electric angel /design for life

enterprising britain – the book

so we’d planned the day and the take-home and initially discussed sending someone to accompany the judging team on the last leg of the journey into scarborough but didn’t want to spoil the story by saying too much in advance. so it was suggested we put together a brochure that told the facts and the stats – the stuff it was going to be hard to get out in the personal stories without it seeming staged. the judges would have this info in the entry submission but it needed a friendly presentation.

so, no problem – that’s what we do at electric angel. one slight problem with this one though – we were now just 3 working days from the visit. 5 days if you include the weekend. and we obviously needed to – in fact it was john in the regeneration team at the council who spent his weekend turning formal text into a more enjoyable read. we did the design, illustrations, sourced photos and arranged print turnaround in the remaining 3 days. this is why designers always look so tired. the booklets – designed to ultimately slip into the goodie boxes – were delivered by first transpennine express who personally placed them into the hands of the judging team at york station.

as for the design – we went with hand-drawn illustrations to make the stats more approachable, an easy to read layout and made the most of photos – by tony bartholomew and james. an idea we had was to also give some background to scarborough by having a timeline run throughout the book that charted scarborough’s history. likewise, the photos tell a chronological story from 2002 onwards [2002 being the point when the renaissance initiative began]. it was good to to see the judging team making notes in the margins during the day.

enterprising britain – the goodie box

we wanted the judging team to take home a reminder of their day in scarborough and something to take back to the whole national judging panel, so the postcards were packaged in these boxes, to be opened on the journey home.

the ‘waking sleeping beauty’ roundel follows through on the postcards, box and rock.

we had two more tricks up our sleeve… that means two more blog posts.

enterprising britain – people and postcards

the potential problem in visiting a wide range of people and places is that it goes by in a blur leaving the judging team reeling. so we had to think about how we might give them opportunity to revisit at their leisure their whirlwind tour of scarborough’s renaissance.

well, when you go to the seaside you send a postcard back home… and as we wanted real stories, we asked the people we were meeting to write their own postcard message.

and we packaged them as a ‘goodie box’ – we’ll blog that next tme.

photography on postcards by tony bartholomew plus james rush [nighttime harbour shot] and darrell hooper [digital scarborough pic], film stills from ’900 miles’ by ollie banks.

enterprising britain – planning the visit

the national judging for enterprising britain involves a judging team visiting each of the regional finalists – our judge was internet entrepreneur james murray-wells. as part of the planning team we continued the theme that personal stories are the best way of explaining the renaissance of scarborough and set about identifying the people and places that would best tell scarborough’s story and who we would introduce to james.

[image: woodend creative workspace, one of scarborough's newest success stories and the obvious starting point for the judging visit]

we had to be quite brutal about ignoring protocol – it was quite clear that meeting the usual dignitaries might be the ‘proper’ thing to do but it wouldn’t help tell the story in the limited time we had. we may have put a few noses out of joint… another issue was where to take james and his judging assistants – there was some concern from the council that we should avoid scarborough’s less pretty areas but we insisted that these were part of the story and places where change was happening and transforming lives – the ‘real scarborough’, if you like. if we just showed the places that have already been transformed there’d be no contrast and less of a story to tell.

our watchword at all times was ‘no spin’ – we would show scarborough’s enterprising attitude in all walks of life and tell it like it is. if scarborough has one big challenge, or even one constant failing – it’s that it’s rarely any good at shouting about itself. we were glad to be able to help that process.

enterprising britain – the regional pitch

as promised, here’s the story…
once scarborough was on the yorkshire & humber shortlist for the enterprising britain awards, it had to present to a regional panel of judges. we were invited to design a visual presentation and i was asked if i would be one of the presentation team in order to talk about our story of relocating electric angel to scarborough.

we suggested that a typical powerpoint presentation wouldn’t allow the trio of presenters to speak freely, plus the judges had already got ‘the facts’ on the written entry submission – what was needed now was to present a human face to the story and let personalities shine through. so we put together a smoothly evolving series of images that formed a visual backdrop while people spoke. the sequences of images were relevant to what each person was saying, adding context and telling a linear story, from scarborough’s initial heyday, through it’s loss of confidence and to its current reinvention and regaining of self-belief.

this freed up the three of us to talk in a more relaxed way and respond to the reactions of the judging panel. seems that it did the job. we were declared the most enterprising place in yorkshire and the humber. and that’s really when the real work started…

enterprising britain 2008 – we won!

we’re pleased to announce that scarborough has been awarded the 2008 enterprising britain award at 11 downing street. if you follow our blog, you’ll know that we were invited to represent scarborough and helped win the regional award earlier this year. following that success we were engaged as consultants to help plan the judges visit to scarborough and to design supporting material. so we’re obviously incredibly pleased to have won.

we’ll blog what we did and why over the coming week but for now we’re enjoying the success and celebrating with all those involved in renaissance who have worked to demand a bright future for the town – this is a deserved accolade.

enterprise angel

ta to everyone who’s got in touch after seeing me on/in inform magazine. your comments were mostly polite. i was photographed on the beach for what i thought would be a small pic accompanying an article on enterprising britain and was rather surprised to find myself cover model too. it’s been suggested there might have been some kind of sony product placement deal going on… alas not, but i’m tempted to send them a copy and pleading letter now my laptop is full of sand.

download a copy of inform for the article and bizarre ‘adrian in middle of freak storm’ pic here

new studio

electric angel will soon be on the move to a new studio in scarborough, giving us more space and a pleasant view. we might also have a new aspect to the business… but more about that later. here’s a sneak preview of how it’s looking now the nice plasterer has started to weave his magic. [photo by james. firewood by adrian, james and rebecca. orange paint by former residents.]

still crazy

banner for promoting the ‘crazy, damn right i’m crazy’ exhibition. these were used at freshers fairs where our dayglo posters and interactive booklets were much in demand.

you’d have to be crazy…

…to wear one of these. t-shirts, as worn by the ferens art ambassadors promoting the exhibition at freshers fairs and at the exhibition launch.