Nzime

Karl McKeever (Brand Director of Visual Thinking) is an influential and well respected visual merchandising specialist who works alongside brands such as Marks & Spencer, Harley-Davidson, John Lewis, Waterstones and many, many more. Check the new site and follow Karl on Twitter for VM industry comment and general chit chat.

We have just finished the K-tech product videos which are being rolled out across all their digital channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Blog and the web site. Even non-motorcyclists will want one after watching these.

Using Google maps we calculated the exact distance from the Billboard locations to our clients location. The creative we can do; the golf we can’t….

Laura has pulled it out of the bag this morning with a surprise birthday cake for Andrew which tastes as good as it looks. What a star; on brand too!

There’s only a small slice left so if you’re passing this way today then pop in…

This doesn’t really need explaining as the emails say it all…

Hi

Never usually bother with things like this but I thought it was worth dropping you an email.

I’ve picked up a pack of your ‘Toast For Cheese’ packs today after purchasing from a local deli in Long Clawson after they were running a free tasting at the counter. Lovely product, lovely packaging but when I opened them I felt let down as it appeared half empty; as I say I wouldn’t usually bother mentioning but because everything else was so perfect….

Working in a creative agency I always over analyse these things but by reducing the pack size slightly this would immediately fix this.

Anyway, just had one with some stilton and lime chutney, perfect.

Hope this is helpful and not deemed as negative/annoying.

Cheers
Andrew

Hello Andrew
It was a kind and generous email- thank you for that.

This is a very new product with technical challenges, particularly cutting it, packing it and transporting it.
Initially we had to design the box and tray with hand made products so size-wise we had to play safe.
The first products we produced on the cutting machine were much thinner and so they filled the tray better but we had a lot of breakages in transit,
so we had to set the cutter to produce thicker slices – which take up less space.
This means that the tray is, as you point out, rather roomy’ but I am thrilled to see an absence of broken’ Toasts’ in the tray.
We are planning to have a tray with a divider soon, and ideally down size the box a touch.
Because the product is by nature fragile I fear we will always look a bit over-packaged but at least that way we will keep damages to a minimum.
(Have you ever watched TNT in action? – suitably named after an explosive)

Anyway I ‘m glad you like the product.  It is expensive to produce ( 60% fruits/nuts and seeds) – so please understand we are not trying to mislead our customers.

Thank you writing – I will send you another variety for you to to try out and spread the  good word….
best wishes
Ann-Marie

Having not turned down a free lunch yet, Glen and I attended Nottingham law firm Rothera Dowson’s ‘Small Talk’ seminar at regular Nzime hangout the Curry Lounge. The seminar focused on how businesses can tweet, connect and poke their way to increased sales and better customer relationships, without landing in legal hot water.

Social media enables businesses to show their personality, crucial in a world where ‘people buy people’, but must be used in a considered and strategic fashion if it is to achieve results. Simply pushing out company propaganda does not work. Instead, brands should look to become actively involved in their online community, by joining discussions and making thoughtful comments and retweets. This has the added bonus of also helping your SEO.

Here at Nzime, we’re old hands at developing strategic social media strategies for our clients – but were interested to find out more about where it can go all go wrong…

Most companies have an internet policy, which provides them with legal recourse if their staff spend too much time on Facebook. But most probably don’t realise that employees’ online behaviour outside of the workplace also has legal implications. Now that personal lives are made more public online, employers are open to claims of discrimination if personal information discovered on the internet is used in recruitment or disciplinary processes. There is also a risk that staff might post confidential or defamatory information online, or use their LinkedIn contact lists to steal clients when they move on to another employer.

By establishing a social media policy, employers can proactively manage these risks. Your policy should clearly set out your expectations of employees in both their business and personal use of social media, and if you intend to ‘check up’ on them online. It should also establish a framework for action, for example, staff training on appropriate use, complaints procedures, or the use of restrictive covenants when people leave.

If your business is looking to develop its social media strategy, feel free to email me at taryn@nzime.com.

The Design Museum is currently showing the UK’s first retrospective of Dutch designer Wim Crouwel. An exhibition showcasing the prolific 60 year design career of a living design legend.

The exhibition will explore Crouwel’s innovative use of grid-based layouts and typographic systems which produced consistently striking visuals for clients such as: the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Dutch Postal Service and Rabobank. Along with his experimental typeface designs including the New Alphabet font which was used on Joy Division’s Substance album sleeve.

