Well Made Studio Blog

[wellmadestudio]

Blog, or not. Honestly, I don’t care.

By Gemma

I was asked to talk to a group of people about authenticity in third sector community-led communications. 

Stick with me guys....

We get a lot of praise for our honesty. We realised quite early on that we had a knack for laughing at ourselves and addressing the white elephant* in the industry.

Our original plan was to blog to and for clients about our fabulous work and why they’d be idiots to ignore our direct mailers. But it was boring and I hated writing those kind of blogs.

Ironically for the subject of my talk (and this blog), I felt a little disingenuous telling these organisations to follow my lead. We are and always have been rebellious. We’re small enough to get away with it. I once spent the day telling Twitter to go #suckmyballs. And we invented a sub agency called ‘No Mercy’ to berated clients who’d asked us to free pitch before selecting (in our mind) inferior agencies.

Imagine a third sector community-led organisation doing that. Imagine how bad that would be.

What works for us doesn’t work for other organisations. The success of our brand goes against everything we know about branding. We didn’t develop this. The Well Made tone of voice is just what we sound like.

That’s great when your brand is three people who created, and continue to slog at their business as an excuse to work with their best friends. It’s less great when you’re a third sector community-led organisation with responsibilities to larger funding bodies, and (at times) vulnerable service users. Their comms can’t simply be the mouthpiece for the most opinionated team member.

It’s not impossible to have an authentic communication strategy, it’s just not that easy.

Blogging is easy. Good blogging is nails.

I spend days mentally drafting and re-drafting ideas for Well Made that consume me. Weeks can go by without me saying anything. That’s fine for us because my higherups haven’t made blogging part of my job description.

Being paid by a magazine has altered my writing in a way I don’t love. Placing a (small) monetary value and monthly quota on my writing has turned it from an asset to a chore and most definitely affected the quality.

How much more ‘content’ can we shovel into the internet before we admit the most authentic thing some organisations can say is nothing?

Yes, a blog about not blogging is meta as hell but we’re telling everyone they must have a content marketing comms and social strategy without addressing the fact that success is a long, hard slog.

The Well Made blog is a (small) success because we have a unique organisational structure with a genuine emotional backstory.

We launched our blog to a strong social following; something we’d devoted 9 years to building.

We’d spent the previous 10 years creating stories and experiences that we could harvest for our audience.

We’re quite odd people.

Two thirds of us are really good writers.

That final point is especially pertinent. We don’t have to farm out our stories to the comms teams. We’re unfiltered. This is what we sound like in the real world. This is why we’re authentic.

We can’t teach anyone else to have all these right factors and then (basically) get a bit lucky. It doesn’t work like that.  

However, there are some factors that have had an impact.

We don’t write short articles. We give our thoughts room to develop.

We don’t write every day. Sometimes we don’t write every month.

We don’t publish everything we write. Some articles I share with only a few people.

We ignore Google Analytics.

This is important. Our two most successful articles are also our most controversial. One was about oral sex, the other a list of the industry’s fittest male designers. I could bash one of those out a week and watch the likes pour in. I won’t because they were written to make a point. I made it and I moved on.

We write about what we care about.

Sometimes we’re a stuck record and I’ve specifically held off publishing a post about women in the industry because I’m a bit exhausted by the topic. However, you can’t fault our resilience. We talk about three things; interns, diversity and how bloody hard it is staying afloat.

It strikes me that third sector community-led organisations have got a lot to care about. And that caring about something is the first step to communicating eloquently about something.

So yes, in conclusion, don’t blog. Or do. Honestly, it’s up to you.  

*I say ‘elephant,’ I mean that young kid you’re ‘paying’ in sandwiches; sort it out pal.

[wellmadestudio]

WHY I AM STILL SHOUTING ABOUT INTERNS?

By Gemma

We just received a presentation document from a intern broker. 

Yep, they’re a thing that exists now. 

14 years ago I turned down £12k to drop out of uni and work at Dazed & Confused because it wasn’t enough. Now, companies exist for source infinite amount of free talent for me to choose from. 

Sound. 

So, once more from the top, for everyone who’s forgotten. 

Hi Adam

The information in your presentation is wrong.

If a person in engaged in work for an employer, if they are given set hours and tasks then they are classed as an em-ploy-ee and entitled to at least the national minimum wage.

It is completely false that an intern doesn’t need to be paid.

Also, if we aren’t paying our interns, how the MERRY FUCK are they supposed to survive?

Your business model is capitalising on the desperation of young people. Never contact us again.

Also, your presentation document is so ugly it gave me a migraine.

