rolled out through websites, internal marketing and external marketing, vehicle graphics and local area advertising. The microsite incorporated dynamic features through the use of the jQuery javascript that evoke the user to explore the site to discover more information about the new ‘Heroes’.

View the site: http://www.providedesign.co.uk/?p=530

Check out their website here www.maritime-medical.org

A long standing client of Provide Design, Dunstable College are evolving. Taking on new campuses and expanding their coverage meant that they were no longer a college for a single town, but a college for Central Bedfordshire.

Provide Design won the pitch to rebrand the college and created a new logo, identity, palette and signage for the college.

Find out more about the Rebrand here www.centralbeds.co.uk

Meet the Heroes of last years campaign www.centralbeds.ac.uk/dc-heroes

Promotional hanger for Energie Fitness Clubs. The hanger entitles the holder to a free 3 day pass at the club and is distributed by local restaurants, hotels and garages (hung on rear view after an MoT).

A6 Direct Mailer to promote referral scheme for recruitment company Provide Consulting. A custom game board was created for the photoshoot (no fake money here!).

Provide Design are proud to announce that our hard work and creativity have bagged Dunstable College a FE First Marketing Excellence award for the ‘Heroes’ recruitment campaign.

The campaign itself was entered in the highly subscribed ‘best 14-19 year old campaign’ category, and came home with the silver.

This national award is strong recognition for the campaign that has largely contributed to a massive 30% increase in full-time age 16-19 student numbers at the College.

We have just been re-comissioned to develop the visual identity of the 2010 Heroes Evolution campaign so watch this space to see how we raise the bar for next year.

You can see some of our work from the 2009 campaign here: Dunstable Heroes Campaign

Or visit: www.dunstable.ac.uk to see our work in action

3 years ago I was asked to put forward suggestions for a quick, personal, update app that allowed a company to put a ‘friendly’ face on their website and grow their social network. I put forward Twitter. At this time they barely had a 50,000 users and was very much in it’s infancy. However, the company in question felt it wasn’t ‘corporate’ enough and shelved the idea.

Moving forward 3 years and Twitter, with it’s few million users, has recently become an integral part of the companys website. This isn’t just a one off. Many companies are now using Twitter to reach a wider audience, to promote their products and increase their traffic. It seems Twittering is fast becoming the new blogging, so much so that the mighty FaceBook has restructured it’s homepage to rival it.

Twitter takes less time to write and perhaps more importantly it take less time to read and with the use of such tools, (FaceBook, LinkedIn, MySpace et al), the possibilities have now been totally realised by many companies, especially in the doom and gloom climate we all seem to be living in today. There seems to be a certain sense of urgency, to be a “part of it”.

But what about good old fashioned blogging? A well written blog will always attract more attention than a tweet. It becomes indexed by the search engines and it’s not confined to a user, it is far more global. The possibilities of using a blog (or blogging platform) when considering a website should never be under-estimated. We have had some great success from constructing sites based around blogging platforms and are continued to be amazed at the development that goes into them. Wordpress in particular is always highly recommended at the Provide Design camp. But now we have many more options/toys to play with.

With the amount of web apps available to web developers a company can reach their target web audience in more ways than ever before. We as web designers, can utilise this time of social networking to create that killer site that really works the way it needs to work as well as look darn pretty.

And that really does make us want to blog more!