You can check out the exhibition at the Design Museum in London up until the 03 July.

A recent edition to the Nzime studio, publishers Unit Editions have also released their next book, TD 63-73, a study of influential Dutch Studio, Total Design. Founded by Wim Crouwel, Benno Wissing, Friso Kramer, and the Schwarz Brothers in Amsterdam in 1963. The book will cover the studio’s work from 1963 to 1973, and promises an “up close and personal” history of the studio.

As if that wasn’t enough Crouwel-based goodness and if you ever wanted to be woken by designery good wishes, there is of course an app: crouwelclock. A beautifully animated graphic alarm clock, featuring three personal Wim Crouwel messages as alarms.

I’m going to start with some large numbers. The current global population is around 6.7 billion, smartphone usage in 2010 was calculated at 526 million. This works out at around 8% of the worlds population are using smartphones all with potential access to the mobile web.

Source: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11-520862.html

In 2010 Google was serving up to 200 million YouTube videos a day to mobile devices. Traffic on the AT&T (US) network has grown 3000% between 2009 and 2010 (yes 3000%) with similar trends throughout Europe’s networks. The figures are astonishing but what isn’t, is the slow uptake of the mobile web market by businesses.

Source: http://ie6countdown.com/

Internet Explorer 6 currently has a market share of 3.3% in the UK whilst iOS is responsible for 5.5% of the UK’s web traffic that isn’t even taking into account Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. More resources are pumped into making things work for the 3.3% of users using a 10 year old browser than the 8% of people using smartphones. If you look at the behavior of the different user groups of IE6 users and smartphone users, which are most likely to use the internet as a primary source of information and purchase?

As a business this market has huge potential, especially with the growth seen over the past 3 years. Providing a dedicated mobile experience greatly increases the user experience and potential for users and this can only aid in sales and interest.

To finish on, Amazon announced last year that it topped $1 billion in sales from users on mobile devices with it’s mobile site playing a huge part in this. More businesses need to follow in Amazons footsteps and embrace the mobile market.

Traditionally website designers have been restricted to using a very small collection of fonts on their sites, mainly Arial, Verdana, Georgia and Times.
Although in practise these fonts render nicely across all different browsers and are perfectly readable it’s nice to occasionally drop in some cool heading fonts and incorporate some brand specific typefaces.

Where a brands corporate typeface is essential we’ve always been forced to replace the headings/navigation type etc with images but this isn’t a great solution particularly with SEO in mind.

Recently there have been some big developments in this area and Nzime are now incorporating new services provided by Typekit and Fonts.com. These create a way of including custom fonts consistently across multiple browsers through a clever mix of web standards compliant font inclusion and a little Javascript for the browsers that need help.
An ever expanding library of web optimised fonts now includes many from the leading foundries such as Adobe and Monotype, so we now have access to 100′s of faces instead of just 4.

To see some of these in action on a couple of our recent site builds check out the type on LabelApeel.co.uk,  DeTourDeFrance.fr and fineoakfurniture.com

This is just part of what Nzime are doing to keep our clients’ sites on the cutting-edge of technological developments in the industry, make their sites work harder for them and produce the results they require whilst bringing their sites in line with their printed material.

We’ll be at the Ampersand Conference in Brighton this June to talk to all the leading lights in the web typography field including the guys from Typekit and even the infamous Vincent Connare creator of Comic Sans!
Any further typographic enlightenment gleaned from this will be passed on to our lovely clients you can be sure!

Alessandro.
We think he’s from Sheffield but have yet to understand a word he says. A very talented designer with a proven track record he joins Nzime to head up the creative team. As well as holding down a job as senior designer at Nzime he manages his penchant for all graphical things to do with the Munich Olympics at his web site… www.1972municholympics.co.uk.

Laura.
She bakes cakes, she’s creative and has Pantone 222 coloured hair. Very talented and has an unnatural ability for Foosball. Laura joins us as a designer.

Taryn.
Scarily organised but with a smile, everything you need from an account manager. Taryn has already shown her weakness by admitting she’s a little gullible, oh dear, April 1st is approaching quickly…..

Glen.
As our account exec Glen handles our reporting and day to day support of several accounts with clinical efficiency. He’s also an exceptional copywriter and has an eagle eye as well as a quiff to match.