Hello. Creative Diary.
After taking far too long to post up the last creative diary entry, we thought we would crack on with a wee mid-month ramble about recent goings on in the Jamhot studio.
First up, by far the most important thing that's happened over the last month. Oasis! Seeing and hearing a packed stadium sing their hearts out to every word of every song over a two hour set was an incredible experience. A brilliant reminder of the power of music, and creativity in general, to bring people together. A very special evening that brought back memories of Oasis at Loch Lomond all those years ago. It's good to be back.
Alongside that, we did of course do some design over the last few weeks. The Health & Fitness brand we're working on is gathering pace, with photoshoots planned and booked across next week. Any occasion where we get to hire a production van is always a good thing. After that we're on to the brand guidelines design and starting a new signage project. It's been a cracking one to work on, and we should have some work to share later this year.
Speaking of sharing work, we did a little list of new projects that we've not had the chance to share with the world yet and realised that we had built up a bit of a backlog... with 18 projects that we need to showcase in some way. To be honest, we're not really sure how we'll tackle this as pretty much all of our time in the studio over the next couple of months is allocated to client projects. We did discuss the possibility of just not bothering, but that didn't seem like a very smart business decision (and we're trying our best to make smarter business decisions) - and perhaps more importantly this is a collection of work we've poured everything into over the last year. Design & brand work we are incredibly proud of, so it would probably be a good idea to get it out there. We suggested that Craig could just move himself into the studio for a few months and not leave until either it's all done, or until he has some sort of breakdown or epithany. But again, we thought that might not be the most healthy way to progress. So we've decided to put aside each Friday in the studio to work on our own stuff until we see some signs of progress. Wish us luck.
We've been making some good headway doing bits and pieces to the new space. A brand new orange painted pillar has added some colour to the studio and we'll be getting the white board wall pained this weekend. Some shiny new Apple equipment arrived this week which made us all happy. We do have to report that some of (all of) the hanging basket plants that we bought have met their end after we clearly forgot to water them. The other ones are doing ok though, so it's not all bad.
What else, what else? Ah yeah, we've got a couple of photoshoots in the works over the next month for a drinks brand. These ones don't require a production van sadly, but will be good none the less. We've got a motion branding job on the go for a music brand which has been a nice one to get into. It also feels like the world has woken up again after the summer break, as the diary over the coming two weeks has quite a few new project meetings scheduled in, so hopefully some interesting work will come from that.
We'll be back down in London next month kicking off a new project and meeting some production partners while we're there - and as always probably taking the wrong tube to the wrong place. Standard behaviour.
Design of the new Jamhot website continues - it's looking good and coming together nicely. Development is pretty much done and dusted and we're working on some animations for the different sections at the moment and writing (and re-writing many times) bits and pieces of copy. One case study is almost complete. Many more remain. Onwards we go, it's the only way.
Oh, and we also just made the discovery that the pub right next door to the studio has a pool table and a jukebox. Although £1.50 for a game seems a tad steep, probably cause of Brexit and other global challenges. We forgot to check how many tunes £1 gets you on the jukebox, updates to follow. We'll head to the bank and get a bucket of change and let the pool league table commence very soon.
That's about it for now. We'll try and remember to write another one of these creative diary posts at the start of next month, reporting back on the quality of photoshoot van. The important stuff. Until then, we're off to watch Oasis videos on YouTube.
Jamhot x