Gemma Germains

[wellmadestudio]

RIP My Productivity

By Gemma 

That summer when Well Made nearly tanked taught me that when we put our minds to it, we can work incredibly hard. For very little reward.

I’ve always used the whole work life balance thing as a reason to not work hard. Once, back in 2008 I spent a year working roughly 60 hours a week. It wasn’t my finest performance. Nor was I particularly good at what I spent 60 hours a week doing. I was also very erratic. And disorganised. And sad.

Since then, I’ve used ‘2008 Gem’ as a reason to not work hard. That was until Summer 2013 when I worked harder, with more drive than we’ve ever done before. We all did. I’ve spoken in detail about the reasons why we chose to work so hard before. Short version is, we couldn’t imagine not working with each other (and nobody else would hire us).

Saving a business takes a lot of energy. It took us 12 months to feel anywhere near comfortable, even if that comfort bears no resemblance to the “way hey” Champagne days of 2010.

Which I hope explains away June 2015; the month I finally hit a wall. I’m still dusting brick dust out my hair, but the fact that I’m writing is a good sign. I’m operating around 30% productivity. In June, it was 10.

Before you recommend a holiday. I did that. All inclusive zero wifi didn’t help. I didn’t return home refreshed and raring to go. In fact, I spent the following week asleep in the garden.

The problem with being self employed, especially as part of this small team is if I don’t want to work, I don’t have to. The other two will carry me (after a fashion, and for a while). Nobody can give me a formal written for having a lovely nap in the garden.

Nobody can fire me.

Comfort breeds apathy. We were the architects of our own near downfall because we had regular clients paying good money. I frustrate myself because I’ll work like a dog for pennies; but as soon as I’m getting paid in full, I drag my duvet onto the lawn and pass out.

Nobody can fire me because I’m not an employee. I’m in charge of my own destiny. And to an extent, the destinies of my two best friends. It’s not enough to do the work put in front of me. While we’re working on right now work, we’re also working on the future work necessary to ensure all future right now work. It’s overwhelming.

When I wasn’t asleep, I spent June gazing at my navel, trying to understand which particular straw broke my back (because I’m a camel now, obviously).

Everyone has a different way of working. Joe needs to work on 17 things at once or he’ll die of boredom. Doug needs quiet to knuckle down and focus. Whereas I need people to feed off. But the change in my role (from biz dev to content strategy) has reduced my opportunities for interaction.

Writing is lonely. As is auditing content, writing briefs and creating tone of voice. Yes, I have to interview people and run workshops but my sitting down and thinking work is solitary. I’ve never worked like this before. Relying on Twitter for face to fake interaction is taking it’s toll.

I know this is all starting to sound a bit cry for help, but I’m not sinking. I know what my work problem is. I just need to fix it. And do my client work. And work on the business. And think about the future work I have to do to ensure there will still be a business here in 3 years time.

Everybody’s productivity dips from time to time. The sensible option is to do something different and try again tomorrow. I can’t not do my job just because I feel a bit lonely. But I do need to make time in my short working day to be with people who inspire me (sorry mates, you don’t count right now.)

It’s been a gradual shift from 5 meetings a week to 2 workshops a month and I can’t for the life of me work out how I’m going to add them back into my schedule (#busybusybusy alert!). I just know I have to.

I’ve started making small changes. Like actually attending events I’m invited to and replacing Skype meetings with real life ones. As I said, that I’m writing this is a good sign. These small changes are helping. The challenge as always is to keep it up long enough to reform old habits.

[wellmadestudio]

A list of Creative Directors in Liverpool who also happen to be female.

By Gemma

We have a house policy of not attending anything with an all-male line-up. We invented the policy because Joe couldn’t be bothered talking at a rubbish looking event. However, it makes good sense so we stuck with it.

Invoking the rule has probably annoyed some people we like very much. OWT once got a taste of our mild feminist annoyance, as did Designival. However, more than anything, the rule means we miss out on some interesting stuff.

Like an event we’ve not 20 minutes ago been invited to. It’s an informal event to understand the challenges our regional sector is experiencing. I want to go. Only we can’t because there are no women on the line-up.

And because I want to go, and because it’s not like I’m up to my actual eyeballs in work at the moment, I’ve made a list of all the Liverpool women this institute could have asked to participate in the talk.

Nicola Wass CEO SoMO

Ashley Culvin Deputy CEO Red Ninja

Bernie Emery MD Liquid

Jan Peters Founder & CEO USP Creative

Alex Rose MD USP Creative

Helen Adams - Finance Director PH Creative

Caroline Whittaker - Client Director Uniform

And … Me!

