Last year, 2011, was a good year for us; busy, interesting, exciting, scary, all mixed into one. We learned a lot, honed our skills, developed new ones, new relationships, new ways of working, and created a lot of work we’re really happy with. We grew, too. We changed from a freelance outfit to more of a small agency, which was the scary part I just referred to - but it couldn’t have gone better.

We’re just over two years old now and 2012 is going to be a big year for us. We’re really excited.

It goes without saying that we want to keep doing what we did last year. Keep learning, every day, and keep producing work that we’re proud of by pushing ourselves at every opportunity. But we also have a few more specific things that we really want to do, and will.

Rebuild this website - from scratch. And rebrand (slightly).

We’ve needed to redesign this site for a while now. It’s not terrible. It does the job. But it doesn’t say what we want it to say. I don’t just mean the text, I mean the whole experience of using the site. We want users to get to know us from page to page and understand what we’re really about; how we work and how passionate we are about what we produce.

We also want to take a good hard look at the blogging / reading experience. There are so many blogs out there now that all look the same and don’t offer anything different. The industry seems to have settled on what a blog should look like, but we think we can do better.

On top of that we want to share things via the site a lot more. As we get busier and busier it gets increasingly more difficult to write the types of articles that we have done over the last couple of years. We aren’t going to stop doing these, but they’ll probably be more infrequent. However, we will make much more of an effort to share smaller snippets of information, what we’re up to, and things that we think are cool. A bit like a creative ‘stream’, if you will.

Lastly, as part of this process we are going to have a bit of a rebrand - this is simply because we believe that to achieve everything that we want to from the site, it’s necessary.

More eCommerce / Bigger Projects

We’ve done the odd bits and pieces, making small shopping systems and working with other agencies on their larger projects, but we’re desperate to get our teeth stuck into a good sized eCommerce project of our own. Luckily, just before Christmas we had a meeting about one such project, so it seems that we might have got what we asked Santa for - score!

We also want to build bigger websites in general - as I’m sure every other small agency does - so let’s keep our fingers crossed for that too. And it’s not all about the money. It goes without saying that larger sites need larger budgets, but we simply want bigger projects so that we can spend more time doing things that get you a better end result. More concept generation, more wireframing, more UX, more thought. And that, unfortunately, takes time.

Speak More

Anyone who’s met us knows this isn’t really a problem (especially for that Kemm fella), because we’ll natter on for days. What I really mean is that we’d like the opportunity to speak to the industry, or about the industry - at conferences and things.

Every year we go to the University of Huddersfield Barnsley Campus to speak about online marketing and getting your work out there, and this year we doubled up and also spoke at Inspire. Create. Leeds - as part of Leeds Digital Festival - about how we set up this company of ours, and we really enjoyed it. So from now on we’d like to do more.

We’re hoping to continue our connection with the University of Huddersfield by speaking to their students studying Multimedia and VR, too… But we still want more.

Grow

Put simply, we’ve got ambition, and we don’t want to sit around being small forever.

Being small is great, and we love it, but do you know what we’d love more? Being a bit bigger. But we aren’t really sure how to go about it, so we’re just going to do what we’ve always done - make the best stuff we can and see what happens… It’s worked so far, so what’s stopping us!

Make more friends

Cheesy? Yes. But we love meeting new people and we’ll chat to anyone. Seriously. And it’s all going to kick off with New Adventures in Web design 2012, so give us a shout if you’re coming and we’ll go for a beer.

Our favourite projects of 2011

Nu-Light LED - branding, web design, print design

Mission Foods - WordPress web development

Capital Properties - branding, web design, print design

Chalet Snowdon - branding, web design, print design

So here’s to an awesome 2012!

By Chris Skelton