Linney Design

There’s an idea that creativity is an elusive, slippery snake of a thing, which cannot be called upon on demand or under duress, but that appears in moments of lucidity and spontaneity. There’s an idea that it is the domain of a lucky few and is held in precious esteem. And if you want to believe that, that’s fine.

We won’t disagree that it’s a difficult skill to harness, to control or even to teach. But of course, traits such as elusiveness hardly sit comfortably with the disciplines necessary in business today.

That’s why we believe it is this very necessary amalgam of true creativity with business discipline and control that ensures longevity and economic survival. A business that harnesses both guarantees great creative output for its clients and a healthy, performing business. So we don’t believe one to be a slight on the other, more so that each is accountable for the other. That’s true creativity.

What we do here boils down to a couple of things in essence really:

Let’s start with the first, we are anoraks, really, what might seem incredibly geeky to you, is that we actually enjoy reading all those marketing books and expert papers on brand. We like reading, so our clients don’t have to go through the same old ‘sifting the good, the bad and the very ugly’. Believe us when we say that there is a lot of ugly out there, so much so that we throw countless amounts in the bin which never see the light of day.

Some opinion makers or movers and shapers just don’t seem to ‘get’ what ‘it is’ what is  marketing  supposed to do, which nicely brings us to the second point.

This, which is a little more controversial, is our view on what marketing’s role is. But first, marketing is not an art. Marketing is not designed to make you feel warmer, put a nice smile on your face or make you feel more positively towards the goods or service – you can’t put good feelings, smiles and warmth in the bank.

Marketing is a science and is designed to do one thing and one thing only – sell more goods and services. That’s right, if it ain’t gonna hit the bottom line, we don’t care.

So in the role of Brand Consultancy and Planning: well, we just make sure that we put ourselves in the role of the consumer and plan the campaigns in a way that talks directly to them. The result: we make absolutely sure that you and your brand are more relevant to your consumers, even more than any of your competitors. That’s brand and planning around here.

Corporate identity. There are few people (and particularly few designers) who can argue that the idea and principle of corporate identity is flawed. Few would disagree that the application of a unique, consistent identity or personality is the only way to ensure we recognise a business or service. So do we assume that’s the way it should stay? Is the model of corporate identity still relevant? Maybe, but perhaps we should look at the word ‘corporate’. Do we feel ‘comfortable’ with it?

I’m not so sure.

In the way that Arts and Crafts flew in the face of industrialism, there’s a convention and idea emerging today that flies in the face of ‘corporateness’. What is it? I think it’s choice. As our cities’ high streets are littered with the same stores, so comes the rejection, the reaction. Where has my choice gone? Who told me what I should have? This is corporate identity in action and yet this is the new danger. What would once serve as familiarity, a reassurance, is potentially a plague. Does it follow that a corporate identity works only when it is absolutely consistent? Does a facsimile of restaurants make a chain? Does a chain undo the very idea of a restaurant? Perhaps. What’s clear to me is that the formulae that exist for the design of corporate identity is in question. Life is not formulaic, nor should design be – social and cultural acceptance of ‘corporateness’ is changing.

And so should we.

When was the last time you read something? Apart from now. And was it printed? On paper? A book, a magazine? If it was, I’ll bet you picked it up. You’ll have held it, leafed through it, felt the texture of the stock, the weight in your hand. Maybe you surreptitiously sniffed the pages as they wafted their inky perfume towards your nostrils.

Sound familiar? OK, maybe it wasn’t such a conscious decision, but let’s face it, reading from a book, a brochure, a magazine is a total sensory experience whether we care to admit it or not. It’s a combination of a huge number of actions and sensations that contribute to our overall absorption of a subject. That beautiful new car, mouth-watering pasta recipe or idyllic holiday villa – all made more the better for the manner in which it was presented, printed, folded, varnished, finished. This isn’t graphic design. This is product design. Get it right and it adds value, contributes positively to our experience of a brand, and gets the sale. Get it wrong and the Bentley feels bland, the pasta plastic, the holiday a horror day.

We are often asked if digital media will replace print. No, we say. Digital media contributes to the total experience in a way that print never can of course – with animation, sound, music and transition. It’s a phenomenal partner to print and of course delivers with an immediacy that even digital print can still only aspire to. But for that absolutely tactile and – dare we say it – sensuous experience, there is simply no substitute. Hold, feel and leaf through a well-designed book today. The medium really is the message. Or do we mean massage?

Actually, what is new media, is that the same as digital? Where does old media stop and new media start? Is it above the line, below the line or through it? In fact, does anyone know where the line has gone these days? These are all questions our clients ask and we have asked ourselves. Actually – does it matter? No.

