On Sunday our very own Emma Walsh undertook the 2012 London Marathon and we’re happy to say she successfully completed it! After overcoming a painful knee injury after mile 11, Emma powered on and finished the Marathon in an agonising 6hrs 44mins 45secs. Emma’s efforts have so far raised more than £1,200 for her chosen charity CLIC Sargent.

In what was an astonishing feat, Emma completed the marathon after just seven months of training and although she made every claim that she would give up running for good afterward, has already planned to sign up for next year’s Marathon!

We’re very proud of her and amazed that she strolled right back into work like it was an ordinary weekend, way to go Emma!

If you’d like to help Emma raise even more, visit her Justgiving page

That’s right, we asking you to submit a design, a photo or an illustration that we can use as our Facebook Cover image and in return we’ll give you a week’s work experience with our seasoned designers in our award winning international agency!

All you need to do is post an image in the right dimensions (850×315) to our wall and if we like the look of it, you could very well be on the receiving end of a snazzy work experience week in our Northern Quarter Office.

There’s no guidelines, it doesn’t have to represent us, use any special colours, fonts or be based on a particular subject, just send us something that justifies your creative ability. If we like more than one, we’ll be asking more than one of you!

If you’re stuck for ideas, take a look at these big brand examples!

Here at Pixel8 we were chuffed when Woodhouse Ltd wanted us to refresh their brand and create an email marketing template suite.

Woodhouse, part of Clothing Sites Ltd, first started in 1975 as one of the leading importers of men’s fashion clothing and now have a thriving e-commerce website as well as a flagship store in Notting Hill. They stock brands such as Stone Island, Lacoste, Hugo Boss, Diesel and Edwin and are seen as one of the top editors of men’s fashion.

Because of the history and heritage surrounding Woodhouse, we wanted to really understand the brand and target audience and convey this through the design and email marketing suite. Online fashion retail is a very competitive market so we wanted to insure that Woodhouse stood out from the crowd.

The initial brief was to introduce an identity refresh that could be used across all areas of web, print and emails. Following our extensive research and design trials we rolled out brand guidelines which could be applied to all aspects of Woodhouse. In addition to this we developed a tone of voice specific to the brand and target audience, with the view of being more personable with the customer as well as maintaining an air of authority in the fashion world.

Using the brand guidelines and the specific tone of voice meant we could focus on the objectives of creating snappy headlines and compelling content to encourage a greater open rate and, more importantly, click-through rate for their email marketing campaign.

After the success of the email templates we then implemented the refreshed brand through the website, ensuring successful brand consistency throughout their all their marketing media.

As well as refreshing the Woodhouse Ltd brand, Pixel8 we’re asked to create a sub-brand loyalty scheme. Deer Sir is a scheme for returning customers that offers 10% return on their purchases and is activated online which provides a great way of retaining customer relations. We created a range of logos and names from the initial brief, but Woodhouse chose Deer Sir as it offered a range of dimensions enabling it to work more as a sub brand. From the logo and initial idea we created a range of emails for loyalty scheme customers as well as icons to be used around the website and on additional packaging and marketing collateral.

We’ve really enjoyed the whole branding process with Woodhouse and are looking forward to working with them throughout the year and into the future.

I couldn’t have been more wrong though, as I was given a variety of tasks throughout the week to help me settle in and understand the way everyone worked.

I started off looking at Pixel8’s approach to social media, assessing this blog and their Facebook in detail, thinking of ways they could both be improved. Browsing different blog pages of different brands and types of companies was really interesting to see how layouts differ and how brands create popular social media pages for themselves. Another task I was given was to source the social media of a number of local restaurants to see how they presented themselves as a brand or if they even used Facebook or Twitter at all.

From Facebook to Tourism, I was also tasked with researching certain tourist destinations for an upcoming project. I got to talk through the information I had found with other people, which is always good for learning to have confidence in your own ideas, especially as everyone was really friendly and enthusiastic.

