Friday 25 February 2011

Why an X-Blog beats an iBlog any day!

We’re all used to iThings; where technology’s concerned we know as consumers that the obligatory ‘i’ prefix is what we need.

‘A blender Sir’ - ‘no thank you’

‘An iBlender Sir’ - ‘I’ll take three of those please, and with iWhisk attachments too’.

See? Works every time. Replace the word blender with anything else you choose and you’ll want it more when it’s an iThing. iBeer (want), iBike (need), iKellyBrook (let’s not even go there!)




Tuesday 22 February 2011

Rent a mob!

Heard of Crowdsourcing? No… then read on, it might just provide you with the solutions you’re looking for.

‘Crowdsourcing - the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call’
Jeff Howe, June 2006, Wired Magazine.

Tuesday 15 February 2011

Planning – on an Olympian scale!

You can have any number of opinions about the London Olympics 2012. You can be angry about the overall £9billion plus budget (but don’t forget the legacy!). You can be astounded at the huge infrastructure project that is going to change the face of transport in East London forever. You can be bemused about the ‘Rock man’ logo that, 3 years down the line, is still harsh and unapproachable. But surely, what everyone must agree on is the masterful way this massive project has been planned, managed and executed.

When was the last time that any of us were able to reel off the 4 cornerstones of project management with such ease and consummate professionalism as the LOCOG planners – Scope, Quality, Time and Cost – all delivered with, what appears to be clockwork milestone efficiency and powerful public perception.


And today, Tuesday 15th February, we have the next piece of brilliantly executed and masterfully fulfilled product promise – the release of the 2012 Olympics ticketing schedule. Now we’re really getting to the business end of the planning for what everyone describes, in the contemporary absence of the Barnum and Bailey Circus, as the ‘Greatest Show on Earth’.

Monday 14 February 2011

Welcome to ‘the family’

As a close-knit team of 15 or so (we expand and contract if we need specialist skills see) it often feels like a family here; we can certainly tell you which of us is the embarrassing uncle, the nagging wife and the grumpy old grandfather! So the coming few months are especially exciting as both Simon J (our Digital mastermind) and Nick H (Client Liaison something or other) are both expecting new additions in their, and that means our, lives. Best of luck to them both, but more importantly may they be back at work in one day, and not at all affected by sleep depravation, there’s still plenty of work to do fellas!



A picture sells a thousands words

We’ve worked, over the years (more than 20 now, but we’re still oh so young… honest!) on a massive variety of projects. As part and parcel of helping engage audiences for our clients we’ve had to take, source or commission high-quality pictures of industrial technology, kitchen machines, fitness fanatics, mobile phones, beauty products and even super posh yachts.


Now we know all of the above won’t fit into the Idealogy headquarters for photographing, but for the things that will we now have in-house facilities to help us turn these projects around more quickly, more cost-effectively and with a greater creative control.

Tuesday 8 February 2011

From an “Oh No!” to an ‘I Do!” moment

Unfortunately, there’s no way to put this delicately!

So, OK – on a scale of 1-10, what’s the worst thing that a designer can be asked to create? We’ve all been asked to ‘do me a Business Card’. Then there’s the old ‘logo for a friend’s new Delivery Business’ chestnut. Or, in at number 8 with a bullet, an advert for a small local hotel, owned by a friend of your Mum’s cousin who’d heard that you were good at drawing!

Well, and you need to trust us on this, there’s something worse, much worse, than any of those. How about Wedding Stationery for a highly valued and much loved client? Scary, eh?

The first reaction is always to try to think of an excuse – “it’s a lovely thought, but I’m just so busy and I’m worried that I won’t do the project justice!” Maybe, in such circumstances, a more honest –“you must be joking!” – response would be more useful.


Nothing like that happened, so this story is about how Idealogy turned an “Oh No!’ moment into a powerful personal branding experience for Lisa Rickhuss, Simple’s CRM Manager and her new husband Nigel Taylor, who began their own official partnership at the end of October 2010.

Wednesday 2 February 2011

Give us a penny for a proper tune mate!

A recent television commercial, this one, for John Lewis, has an accompanying piece of music, that let’s face it, breaks your heart when combined with the images you see on screen. And here at Idealogy HQ we’re often tasked with making films, and choosing their accompanying pieces of music… so what’s in a soundtrack?