Insights & Ideas

A Refreshing Take On Logos From A 5 Year Old

A great video doing the rounds today from Cincinnati, Ohio based designer Adam Ladd. What started out as a fun Sunday project with his daughter on brand logos has turned into a YouTube hit with almost 500,000 views (as of 01/02/2012 12:30GMT). What's so great is the simple take on these logos and its clear some brands have been more successful than others in appealing or exposing themselves to such a young audience. Scary or not? Feedback with some comments...

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FREE Amazon Kindle With Every Order Over £300

Lighter, more compact than ever and weighing in at less than 170 grams the Amazon Kindle fits straight in your pocket and holds up to 1,400 books. Best of all we're giving these Amazon Kindle's worth £89 away for FREE when you spend over £300 with us on your next project.

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FREE Apple TV With Every Order Over £600

Apple TV has been designed to be small in size but big on entertainment. Stream films, TV, music, photos and more to the smaller, redesigned Apple TV. And all you need is a single cable to set it up. You can either user the remote or download the free Remote App. You can also rent from a selection of the hottest HD films and stream photos and music from your computer to your widescreen TV. Best of all we're giving these Apple TV's worth £101 away for FREE.

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5 Top Tips to Local Search

If your a company that targets the local area you want to do business in, then the internet can be a vast place. Your website can be offered up to a global audience through all the major search engines, but that can be your main problem, the world is a big place and with lots of companies offering similar products and services it's important to get your SEO right at a local level.

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Web Design in Salisbury

We've just launched Web Design in Salisbury. A microsite for FHOKE in Salisbury and the Wiltshire area. Why? We'll we're well known in the town of Andover for creating great cost effective web sites for local businesses and have started to become known in the Salisbury area after moving offices to a rural location between these two great towns.

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Targeted Banner Advertising Campaigns

With a wealth of knowledge working with online shops and stores it's becoming more apparent in today's market that you need to be offering something different. You might have great products at a great price but if you've not got a unique selling point (USP) or it's not instantly apparent to the user what offers you've got going on then your missing one of the many tricks in making your store successful.

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Site Stitcher Building Affordable Websites Quickly

Recently we took a step back to evaluate the services we had been offering. We soon realised as a design led web agency we were denying businesses with budgets of under £1000 the opportunity of having a big agency website. These customers wanted everything the larger sites had to offer but without the big price tag.

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Send Your Customers a Christmas Greeting

In the past you've no doubt been caught on the back-foot by Christmas, don’t fear – this year we'll keep you one step ahead so you can share the season with your clients and subscribers.

We've created 3 fantastic email greeting card designs for you to choose from (click the images for a larger version). All we need from you is your chosen design a list of up-to 100 email addresses, a send date and we'll do the rest. It's really that simple PLUS you'll be helping the environment, no paper waste and no carbon emissions from the postman. We'll also show you your stats at the end of the campaign so you can monitor how successful it was.

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Spelling. Just How Important Is It?

Recently I've been ramping up my activity on LinkedIn - I've used it for a long time now but never really embraced it like I had Twitter and Facebook.

During a recent meeting about a new website project I was recommended to join the Hampshire Business Network on LinkedIn as it had proved to be of value to the customer - so I did.

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Bristol Media - Ones to Watch

This time last week we got a fantastic email from Jane Sabherwal at Bristol Media informing us that FHOKE had been identified as a creative company to watch during 2010/11. As you can imagine we are all pretty stoked here to hear the news and can't wait to see our name in print and up on the impending site.

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Make Time to Blog

We've really written this blog post for all our existing, new and potential clients but hopefully everyone who reads this can take a little something from it.

If you've met us you'll know that if it's right for your business then we'll shout about the benefits all the social networking tools can have for your site and products. But we'll also stress the importance of blogging, it's a great way to get an insight to the business and to keep your site regularly updated. It's tough to keep up to date with this and we are as guilty as anyone when times get busy, but we at least try to post at least once a month, ideally we'd love to go back to those days of once a week and we really must. But here's a gentle reminder to everyone else to make it a priority, it really does only take an hour in your week to write a worthwhile post. Allocate time in your schedule and distribute the task through the team.

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Learning To Say No

Learning to say no at the right time can save you and your company time, effort and and a lot of pain. Said at the wrong time and it'll bring you all of those and more.

We were recently offered a project to work on solely as designers to another agencies project. We've worked with these guys before and love working with them and still do. The budget was great and with the business booked out for a whole week it seemed to make great business sense to take it on. We'd already figured that this project alone could easily be used to re-invest in a new mac and all the software plus more for a new employee so there was a great reason to take the project on. But things don't always run smoothly and in hindsight we should have refused the project from our original gut feeling.

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Expanding Your Online Presence

Last week we watched a short video from Think Vitamin where Ryan Carson talked with Paul Boag about 'The Demise Of The Website' (amongst other things). But what was he really getting at? Well having talked about it within the team we think he was trying to get across that your website (however great it is) is not enough when it comes to attracting new business via the web.

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7 FREE Ways To Get Your Website Noticed

If you own a website then you are bound to be concerned about getting it noticed. All to often people believe that if they put up a professional looking website, traffic will come - This is not the case. You need to actively promote your websites products/services and post relevant information to potential new customers or clients, this doesn't need to be costly - it just takes time.

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To Twitter Or Not To Twitter

For many years we have used MSN Messenger to drop friends and colleagues short messages and interesting links, and from examples I’ve seen of Twitter - it doesn’t seem all that different.

What Twitter allows us to do is share relevant information with like-minded people, people that you may never get a chance to meet otherwise. It also opens up an opportunity to shamelessly promote yourself, your business and the services you offer. Here are a few things to consider before you twitter...

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10 Brilliant Ways to Follow Us Online

Now there's more ways to start following us online. Already hooked up to these sites? Then invite us, join us or signup yourself and start experiencing the social web and stay in touch with the latest news and interests from FHOKE.

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Clear And Effective Communication In Web Design

WOW this is a great article from a well read author of web design and we felt the need to publish his thoughts on our own blog. Much respecto Steven. Find him here at Vandelay Design

By Steven Snell

Communication is one of the foundational elements of a good website. It is essential for a positive user experience and for a successful website that truly benefits its owners. All types of websites are affected by the need for good communication in one way or another. Regardless of whether the website in question is an e-commerce website, a blog, a portfolio website, an information website for a service company, a government website or any other type of website, there is a significant need to communicate effectively with visitors.

Because of the significance of communication with visitors, it is an essential consideration for every designer and website owner and the responsibility of both. Unfortunately, communication is sometimes overlooked and takes a backseat to the visual attractiveness of a website. Ideally, the design and other elements that do the communicating work together to create a clear, unified message to visitors.

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Why You Should Join Linkedin

We've have been using Linkedin for a while now, and it has proved itself to be a handy business-networking tool. Here are a few reasons why:

Networking
This really is the most powerful thing anyone can do in business, it gives people access to the resources they need to succeed; other people.

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Happy Christmas from AKQA

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Entertain With Design

Traditional methods of entertainment have always been one-way communication between writer/reader, singer/listener or actor/audience for a long time. The Internet however, is two-way communication and provides the fastest means of feedback.

Everyone still enjoys listening to music or watching a movie but channels like online gambling and creative user interfaces have created a large open playing field for all types of new entertainment.

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