I spent time helping Matt with some photography of Hotel Indigo’s collateral items such as business cards and menus for a brand package, so I was also given a run-through of how all the different creative software such as InDesign and Illustrator worked. Gareth then showed me the process of the Crowne Plaza hotel project, from planning and designs to retouching of the finished images and their presentation. It was interesting to see how much work goes into producing a handful of quality photographs.

I have really enjoyed my week at Pixel8. There is a really good atmosphere within the office and everyone has been really welcoming and helpful. Working alongside different people performing different jobs has given me an insight into the industry and will hopefully help me to pursue a similar career in the future!

Sophie McFegan
Fashion Communication and Promotion student, University of Huddersfield

If you would be interested in placement opportunities at Pixel8 drop us a line through the website, message us on Facebook or Tweet us! We’ll see what we can do!

BBC Motion Gallery, part of BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, offers customers in the creative industries access to the most comprehensive collection of unique motion imagery in the world, spanning natural history, sport, news and more.

To raise awareness within the creative community BBC Motion Gallery commissioned Pixel8 to design and develop a series of Facebook competitions. The competitions offered users the chance to win an iPad 2, by watching unique montages of BBC Motion Gallery footage and answering questions related to them.

The campaign enhanced the profile of the collection as well as showcasing some of the diverse and unique footage offered by BBC Motion Gallery.

Managing Partner, Jamie Watson said, “BBC Motion Gallery is a fantastic resource for the creative community offering amazing video content whilst helping to dramatically reduce the cost of creating TV ads and videos. Having access to the BBC Motion Gallery archive is like having access to a whole world of opportunity and it’s our job to tell our peers about it”

Paul Maidment, Director of BBC Motion Gallery, added “Our campaign with Pixel8 is the first time we are using social media as a platform to increase our profile and deliver our content to an audience within the advertising community. We feel this has been achieved with this interactive approach.”

The competitions have been developed on Facebook, with Pixel8 creating accompanying email marketing and banner ads for external websites, with this campaign forming part of a larger ongoing partnership between Pixel8 and BBC Motion Gallery.

‘PLAY’ Facebook Entry Page

Each of the BBC Motion Gallery RUN, WILD & PLAY Campaign Pages

The contest is now closed but why not take a look at the videos and see if you can guess the answers:

_ _ _ _ RUN - Pause the first film at 00:26 then guess the answer

WILD _ _ _ _ – Pause the second film at 00:37 then guess the answer

PLAY _ _ _ _ _ – Pause the film at 00:46 then guess the answer

Answers:

unɹ əɯoɥ

ʇsəʍ plıʍ

ouɐıd ʎɐld

Google recently introduced a new feature to their search interface called ‘Search, plus your world’. It’s the latest in a fairly long, yet recent, line of updates to push the search giant’s social network, the feedback is mixed.

The feature will only be present for those who have and are signed into a Google+ account, when this is the case, the search experience will differ by

• Showing user profiles in drop down search bar
• Returning more personalised results relevant to your history
• Increasing links to prominent Google+ profiles
• Linking to profiles related to search query
• SSL security to all signed in users

There has been the usual SEO industry uproar about how “SEO is Dead” again but that’s common for any significant update that effects the results returned for any search. There has been increasing evidence over the past couple of years to suggest that social networks are impacting search results more and more, now Google has cemented this theory but with their own network. There is no doubt that a user could receive better results if they were personally tailored to them but since Google+ isn’t the only social network people user (and certainly not the most popular), how can it really benefit the user.

The common criticism of this latest change is that Google is making use of its industry leading search product, to promote another, its social network. Users are feeling that their use of the web is being restricted to the services provided exclusively by Google, with other offerings such as Facebook and Twitter being ignored all together.

