electric angel /design for life

culture and wellbeing

we’re pleased to announce the launch of a new website: www.cultureandwellbeing.org.uk

this new site, commissioned by the uk’s major arts and health organisations has positioned itself as the definitive uk arts and health website with case studies, resources and a directory of practitioners. which reminds me, we must add ourselves due to work such as the hull and york medical school artwork and our current lifts project with rachel welford in york hospital.

the culture and wellbeing website is a collaboration with ross kendall who built all the functionality. tree reflections courtesy of a sunny day.

coastival website

we invited gordon aka sneakytrick to work with us on this project – a website that includes online ticketing for the coastival event. there’s also an e-newsletter to sign up to [with electric angel-written copy] and we’re pleased to say this really works – emails are regularly followed by a flurry of ticket sales.

there’s new content going on the site all the time so do check back towards the festival. you can visit the website at: www.coastival.com

if god were on msn…

…you could talk to him/her online. well you can.

lava prayer lamp. developed by electric angel with michael southgate.
click here to visit the lamp.

we’ll blog about the rest of the emergingchurch.info site sometime soon. but in the meantime…
local press coverage of the lamp launch at digital scarborough 05
what people are blogging about the lamp

coastival tour pics

photos of victoria performing in york station. this was the best of the unusual venues we visited to promote coastival. people stopped to listen, often to chat and the sound of arias echoing around the magnificent station architecture created quite an atmosphere. it was lovely to see people look and smile even as they were dashing to catch a train. radio york interviewed victoria and myself live from the station and broadcast a snippet of her performance.

our task was also to take photos for use in future publicity – this was sometimes a little more hazardous than we had anticipated. the photo at the humber bridge below very nearly resulted in james and i getting blown across the humber. we were also accused of stealing real road signs – so they must look the part!

you can sign up to be first in the know with headline acts, listing and special offers for coastival at www.coastival.com. full resolution versions of the photos of victoria performing are also available on the coastival website.

rachel at new designers

friend rachel welford is exhibiting at the new designers exhibition this week in london. rachel works in glass and has been developing larger scale pieces as part of her MA. we produced some postcards for her to hand out this week [a close up of one of her pieces using sand-blasted glass and mirrors] and are working on a visual identity applied to stationery and website [still very much under development, but take a look if you'd like to see a little more of her work]

photography of rachel’s work by david chalmers.

free wireless broadband launches on scarborough seafront

we’ve been mentioning this for a while and it seems a long time since we took the above photos after a creative coast event, but FreeBayWiFi is now live and free to use on sandside and round the harbour. this is phase 1, there’s another aerial going in soon which will extend the zone.

if you’re not the type of person who gets excited about techy stuff [and to be honest, that's us too really] what this means is that you can check your email, look at websites, even do your weekly shop online while sipping coffee on the seafront. it’s also anticipated that free wireless broadband will be useful for the fishing fleet and boats mooring in the marina. if you’re the cynical type and think that sounds like a bit of a far-fetched continental dream for the yorkshire coast, then think again – last week i was meeting to discuss a project in one of the seafront coffee shops and everyone else in there was using a laptop. there’s no hype around this one.

we were pleased to be invited to help FreeBayWiFi happen and window stickers (designed by us and featuring our logo design) are going up in seafront premises today. metal signs will be appearing over the next couple of weeks. you can check out the website we’ve produced for the project at www.freebaywifi.net

i’m being interviewed on yorkshire coast radio in the morning about the project. why not get down the harbour, get online and leave a message on the website.

seven years of new thinking, new investment

from the archives… this is a report for bradford district council upon completion of a seven year regeneration project to revitalise several inner city areas of bradford. it was accompanied by a website, also produced by electric angel: www.newlandspartnership.co.uk

we started electric angel design within the newlands area and were grateful for a grant to help us buy software. the newlands funding was also instrumental in the genesis of artworks creative communities which whom we have a long standing and creatively rewarding relationship, so being invited to design the report and website seemed fitting. an event within the communities to celebrate the achievements of the project was used to launch the report and we were also commissioned to design exhibition stands and a rolling visual presentation.

one aspect of the brief for this job was getting the balance between professional and interesting design without it looking like it had costs a lot of money – that’s often the case in the public sector, it’s not about looking flash but looking presenting information in a readable interesting format and with integrity. so much thought was given to the colours used and the paper we printed onto. likewise, with the exhibition stands the intention was to produce something that would be of use for the various community groups and organisations afterwards – given the economic circumstances of the area it would have been insulting to have a showy event in which there was no benefit to the community. artworks planned the evening utilising local creative talent and the end result of both event and print got the balance just right.

wisdom for women in youth work

…that’s the description for a website we produced towards the end of last year for launch at the national youthwork conference. the aim of the site is to provide a female voice and perspective in a male-dominated profession.

we were asked to design a logo, website and promo postcards for the newly-formed sophia network. the site was a collaboration with ross kendall using open source technology, hot on the heels of the renaissance friends site. there’s a lot going on in the website and ross did a sterling job to meet a rather tight deadline.

the site has two levels of engagement – casual visitors will see the public face which includes a blog, an editorial, events listing and a taste of the features on offer to members. when you sign in as a member there’s a more in-depth blog, an editorial written specifically for members, resources for download and directories of members and female speakers. this enables the site’s owners to tailor the content to two specific audiences as well as provide an incentive for females in youthwork to join up and benefit from being able to interact online in a safe space. the site is powered by a content management system so the owners have complete facilities to update content and manage the membership details.

for the logo design we did some research into ‘sophia’ – the greek word for wisdom and in jewish scripture thought to represent the female part of god, something that reaches into the roman catholic tradition of referring to mary, the mother of christ as ‘seat of divine wisdom’. we discovered that in the latin church sophia is usually pictured crowned and in the orthodox church with red skin. thus the crown features in the logo and the gold and red provided a starting point for the website’s colourscheme.

after prison… on the web

website to compliment the visual identity and promotional material we designed for west yorkshire community chaplaincy. the brief requested a simple design that gave priority to provision of information plus ease of use for wyccp staff who handle the updates. the site is driven by a content management system with training delivered on site at wyccp’s offices in leeds. visit it at www.wyccp.org.uk

run website [or adrian's secret life as a writer]

the balance in our workload between design for print, websites and other creative stuff is always unpredictable. we’re currently busy with websites so i thought we ought to blog a few before there’s too much of a backlog. this is the website for mission network run – actually the first job we did for them, so it predates the print designs we’ve blogged about. we produced the design and html for a programmer at run to develop into a content managed site.

so to my secret life… run also invited me to write three articles a month for the sprint section of the website, a magazine section within the site. i review resources, offer a guide to what’s on the internet and surf contemporary culture for a series of ‘beginners guides’. the site launched in its new format over 2 years ago, so i’ve been making some of my living as a writer for a couple of years now – something i always forget to mention whenever people ask us what we do. in fact, there’s plenty of our writing in quite a lot of the design work we do and although we’ve never advertised that we do copywriting, people often see our stuff and ask us to write. alas, unless you’re a run member you can’t access to these particular articles but i’ll try and remember to post some examples of or links to our writing at some point.