A Little Studio Update. What We've Been Up To...
Hello there. You know, I'm not sure who might be reading this. A future client, or perhaps a current one, a student who's browsing or maybe just my mum (hello mum).
Regardless, I thought it might be nice to pop a little studio update. A wee bit about what we've been up to, which feels like a lot recently.
So for anyone who might be interested, here's some chat.
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Gab34
We're just recovering from the epic event that was Gab34, where we welcomed Brian Collins all the way from New York to speak to a sold out crowd of over 200 creative folk at Glasgow's Drygate Brewery. As one of the best studios in the business, we've been admirers of Collins work for a long while - so when we bumped into Brian in Barcelona at Offf Design Festival we couldn't pass up the chance to try and get him to Glasgow. Thanks to some tequila, and some cheeky chat we were delighted to make it happen and were all very pleased that the event went well, people turned up and that we managed to raise £2,300 for Glasgow North East Foodbank (as well as donating some lovely kids books... thanks to Brian for that idea).
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Getting To Know The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh
Over the last month we've been delving deep into something very new for us - the world of surgery. That's because we're working with The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh on an exciting new design project. At the moment we're in the discovery phase of things, so we've been speaking to some of the world's top surgeons, getting an insight into what they do and how they do it. It's projects like this that remind us why we love what we do so much - getting the chance to take peek into other people's worlds, gaining an insight into other industries and applying our skills to something totally new. The work continues into the start of next year and we can't wait to see it all come to life.
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Starting Cancer Cures
As well as working on very interesting projects, we're very lucky to spend a lot of our time working with arts & charitable organisations that do very worthwhile things. And as far as worthwhile goes, starting new cures for cancer has to be among the best things we're currently involved with. We're currently working very closely with the team at Worldwide Cancer Research on a series of design sprints - where over ten weeks, we catch up every Monday morning to go through our creative work from the week before. It's the first time we've tried this approach in this way, and it's been excellent. Some weeks it feels like we make incredible progress, other weeks we might have hit some creative cul de sacs. But regardless of what's been happening, we catch up and take an honest look at where we're at.
The idea of making yourself more vunerable with clients, saying things like 'I don't know' and 'I'm not too sure' feels like it opens you up to more possibilities and makes things more collaborative - a feeling of being in it together rather than trying to present the perfect answer.
Having got into the swing of things, it feels like we're making great progress on a couple of important projects and what's more the process has been very enjoyable too and a good way to kick off the week. We'll report back on how we're getting on when we (hopefully) do another update.
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Something New For The British Red Cross
Last month saw us launch a new digital design project for the great folk at British Red Cross. The charity does incredible work across the world, and sadly as we can all see from the news this year - their work is now needed more than ever. We partnered with them to develop a new recruitment site that allows them to take the organisation forward into the future. It's been a joy to work with the team there, and as always it's a great feeling when new work launches to the world.
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A New Island Adventure
Tomorrow we're welcoming a new distillery client into the studio for a creative kick off, as we start a new island adventure creating a new brand and packaging for an exciting new Scottish Island Distillery. We can't talk too much about it just now, but it's fair to say we're all looking forward to this a lot.
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A Fond Farewell to Andy Arnold
Tron Theatre was one of our very first clients. When we started the studio we phoned them up out of the blue (that would be seen as a hate crime now) and said we wanted to work with them. I think they must have felt sorry for us, so told us to pop along and say hello. Sixteen years later, we are proud that they are still clients at Jamhot - and we love everything we get to collaborate on. The other week saw us attend Nae Expectations, the final show under Artistic Director Andy Arnold. It's been an honour to get to work with Andy for such an extended period of time and we're all sad to see him go, and wish him well on his new adventures in Ireland.
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Saying Hello to European Friends
Last month we were busy working up some design magic for our friends at the European Youth Card Association in Brussles. We always like the chance to work with our European friends and so when they popped up in our inbox with some design based treats we stopped what we were doing and got stuck right in. Hopefully we'll get the chance to do it again soon.
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The First Jamhot Dram
Craig has been busy over the last few months working on designs for the first two whisky projects to come out of the Jamhot studio in collaboration with our friends at Global Whisky. We're hoping that we will be able to show some of this work at the start of next year, but it's now into production and will be out in the wild soon.
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New Creative Friends
We've been collaboraing with all of the usual friendly faces in the studio over the last little while, but it's also been great to welcome some fresh blood and new ideas into the fold as we have been working with some talented folk on a new design project for a Scottish University.
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What's next...
At the moment we've got our heads down working hard on some great stuff in the studio, but from a new business point of view our eyes are looking towards next year to see what new adventues await. We don't tend to do any business development activity as such, instead focussing on delivering the best work we can for our clients in the hope they might recommend us to other people - thankfully as we prepare to enter our 17th year (ooooft!) this approach seems to work as well as it did when we first kicked things off. So we have a few very interesting conversations going on about projects in 2024, who knows which ones will come to life and which ones might not - luckily we're still able to do what we love and we hope that can continue for a long while to come.
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Ok, I think that's about it for now. If I can be bothered I might do another update towards the end of December. I'm guessing though that in six weeks time we'll be spending more time in the Big Slope next door eating chicken burgers and drinking pints that we will be designing as our two week festive break begins to kick in.
Until then, be well.
Jamhot x