The last 10 years have seen the most dramatic change in the world of marketing and design since we put down the felt tip and picked up the mouse. Everything we produce here at Linney Design has a digital dimension to it – or at the least an acknowledgement for it. Everything we design has to work across a variety of disciplines. So you won’t find this design agency blaming the web agency if things are inconsistent. We are both, yes truly both, right through to our bones, call it connected.

Understanding the changing disciplines of design means we are experts in online advertising, digital creative, web design and web build, from entertaining online games housed in unique microsites to all the back-end functionality and site architecture required for effective web campaigns. (So when we say an ‘integrated campaign’, we really mean integrated).

In a discipline where evaluation and responsibility is critical, Linney Design provide the tools to measure success across all metrics for a business focused approach to digital, but the impassioned commitment to great creative cut-through has never been more evident than now in this fragmented, cluttered world. Welcome to new media then, it’s just begun.

Website design. Now there’s a big hot virtual potato! There are more sides to web design than a dodecahedron, and just when things are looking complicated, in come a load of trendies using strange terms like Web 2.0, Ajax and combobulators! Fundamentally, web design’s not that far removed from designing a brochure, a DM piece, or anything else. You start with information, and lay it out in a format that enables people to readily access it.

The difference – and this is the big one – is that not only is it about what you’d like to say or sell, but what other people like to say, and even more importantly, do. Website design isn’t about making a pretty-looking design. Anybody can do that. The key is understanding what it is you’re trying to achieve, the problems that you need to solve.

Think of the Internet as a medium of two-way communication, and suddenly the humble website can solve your internal communications issues, do that fiddly job that no one wants to allow customers to tell you what new products/services you should supply. The list goes on and on…

Only by doing this can we design, and more importantly build, a site.

So, how do you actually do it? Well, when asked we’ll happily tell you, but it involves lots of strange terms, weird-looking scripting languages, and strange acronyms. Sorry, like we said it’s a real hot potato.

Here at Linney Design we had a vision 13 years ago, a view of the future, a future that would see the end of the printed word and the dawn of a new era of communication. Well, we were kind of right, the printed word is still alive but the multimedia market burns ever brighter today.

Within Linney Design we have a devoted team of specialists who create a crossover of these skill sets in this fast-moving discipline, they add the wow factor to all we do. We don’t think of multimedia as a specific skill set that actually exists, it’s that all culminate in a richer media experience.

The  team consists of everyone from animators and photo retouchers to 3D artists and film editors, flash artists and scripters through to web designers, traditional artists and music composers. There’s a passion about what we do, a need to make things different and more interesting, which we believe permeates throughout what we produce. Multimedia has made the whole marketing world a more fun place to hang out, so I guess we were right all along.

An amalgamation of a thousand pieces at the right time and in the right place, sounds tough, sounds like production to us. Film is a rapidly expanding area of the Linney Design business, therefore making it happen is high on the agenda. Ambitious film projects are not for the faint of heart.

Location work might involve weeks of filming… from sun-baked deserts, to sub-zero cellars hundreds of feet below the ground. It’s exciting, even daunting – so the planning of the projects requires management of the highest standard, that includes creative concepts, location, reconnaissance, talent-spotting models to transport logistics, flights to multilingual liaison, and that’s before the shoot has started.

All this whilst keeping a creative eye on the storyboard and making sure that final production is on brand. And finally, weeks, if not months later, the viewer finally sees the work, blissfully unaware of what’s happened seamlessly behind the scenes, and hopefully taking away with them the very message that we’ve endeavoured to define. Sounds simple.

Bring the subject to life they scream! Working in this environment brings its own challenges I suppose, expanding software, increased realism and faster production times are part of our daily routine. When the day arrives that it is more cost-effective to model rather than shoot, and the realism and angles we create scare most photographers, then we realise 3D is here and here to stay.

Well, that day has arrived, and we are proud of it. 3D for us is one of our most powerful tools to help create and visualise new design, ideas and concepts. It’s a way of creating something from nothing. I really think it isn’t quite equalled anywhere. It can be the most exacting of arts, yet the most abstract. It’s the blankest canvas available, existing almost without limits in three dimensions, and quite often I think our newest and only unique art form since film.

In a regular day we build anything from a new restaurant with fish in a giant aquarium to liquids filling a glass for a beer comercial. The range and scale is endless and the fantastic thing that it does for us working in this medium, is to test the mind’s ability beyond the conventional. We’ve all got a great interest here in product design, architecture, virtual worlds, animation for web, TV and CD- ROM, and 3D sits neatly across all of them as the tool for getting it done. The world has turned 3D.

Our animations are used for the many different types of work that we produce within the multimedia team. Things can be as simple as building and animating a 3D logo or as complicated as rigging and animating a realistic character. The latter can be considered as the more time-consuming of the two; characters have to display movement and weighting with realism in order to capture the viewer’s attention. Our character animations are simple, humorous and tend to grab the viewer’s attention with their stylised visuals.

