Welcome to the Escape Blog

There is much talk at the moment about e-mail formats for e-shots. If you are in the game creating them, the different ways e-mail clients read e-mails makes the job very difficult to create a standard.

Dave at Campaign Monitor, our e-mail tool of choice, has a call-to-arms regarding e-mail standards.

I for one am considering changing our e-mail newsletters to pure text, with more links to articles and the blog. At the moment, as you can see, 30% of the e-newsletters we sent in September were opened as HTML. A high percentage of the unopened ones must get read as text, otherwise surely people would unsubscribe? Out of those 339, only five people looked at the HTML version link on the website.

What Do You Think?

An interesting interview with Eric Kintz from HP about new web technology and how it is affecting print on demand - via Drew McLellan.

From late November 2007, new industry minimum clearing standards are being introduced by all banks.

This (allegedly) will provide us all with greater certainty on whether a cheque paid into our account has actually been paid.

This is being referred to as ‘Certainty of Fate’.

Some more news is that in 2008, banks will offer a new payment solution that will provide same-day clearing of electronic payments.  I have no idea how much they will charge us for this service which I’ve seen classified as “near real-time basis”.

You know what banks are like, they make things sound much more complicated than they really are so I suggest you all check out your own branch for advice on this key change to banking.

I am always intrigued by business and the way some companies manage to embrace change, while some moan and do nothing. You can guess which grow and which tend to fade away.

One that I have referenced in the past is the charity Oxfam - yes, charities are still businesses - and how they started using E-bay as people started to sell their second hand goods themselves, rather than donate them to their shops. They turned the threat into an opportunity.

Once again, their name popped up in the Sunday Times yesterday with the news that they now have their own web shop.

The launch is expected to revolutionise the way Oxfam raises money and sells to customers, almost 60 years after it first opened high-street shops. The charity, which is trying to cash in on the growing trend towards ethical shopping, hopes to become a key player in the online-shopping world.

It has 750 shops across Britain, staffed by 21,000 volunteers. In the last financial year, it sold goods worth £80m and made £25m profit.

Business challenges never go away, it is us that has to adapt to these changes. And, they are coming thicker and faster than ever before.

On an aside, even the design of the Oxfam site is fresh and very modern.

Pantone Inc have unveiled the first completely new colour specification system for the graphic arts industry in 45 years.

With more than 2,000 new colours it’s design is to inspire creativity.

The original PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM was designed to meet the needs of an industry that was functioning without a precise and reliable way to communicate colour

explains Helmut Eifert, vice president of Pantone, Europe.

The PANTONE Goe System works in concert with the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM to empower everyone in the creative and production process with a simpler, more complete, user-friendly workflow from the moment of inspiration to the realisation of a finished project. Just as the original System enabled the industry to step into its future, PANTONE Goe will impel designers and printers to stay competitive and versatile in today’s challenging and evolving marketplace.

A new Facebook feature reported yesterday is “People Search” with public profiles. Given a short time, this will make us all much more ‘findable’ in search engines. Indeed, Facebook could essentially become a “people search engine”.

Great for finding people, but it does pose a problem with exposure - do we really want that much? As much as Facebook is a choice for us to use as individuals, do we want to start chipping away at our personal privacy and are most people in control of what they say and what people see with regards to the possible implications?

Employers are also cracking down on employees using Facebook and what they say online that could harm their brand.

The flip side being that as a user of Facebook, what you say, how you say it and who you connect with, could influence other peoples opinions about you personally.

We had success this week implementing a Facebook Group and engaging a customer base for a retail outlet. But, already, comments are being made on the open forum, which may be funny to one person, but could offend another.

Allowing people to have control over aspects of your branded communications brings its own problems but I guess people are already using Blogs to do the same thing already. But using this kind of media, they are connected together by you.

That said, it’s a great way to turn the tables and re-emphasise your brand values in front of everyone and you do still have control over what gets shown. But, just like forums, there’s always one that spoils it.

Facebook offers a real opportunity for organic social networking, above and beyond equivalents like MySpace, but careful strategic management of how you do that is essential for your business, and for “brand you”.

Keith sent me this cool link for a new way to re-size images without cropping or scaling…

Not exactly a Hollywood blockbuster in the making but a movie about Helvetica has been created and Directed by Gary Hustwit as reported by The Guardian.

If Hustwit looks chuffed, it’s easy to understand why. His first attempt at a full-length documentary, shot on a credit-card budget and made up of interviews with designers and typographers, has somehow become a global phenomenon.

Helvetica is just one of those fonts that does the job. Nothing fancy, but oh so adaptable to so many different applications. Dare I Say, the Helvetica Neue family is one of my favourite families of all time - despite it’s over use in design and advertising.

We did one of the best pitches of our careers this week and it looks like we won it - we’ve had a call and an e-mail but never count your chickens I always say.

It was for an internal staff magazine for a large housing organisation and found us asking questions about the very essence of magazines before we even hit our sketch pads.

It’s great when you have the freedom and budget to explore the ‘questions behind the questions’ for a new project and the creative work had some real backbone by the time it was ready to go.

Chunking Up (for all those familiar with Milton Model Patterns) is a great way of exploring creative projects and understanding the very purpose of a design piece. (more…)

After howls of laughter and lots of loud YES’s coming from the studio yesterday I asked what all the fuss was.

Having worked in a design studio much of my career I too could soon be heard saying loudly, YEP, YEP, YEP, YEP, YEP, YEP, YEP, YEP to Groy’s 8 ways to drive a graphic designer mad.

Clients… you know who you are….