electric angel /design for life

roll up, roll up for the cultural tour

we’re proud to have been asked to be one of the tours at the north yorkshire cultural conference tomorrow. we’re billed thus…

‘the tiny gallery with a big heart would like to welcome you to view it’s gallery and discuss some of the exciting projects that are coming out of it. Adrian Riley will describe their journey as a design studio, to opening up their shop window, to some of their current work, such as CHART Scarborough and public art on the old Scarborough-Whitby railway line. They also run creative coast, a grass roots network for creative on the North Yorkshire Coast.

so a big hello to those who will be visiting us tomorrow. all three of us will be at the morning conference too so if you know who we are do come and say hello. which reminds me, we must put some more up to date photos of us on here. where’s that ‘to do’ list?

btw, there’s still time to book for the morning (and maybe some of the tours) and join 100+ delegates from across the county.

how on earth did scarborough win
the european enterprise award?

if you’ve been asking yourself this, then get yourself down to the international business forum event at the spa today or tomorrow and pick up a copy of this brochure.

another award for scarborough – the international association of public participation project of the year – prompted this new piece of literature. alas we didn’t get to go to san diego for the ceremony, instead we had to turn a brochure around, from concept to delivery in two days. ok, so that was delivery to london and taken from there to san diego, but we think that’s pretty speedy nonetheless. the brochure uses text and a visual timeline to tell the story of scarboroughs’ renaissance over the last 7 years. it’s also pretty candid about the situation that scarborough faced and how the council was basically told to work in partnership or not get any more money.

although you probably won’t hear as much about this award, to my mind it’s probably the most important as it recognises that scarborough’s recent achievements have come through people working together with shared vision.

collect the set

this post on carl hopkin’s blog reminded me of our old business cards from the bradford days.

these were sent out upon moving to a new studio – each pack contained a card slotted into a larger flyer announcing the move and declaring each card part of a limited work of art. you could own the full work by collecting the full set of cards [below]. the idea would have worked best if we’d had 10 staff, each of whom’s card could be collected. as it was, this was the early days of electric angel when it was just me, but the idea caught people’s imagination and i received lots of complimentary feedback and requests for full sets. they also worked a treat at exhibitions when i could lay out my business card as a full picture – it was an easy conversation starter.

we need some new business cards, maybe it’s time to resurrect this idea.

bridge. our new exhibition

the new exhibition in our tiny gallery will be bridge – photographs by graham rhodes.

it’s daunting to begin to introduce graham, depending on whether that day he is exhibiting paintings, MC-ing a concert, acting as a ghost pirate, or as was our experience recently, collaborating as a storywriter on a comic. if you own the police’s early singles you’ll also have seen graham’s graphic design work. for our exhibition he is a photographer – something that graham has taken up quite recently and with some wonderful results. we love his good-affordable-art philosophy and the framed one-off prints in this exhibition will all be for sale at £40 each.

if i remember right [and conversations with graham can go off at deliciously wild tangents], the idea for the exhibition came from us chatting about producing some high quality scarborough artist’s postcards to be launched at an exhibition in our gallery. well, the postcards haven’t quite happened yet – next summer perhaps – but graham did hint that he’d love to take a series of photos of the iconic spa footbridge which is part of the view from our gallery/studio window. so we thought ‘why not’? and here we are.

the exhibition opens on monday with a private view this friday at 5pm. do get in touch if you’d like an invitation sending. we liked the idea of giving a photograph as the invitation, so one windy day 2 weeks ago graham photographed a printed invited tied to the bridge [below].

is social media worth the effort?

we’ve had a few invitations recently to propose social media strategies for organisations or events. it’s not a service we’ve ever advertised, but then that’s never stopped us in the past. it’s our own approach to promoting electric angel via such as twitter, this blog and facebook that has caused people to ask us if we could do something similar for them.

the image above is part of my sketch showing how we approach our social media profile. which makes it sound all very calculated – in truth we take a very intuitive approach and i tried to explain this with icons showing how the corporate and more personaility-driven aspects of ‘the electric angel brand’ work together. the different paths and arrows show how they interlock and routes of interaction. to be honest it’s not something we’d have normally analysed other than the occasional over-the-monitor conversation, but once someone asks how you do it you have to take a step back and look at how it’s all working. and working it must be, or folks wouldn’t be so interested.

below is a part of a perhaps more understandable diagram that plotted a possible social media campaign along a timeline, in this case for an arts council exhibition. the crux was understanding the two essential purposes – reaching the intended audiance, and keeping them interested. the former is about knowing your audience and what they do online, the latter requires some more creative ideas. interestingly we’ve had quite polarised views on social media, with some doubting they have anywhere near the time needed to even bother trying it and others thinking it’s pretty simple stuff.

oh, and while we’re on the subject, we’ve finally worked out a proper use for the electric angel flickr [featured in the right hand column of this blog]. we’ll be using it to show snapshots of life at electric angel, work in progress, days out, that kind of thing. not great photos, but hopefully a bit more insight into who we are and how we work that will compliment this blog and our tweeting.