The biggest thing that we use animation for, however, is web and video. 3D logos are easily incorporated into Flash for our web pages as well as changing the pace of a video. When working with these animations, members of the team are constantly throwing around ideas as the animations develop and everyone gives a little bit in order to ensure a great visual experience.

All in all, animation is a powerful tool within Linney Design and helps to bring our concepts and ideas to life.

Get the delivery right, the rest will take care of itself. So editing is essentially the ordering of information into a linear film form to present a story, that’s it, as simple as that. Not!

We haven’t talked about the style, the tonality, the mood, the intention, it’s a great art form, a really precise thing to get right each time one tackles a new project. We’ll often sit down, prepare and find we have 8 hours of video footage back from a shoot that needs cutting back to only 30 seconds for a TV slot. It’s a complex job that requires an enormous amount of concentration to hold all the different shots and angles in memory.

At any one time at the height of busyness, one editor can be holding three whole film edits in memory, a total of 24 hours of footage all waiting to be distilled into three distinct styles. We need big brain capacity. Given that film shoots never go perfectly to plan, the editor needs to be able to work technically fast, yet retain a creativity to work with what’s given to achieve a final film as close as possible to the original storyboard. It’s a great medium to work with as there are so many styles to draw from, whilst at the same time having the freedom to add personal touches. This could have been the final edit but I am sure we can fine-tune it again.

Songwriters and composers – sounds like a great title for a day job. Here at Linney Design we have the raw talent to write, but ever increasingly an ability to bring our musical imagination to life with modern computers and software. We’re into quite a range of musical styles and have a very broad eclectic mix to draw on for inspiration.

So, when it comes to designing sound for a particular piece of media, there’s often great debate as to what ‘feeling’ the job needs. There’s a diverse range of people in our business, each with a broad understanding of a number of musical styles and arrangements – and this, of course, is vital when briefing external suppliers, making music ourselves or talking to our clients about their requirements.

Getting the sound ‘just right’ is often simply a case of stripping away the jargon that the music industry promotes. We’re just offering sound advice.

Online advertising is BIG and getting even BIGGER. Online is now only behind TV and press in terms of media spend. At Linney Design, we believe creative is king and with the uptake of Broadband and a little innovative thinking we really can engage with consumers like never before. Blogs, banners, virals, search, video, UGC, social networks, widgets… The possibilities are endless BUT at Linney Design, we believe in keeping it simple, making it relevant and involving the consumer… oh, and working with Linney Design, everything we build will always look and work beautifully – guaranteed!

Assuming you’ve landed here intentionally, and aren’t staring in bewilderment at the website of a design group when you thought you’d Googled ‘Lenny’, congratulations. You’ve responded to a form of advertising. It wasn’t a multi-million pound TV campaign, a cutting-edge viral or an eloquently worded press ad, but the fact is, you were intrigued by something that appeared in front of you, and you acted.

Advertising today is, superficially at least, a world away from its origins in ‘headline, copy, pack shot’. Product homogenisation and an increasingly savvy consumer means brand awareness has supplanted product benefit as a selling point, meaning, as an industry we have to work even harder to engage consumers, through an ever-expanding number of channels.

But all the surfing stallions, cuddly monkeys, subservient chickens and drum playing gorillas in the world can’t change the fact that advertising remains a simple business – to continually find new ways of securing that coveted front row seat in your brain.  

The art of photography, born almost 200 years ago, has become a massively important part of all our lives. From snaps on mobile phones to high-end retouched advertising images, we’re all involved with or influenced by photography in some way or another. Thanks to accessible, usable cameras, the creation of the Internet and imaging software, we now live in a world saturated by wonderful, emotional imagery.

As a business and individuals, we are continuously striving to improve how we do things and challenge ourselves. As photographers and visionaries, we are embracing the massive advantages of speed and flexibility that today’s digital cameras and equipment offer us. What, not so long ago, would have taken an age to accomplish, we can now achieve within minutes, whilst retaining absolute control of a project – from concept to shoot to finished product, regardless of medium – the process is seamless.

Sitting hand-in-hand with image retouching, 3D modelling and video, photography has naturally become an integral and vital part of our visual offer. Each new day brings new technologies and with those technologies so the boundaries of what we can provide as imagery may be removed. So let’s celebrate that art of photography today.

The importance of capturing the essence of a brand by using stunning photography has never been so strong. In today’s cut-throat fast moving and image conscious market, it’s a scramble to be noticed. Jaw-dropping photography is one of the things which comes second nature to us, but this is only the beginning.