Here’s a small but perfectly formed list of Director Level (and above) women contributing, right now to LIverpool’s creative sector. This list took me 10 minutes to compile. I’m sure I could double it in the time it takes to brew another coffee.

Honestly, I find the ‘Lady Director’ label Neolithic. I’m a Director (a Founding Partner if you want to split hairs), the stuff I keep in my pants has nothing to do with my ability to run a business. However, I’ve worked in the creative industries for over a decade and I’m still banging this pan. I’ve got far better things to do than pull lazy people up on their event line ups. But I have to, all us Lady Directors have to because the chasm between creative students (roughly 55% female) and creative directors (hovering around 3% female) is horrifying.

In business terms, I’ve just wasted an hour of studio time on this bobbins. That’s an hour I’m not fuelling my studio’s increased growth and improving my kid’s future outcomes.

Who do I charge that time back to? Because I’ve got a stack of these invoices that need sorting.

[wellmadestudio]

Is My Copy Any Good?

By Gemma

We’re currently working with an architectural practice on their new website. Their brief is surprisingly simple. They just want us to create something clients will find useful.

Working for an architect, when 90% of my clients are lifestyle, creative types is crushing my comfort zone. A lot of what I do for my clients is based on an experienced instinct. But that won’t cut it this time.

I don’t hang with many Heads of Regeneration and Land Directors. I don’t speak their language. And while I’m eternally grateful to have an industry expert on my team, I’m also aware that the content will have to work hard if it’s to meet the brief.

There are plenty of ways to test the usability of our design. However, it all gets a bit basic when it comes to assessing how well our audiences understand what we’re telling them (and if they’re even that interested in the first place.)

The architect project poses two challenges. One is tone, the other context. I’m interested to know what the clients think, want and need from the content.

Being a stand up kind of woman, I’ve compiled the resources I’m using to test the quality of our content. Here they are and yes, you owe me one.

Tone of Voice https://blog.optimizely.com/2013/04/30/71-things-to-ab-test/ This is a pretty basic one. We’ll A/B test next newsletter using two different tones of voices. One, using the ‘architectural’ voice and the other friendly and conversational. Most clicks wins.

Pair Writing https://vimeo.com/117500823 For reasons of usability and speed I’m forcing the architects to write the majority of their web content in one workshop. There will be tears. Pair writing is an opportunity to ask some very clever people what on earth they’re going on about.

Context and Understanding http://alistapart.com/article/testing-content There are some brilliant tests in this article, designed to analyse how well the client understands what you’re telling them.

[wellmadestudio]

Where Our Clients Come From

By Gemma

When we relaunched, we created a brand on the back of the clients we’d secured and the work we’d done as Mercy. That’s what most rebranded companies do; base their knowledge and experience on what’s come before.

We’re in a tiny state of flux at the moment for a couple of reasons. Primarily because we’ve evolved in tandem with the design industry. In the past two and a half years, we’ve amassed more skills which we need to sell.

Before we go ahead again, I took a backwards look at where our clients have come from and the work they bought.

One of the qualities we were always proud of was our 90% client referral rate. Meaning, most clients who worked with us told their friends about us. However, that also meant that only 10% of our work came from press and marketing (i.e. the stuff in my old job description.) Worse still was the fact we didn’t secure any work from outbound marketing in 2012.

There’s a couple of reasons for that. We can’t pitch and back then, we weren’t a ‘proper’ design studio. Our portfolio of graphic design fought for space with our arts and events work. Which is why Well Made happened. Also, our one go at direct marketing was actually quite rubbish.*

2013 to the first half of 2015 tells a slightly different story. The numbers have changed, but only moderately.

74% of our work still comes from client and network referrals. Treepress alone generated 4 new opportunities in 2014, 3 of which we landed. And it’s a similar story for Penguin Random House and the Pedlars crew. I’m not saying a 74% referral rate is bad; it’s amazing clients are willing to risk their reputation on us. However, it’s a difficult metric to influence. We can only carry on being as Well Made as we are and we can only hope that clients continue finding us pleasant to work with. However, who ever created a marketing plan based on ‘working with people who have friends who want designer recommendations.’

Thankfully, there’s an increase in the amount of inbound opportunities we’ve scored, up from a pathetic 5% to 22%. This means the blogging, guest blogging, social media and PR is having some kind of effect. I don’t know how, exactly, just that it is, We always ask inbound clients how they know about us and they without fail say ‘I just heard you were good.’

Again, not massively helpful but if it’s not broke etc.

The problem, as ever is outbound. We suck hard at outbound.