There is also the impact on SEO, as usual the update is intended to provide better results, but are the best results really so reliant on data from one of the least used social networks? Will websites lose out on clicks even if they naturally rank 1st if above them lies several Google+ pages? Another implication of the update is that the search data for every user that’s logged in will not contribute to keyword data available on Google Keyword Tool, possibly the most important tool for SEO keyword research. If we cannot see this data we will not know which keywords are the most popular and therefore what to optimise for!

Anyway, as it is early days for Search plus your world, we must give it time and wait to see what effects it has on the use of the search engine, search results and SEO. Stay tuned for updates.

Our congratulations go out to Katy and her family and we can’t wait to see pictures of the little fella. We can’t wait to have Katy back either but we suppose we will have to wait a while.

Congratulations!!

Pregnancy & Newborn Magazine, based in Atlanta, United States is one of the top US parenting magazines, found on news stands and in waiting rooms across the America. P&N Magazine approached Pixel8 to help them redesign their existing website as well as integrating an easy to use CMS and a blog. They were also keen to increase visits to the website as this means greater ad revenue, after in-depth research we agreed to perform a comprehensive SEO campaign.

The new website was a hit straight away but the real benefits came shortly after when our SEO campaign began to really take off. Traffic soon started to increase as we worked on increasing it’s rank for a variety of search terms. Since then, our friends at Pregnancy & Newborn Magazine have expressed their appreciation with a glowing testimonial for our SEO, we look forward to a long and prosperous relationship with such a great publication.

“After launching our website pnmag.com in early 2010 we thought little about SEO but as we realized we were losing traffic to competitive sites we needed to address this.  Pixel 8 quickly identified the scope of work that would be needed and held our hand through the development of keywords, tags and various other SEO tactics such as purchasing links on web directories.  For minimal cost and disruption we optimized our SEO and in a couple of months saw our page views increase month over month by 130% ultimately allowing us to generate more online ad revenue.  We are needless to say thrilled with the impact Pixel 8’s SEO tactics have had on our online business.”

Joanna Pritchard, VP Marketing and Insight, Pregnancy & Newborn Magazine

For more information about how Pixel8 can help drive traffic to your website through SEO please call us on 0161 228 6489.

As we mentioned earlier in the year, we’ve been awarded four prestigious 2011 Hermes Creative Awards for our work in design, social media and animation.

The Pixel8 team are thrilled to be awarded a Gold and three Platinum trophies as judged by judges from the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals (AMCP) from over 4,400 international entries.

Our awards arrived in the office today and we couldn’t wait to get them on display. It’s the most recent in a series of great achievements by the Pixel8 team and a good sign of things to come. Our biggest thanks go to all those who worked so hard and gave it their all. The awards are as follows:

• Gold Award for Web Design: Accident Compensation Website (Design/Illustration/Graphic Design category)
• Platinum Award for Video/Corporate Image: Pixel8 ‘Powered by Smart Pixels’ animation
• Platinum Award for Social Media: Hotel Indigo Facebook & Twitter Campaign
• Platinum Award for Video/Internal Communication: Hotel Indigo Brand Refresh Journey Animation

Ed Thorne, Director of Global Brand Management for Hotel Indigo and Crowne Plaza at IHG spoke of the awards in relation to Pixel8’s brand refresh, “We’ve had great feedback from customers and our hotel colleagues alike, winning these awards not only confirms this feedback but it’s also a great boost for the team.”

In response to the success in the Hermes Creative Awards, Jamie Watson, Pixel8’s Joint Managing Director said, “These awards are testament to the way that the clients trusted us to deliver creative and effective marketing communications that reflect their overarching values and vision for the future.”

Hermes Creative Awards recognizes outstanding work in the industry while promoting the philanthropic nature of marketing and communication professionals. Judges are industry professionals who look for companies and individuals whose talents exceeds a high standard of excellence and whose work serves as a benchmark for the industry. To see all Gold and Platinum Winners in 2011 visit Hermes Creative Awards.