RBS Banner Stands

We recently design and printed these pull up banners for the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) in Southampton. They were to promote an internal sales initiative to encourage staff to come up with ideas. Each idea was to be assessed by a panel of 5 experts - rather like a popular BBC TV programme.

We developed the logo, concept and design of the banner.

We produce a range of posters, banners and exhibition stands. Come and see some samples in the store.

Hendy Parts Promotion

We design and print Hendy Parts’ regular offers leaflet – see above.

Hendy Parts, based in Hedge End near Southampton, is the premier supplier for vehicle parts and accessories in the South and South West. They supply parts for a range of vehicles including Ford, Iveco, Mazda, Kia and Honda. Through their buying power they are able to offer their trade customers some great special offers.

This is a great way to keep in touch with your customers. Even if they’re not interested in that month’s special offer they get a reminder of what else you can do for them.

We designed this leaflet as a generic template. So as offers and products change we just replace those sections of the leaflet. This not only saves time and money but also makes it easier for customers to navigate the promotions.

Labels & Typography - Noma

Graphic Design isn't always about making things look nice, but it is always about good design. In the above example the design was about being able to convey a lot of information in a small space.

Noma (www.complementary-medicine.com) offers a professional service to qualified practitioners of complementary medicine. One of the products that they import has all the important medical information only written in German. So Noma had to replace the German with English.

We designed and printed these labels on a roll for them. We do a large variety of labels and stickers, including car window stickers, CD/DVD labels, sheets of labels etc.

The difficulty with this job was being able to squeeze all the information into a tight space. This is where you need a professional design package. MS Word only has limited functionality for tweaking the letter/line spacing, point size and kerning etc. which is what you need to be able to do!

We’ve taken a 12 page MS Word contract and squeezed it down to 4 pages while still keeping it readable. To do that you need to be good at using Adobe Indesign.

New Naturalist Newsletter

Newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with your subscribers - these may be your customers or just potentially interested parties. Above is quite a comprehensive one we've printed for "The New Naturalist" (www.thenewnaturalistcollectorsclub.co.uk)

This is a great example of a newsletter because:

• the target market, i.e. the subscriber who will read it, has been well defined
• it's published regularly - quarterly in this case
• it provides useful information for the subscriber
• it reminds subscribers about services/products on offer
• the design has been well thought out and excuted.

Sometime customers come to us and they've only really got the content for the first issue. They have so much news to tell their customers and think a newsletter is the answer. A newsletter is a real commitment and so we recommend making sure you have enough news through out the year to justify one - otherwise it might be better do something else, e.g. a one-off brochure.

However if you can commit to publishing a regular newsletter then it can be very effective. If the content is useful, subscribers will pass it on to people they know and so do your markting for you. A newsletter is a good way to demonstrate that you really are an expert in your field - not just because it says so on your website. Keeping your organisation's name fresh in subsribers minds means that when they do need your service they are likely to think of you first.

Charity Calendar - Winchester Travel Health

This is a 2010 calendar that we've designed and printed for Winchester Travel Health (www.winchestertravelhealth.co.uk). They are a travel clinic, based in Winchester, that offers advice on the best way to travel safely and healthily. As well as offering advice they carry out vaccinations, provide health screenings and travel health products.

Winchester Travel Health supports the Grace and Hope Foundation which is a charity that funds an orphanage in Ghana. Joanna Lowry, of Winchester Travel Health, thought it would be a good idea to create a calendar made from pictures that her customers have sent to her whilst on their travels. The idea is to sell the calendar and give the profits the foundation.

We created the calendar by screening all the photos to find ones that were of a sufficient quality to be used. We then put together all the artwork and after several drafts, trying out different calendar styles, printed this amazing calendar.

Now Joanna is busy selling them!

Design Awards

Every year printing.com hold a design competition amongst the c.280 outlets. There are 5 different categories that are judged: Functional (e.g. calendars), Identity (logos and branding), Hand Out (e.g. flyers), Prestige (high value items e.g. booklets) and Websites.

Under the Identity category Southampton's designer Dan Ebbrell was the runner up. Dan designed the corporate id for Innovative Technology Solutions (www.itechsol.co.uk). The judges said "The icons visually explain what the company does in a clean, clear and easy to read manner". So if you need a logo designed come and see Dan - a "Highly Commended" designer.

Hoody Top

Horizons is an outdoor pursuits and socialising club offering a wide range of activities each week to people across Hampshire, Wiltshire and Berkshire (www.horizonspursuits.co.uk).

We’ve just produced these hooded tops for them. The challenge was to take the logo that we designed for them a while ago and turn it into a decent stitch pattern. This involves converting all the colours used into suitable thread colours, making sure that the lettering works (e.g. you can’t have big gaps) and actually designing how the stitches will create the logo. Also because the logo was going on the reverse of the top it needed to be large. This resulted in a stitch pattern that consisted of 50,000 stitches. Of course these are sewn but machine, not my aunt Ethel, but is still difficult to produce large, complex stitch patterns such as this. However the results were great as you can see.