The creation of beautiful imagery at post-production level helps you to heighten the level of communication to the next level and moves towards unearthing the emotional connection we all have with colour and form. This attack on the senses ultimately becomes the reason why you treated yourself to that brand new car or this year’s collection of designer fashion.

Here at Linney Design our approach to image manipulation stretches beyond simply just using PhotoShop. An in-depth understanding of the ways in which a subject can be affected by light, shade and surrounding objects, combined with our knowledge of the correct planes of perspective, allow us to seamlessly integrate images.
So the next time someone tells you that the camera never lies, we’ll leave it to you to decide!

For more than a century, packaging has had one basic role, to aid the efficient distribution and attractive presentation of a product.

But there is much more to packaging than that. With the rising importance of the ‘brand’, packaging has become a living representation of a brand’s personality and values, playing an all important role in the consumer’s decision to buy or not to buy.

Taking into account colour, typography, materials, shape and structure, communicating a brand’s principles and therefore positioning it, packaging is becoming more of a science than ever before. All these factors have to be considered by the consumer, both consciously and subconsciously, in just a few important seconds when faced with a supermarket shelf and the purchase decision.

With more and more brands battling it out in the minds and hearts of consumers, to the battleground of the supermarket shelf than at any time previously, we believe that packaging is more than looking pretty, it is about clear communication brand values, what it stands for, giving an unmistakable and distinct personality, competitive edge and more importantly, driving your sales through research and innovation.

I love magazines. That’s it, full stop. I must do, because the magazines in my house are literally piling up... I have good ones, bad ones, new ones, old ones, well-thumbed ones and pristine ones. All have something in common – their own personality.

Think of your favourite mag. It’s personal to you. Picking it up and reading it is like catching up with an old friend – familiarity, trust, gossip and serendipity. That’s the beauty of magazines, they offer something for everyone – even in a single issue.

We don’t always have time for lengthy in-depth features, and sometimes we want more than juicy titbits. Magazines we design have this in mind, allowing us to dip in and out of pages but also serving up more meaty features when desired. Magazines create strong communities of shared interest. To do so they must have a character. In an age where magazines have to really fight for our time, it’s imperative that a publication also has a voice.

A magazine can’t compete with the immediacy of a website or the spontaneity of a podcast, but magazines do sit snugly alongside other mediums: TV, web and radio. They also travel well, can you say that about any other medium? The sensory experience print offers is why magazines will never become obsolete or extinct. To feel the weight, see the gloss, touch the uncoated, smell the ink, fold the corner down, and most exciting of all, turn the page.

As long as there are coffee tables, lunch hours, trains, planes, staff rooms, and space in my house, there will be magazines, that’s why I love them.

Three or four times a week. That’s the average rate at which I go through hell to get the words just right.

But I choose the pain. It’s better than the alternative.

So many company brochures, mailers and websites baffle the reader (and probably the writer!) with complex and ‘clever’ terms.

Does anyone have a clue what it all means? Or how to tell these companies apart?

If your copy’s going to say the same old stuff, why bother? It’s lazy. It’s boring. It doesn’t hit the mark. And it won’t make them hungry to read more. We don’t talk in gobbledegook, so why write or read in it?

I create copy that’s engaging and easy to read. Hence the pain.

19th century novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne once said: “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” For me, if it delivers the result you need, for any audience or medium, the pain’s worth it.

We sit here today having been precisely transported through the strictly ‘minimalist’ look for a number of years, then along came ‘decorative’ ­– a reaction to the austere and an explosion of ornate floral patterns with all the trimmings. Refreshing at first, if not a little over-used now. It’s fading, but it’s not gone yet, the journey is still opulent and colourful.

The new shift for interiors it seems will be an eclectic mix of vintage with new stuff, fashionable with lots of colour, bold patterns and geometric shapes. Opulence and warmth are slowly but surely replacing cold minimalism, after all, the reality of minimalism is hard to live with.

We want spaces that come from personal conviction. As wallpaper reaches its peak we will start to create unique, personalised wall coverings. Just as quick as fashion went from wallpaper to paint to wallpaper again, once everyone had floorboards they soon realised they had cold feet.

So why is interior design important? Well, it’s quite simple really – every brand has a strong set of differentiating values that they want to get over to their consumers on a daily basis. Why shouldn’t the environment in which that brand exists ooze those values too? We think that this is very important yet quite often forgotten or ignored.

Welcome to environmental branding, a disciplined approach to interior design that aligns a three-dimensional space with brand positioning.

Imagine the offices of Starbucks or a Ben & Jerry’s concession. It’s unlikely that you’d conceive their environments to be clinical, corporate environments. More likely, they are a true reflection of their company values, encouraging and embellishing creativity and passion. This powerful marketing tool aims at expressing a brand’s essence in showrooms, work areas, trade exhibitions and any other customer-oriented space.