We’ve done one full creative pitch since we rebranded and a couple of moodboard / written ideas things that weren’t very well put together. And if you take The Young Vic and Pedlars out of the equation (because we scored them back in 2008 and 2011), we’ve landed one client (Three Blind Mice) on an outward approach since the re-brand.

These numbers tell us people think we’re good. That’s sound. And that social media isn’t just a load of whistling into the wind (even if it feels that way sometimes). But the numbers don’t lie. We need to work harder if we’re to grow our business. Our messages don’t go far enough. The people who know us, know us and thankfully they like us. However, the people we want to know us haven’t got the foggiest who we are. 

And here lies the problem.

*I do have to say that, as a marketing manager I was bombarded by direct mail from designers. So much on a daily basis in fact, I struggled to sort the weak from the naff, leaving me vehemently and perhaps irrationally anti DM to this day.

[wellmadestudio]

What We Did On Friday Night

By Gemma

We’re a small team. It’s not intentional, that’s just the way we do things. It’s a set up that keeps us nice and flexy. Late nights and weekend work isn’t our thing and we generate just enough work to keep it that way.

The website in 4 nights project highlighted the limitations of our size when it comes to the kinds of extra curricular activity.

The old website took ten months because we had a business to run and lives to live. When we weren’t getting married, buying houses and raising kids, we were playing business Buckaroo with the studio. This time round we know how effectively our online presence generates work enquiries. The new site has to be a priority.

To accommodate a large additional project we worked 9-5 on studio work and 7-11 on the website. There’s no doubting it was productive, we’ve tweaked our strategy, and designed and built 2 of the 3 most important areas of our website. In 12 hours.

The site would most likely be ready to waft online had we been able to devote a further 12 to it. 

We could have worked all Friday night but by 5pm it was clear we’re hit a wall. No work was done on Friday night. Instead, we necked pints of beer like it was Ribena and inhaled burger and chips and nobody spared the website a moment’s thought.

Deadlines make us do crazy things. We forget that creativity is a finite resource. We forget how important it is to not work, to not solve problems, to not be creative.

So no, we didn’t do anything on Friday night and that’s fine.

[wellmadestudio]

What We Did On Thursday Night

By Gemma

We’ve always wanted a developer on staff. Everyone knows it makes sense. The challenge lies in finding one who fits into our ‘unique’ work culture. And paying their wages, obviously.

The solution has always been for one of us to upskill into a developer. That way, we don’t have to worry about $$$ or a developer having to endure our behaviour.

It was always going to be Joe who upskilled. He’s got the work ethic and stubbornness necessary to stick it out.

I’m telling you this because everything Joe’s been doing for the past 3 years helped us turned a corner with the web project.

Last night we approached two tasks. Re-write the mission statement and refine the layout we all like. Joe’s development skills helped us fix them both.

The problem with our mission statement was that it felt static. We do X for X by X because X is fine. Just fine. We’re supposed to be clever champs with charm. Where’s the wit in a Forbes.com mission statement?

Now I hate to say it, but sometimes words don’t cut it. There has to be an intersection between words and experience. Having Joe on hand to build, on the fly means we’re able to deliver our content with dynamism.

I was going to show you what we built last night but we’ve decided to keep it back for the reveal. That’s not to say we’ve designed a game changer. Just a cute device to say a bit more than the innocuous ‘we’re a small studio working with big brands’.

The key has been how quickly we can now design and build these ideas. Joe’s skills allow us to look at the site as a selection of elements to be individually designed and built. There’s a marked difference from our old approach of designing everything and then building everything and then, going back to fix the problems the developers discover with the design and once round again for fun.*

Emotionally, last night was great. We’ve worked together for a long time but are rarely in the same studio for any extended period of time. Our major long term goal is to reunite the studio, hopefully somewhere glass fronted and idyllic. This week has been a great reminder of the importance of that goal.

* FYI, you’re not going mad; I’ve consciously avoided using words like ‘agile’ and ‘waterfall’ here.

[wellmadestudio]

What We Did On Wednesday Night

By Gemma

One of the ideas that came out of our first night’s activity was the realisation we need to update our mission statement.

Our old one 

- doesn’t cut it any more.

Most projects these days are front loaded with research and strategy. There’s a recognisable reduction in the amount of cash straight up graphic design generates versus an increase from the thinking and planning side of things.

It’s hard because a nice bit of print is easy to photograph and display, even if there’s very little to say about it. On the digital front, a lot of the UX stuff is actually common sense when you get down to it, again making for an uninspiring reading experience.

The challenge at this stage is to communicate the work we do in a way that doesn’t send our clients to sleep. Looking at pictures of our portfolio is too subjective, with too much risk of a client disregarding us on the strength of one irrelevant image. However, the text-based approach we’re considering runs the risk of boring the client to death unless the copy is stellar.

