Interview With... Bigmouth Audio
The good folks at Bigmouth Audio recently asked us to take part in an interview for their blog and we were only too happy to oblige. You can check out what we had to say below or over at their site.
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1. Tell us about your studio for those who are unfamiliar with your work.
Hello. We’re Jamhot - a creative design and digital studio. We work out of our Glasgow studio and operate with a global outlook and a burning ambition to produce world class work. We work with companies and brands helping them to uncover their personality and communicate it in authentic and interesting ways. We’ve lucky to work with some great clients including Tron Theatre, Creative Scotland, Tennent’s Lager and Glasgow International Comedy Festival. We also founded and run a creative breakfast talk series called Gab where creative folk get together over a coffee to hear a talk.
2. What makes Jam Hot unique?
There’s a lot of creative, design and digital studios in Scotland - not to mention hundreds of creative freelancers and so I guess it can be hard to stand out. We tend not to bother too much with what other studios are doing, and stay away from the whole industry awards scene, and just keep our heads down and do what we do to the best of our ability, and it seems to work.
Our studio was started off by two best mates, myself and Craig, and we wanted to create a studio where we could do work that we love, work with people that we like, enjoy the day to day of what we do but (and this is the most important bit) continue to push ourselves creatively and constantly get better at what we do. From the beginning, we also said that we would never do things just for the money if the client or project is not a good fit. We’ve managed to stay pretty true to that philosophy and it’s something we’re proud of.
We try to produce honest work that has personality and comes from a playful approach. We tend to approach our projects leading on strategy, and then look to translate this in to a strong visual style.
3. Do you have a favourite project that has come out of the studio in recent years?
We’re a forward thinking studio and so tend not to be huge fans of looking back too much - so our favourite projects are always the ones that we are currently working on.
We’re hugely privileged to be involved in lots of different work in the studio at the moment. From creating a hand built paper illustration model for photography and stop motion animation for a campaign to working on visual style and user interface development for a new mindfulness app. We’re also working on a really exciting brand re-positioning project for a leading independent school - that’s been a complete pleasure to work on. We’ve got a pretty challenging app design and development project in the studio looking at creating an app that will harness the power of social intervention to help people lose weight, and we’re just about to start a branding project for one of the country’s leading theatre and arts venue. It’s fair to say we’re busy - but that’s how we like it!
4. Do you have any habits or set approaches that help you work more efficiently?
We work as a small team so we tend to work in a pretty agile way. We don’t go in for lots of meetings, we pretty much just get our heads down and get on with things with each studio member taking on the responsibility of the projects they are working on. We use tools like basecamp and trello to plan and manage projects - they’re invaluable to us as a studio. Email is the number one creativity and time killer and so we’re looking at ways to reduce it’s use - including adopting new software like Slack.
5. Tell us something about Jam Hot that no one knows.
When starting up the studio we had to chose a name quickly so that we could invoice our first client. We almost called ourselves Walking Chalk or Big Pixel! Luckily we saw the light just in time and managed to come up with what we think is a much better name!