I spent yesterday writing mission and skill statements. They’re here for you to read. But if you can’t be bothered, don’t worry, they’re rubbish.

We’ve a particular tone of voice. Sometimes, I fear that it’s just my voice, drowning out the lads but that’s probably a self esteem issue I need to unpick with a councillor. None of that matters today because this copy sounds nothing like us.

If we were our client, rejecting everything from the first round of concepts, I’d recommend we/they tested the copy; perhaps asking the test subject describe the kind of project we might do based only on the mission statement. But we’re no so I won’t. Instead I’m trusting my intuition which is telling me to start again.

These are passable mission statements. And the services copy does an adequate job. They just set my teeth on edge. I can’t image how we cope copy and pasting this stuff into creds docs, proposals and quotes on the reg. 

So today I’ve been working on shorter, snappier slogans that convey meaning with a bit more energy.

I’m fixated on this idea of action, voice and visual which seems to cover what we do. The challenge is doing it in a way that doesn’t make us sound like health insurers.

Doing, Saying, Designing Better Brands

Building Brilliant Brands

Good work for great brands doesn’t come close to explaining what we do while clever branding done well opens us up to pain the minute we bash out something quick and dumb.  And I refuse to allow ideas anywhere near this website given how we’ve managed, as an industry to jargon it up so completely. 

When I write, I’m writing for that customer who absorbs the 6 page emails where we explain how to deliver feedback and what to expect from an identity. I refuse to believe they read ideas as shorthand for research and strategy.

Today will just be me rehashing old ground, arguing with myself over the merits (or not) of alliteration and word count.

Thankfully the lads played a blinder on the content layout, giving us room to play around with the way prospective clients move about the site. I can’t help worrying that the mobile site lacks punch, but perhaps that’s just me being impatient. 

Personally, I’m a fan of Layout 3 in as much as it prioritises the blog, i.e. the bits where we can evidence our expertise without being too pushy. However, without working copy, we’re no closer to a testable prototype, meaning tonight will probably be a bit more of the same.

[wellmadestudio]

What We Did Last Night

By Gemma

Our last website took ten months to make. I’d even say our digital tardiness played a part in almost sending us under in the hellish summer of 2013. And even if it didn’t, what self respecting design studio takes 10 months to bash out a bog standard brochure site? If we were our clients, we would have gone postal somewhere round month 8.

So this week, we’re locking ourselves in the studio to design and build a new site in 4 days. Actually, because of our workload, we’re working double shifts and building it in 4 nights. One can only imagine how Thursday night will pan out.

Last night, we looked at the major problems with our existing site.

1. It hasn’t evolved with our skill and experience


2. It’s not a good example of our abilities


3. It doesn’t ‘speak’ to our clients


We know the site isn’t a true representation of our skills because prospective clients tell us so. One knocked us back because they ‘already had a graphic designer’ and were looking for a more strategic agency.

You’re probably reading this thinking ‘whevs m8, you’re not UX.’ And there’s chuff all on our site to give you that impression, despite research, interviews, content strategy and testing producing a decent chunk of our monthly income.

Same goes for content. 12 months ago I threw myself to the floor, refusing point blank to do any more sales. That’s great Gem, they said, but you’re going to have to do something if you want wages. Hence a shift towards strategy, which we now must communicate, evidence and sell to our clients if I’m to maintain this balling lifestyle.

However, the main reason we need to update the site is to speak to, not about our clients.

The main goal of the rebrand (and the old new site) was to help us identify as a ‘proper’ design studio. Our analytics tell an interesting story. Every one of the top 25 referral sites are design sites, operated, populated and consumed by designers while 75% of social followers describe design as their main interest.

There are a couple of problems with these numbers.

1. 75% of our audience already hates pitching and ripping off interns. We’re preaching to the converted. We need to find new audiences to convert. 


2. Designers tend not to employ designers. We want the business to grow this year. We need more clients. We’re not going to find them on a Twitter feed full of designers. 


So last night, after a delicious curry we raked through our research and started planning the site.

The Research

We started out with qualitative data, reading all the nice emails our clients have sent us. We wanted to discover which parts of our service exceeded expectations.

Turns out, our clients like the little things; turning a last minute brief round at 5 on a Friday, spotting a typo, efficiency, calling round for a face to face when email would probably have sufficed.

That’s not the kind of stuff that impresses the design blogs but it clearly impresses the clients.

We also discovered that clients like how much we explain stuff. 6 page emails have won us work where pretty design can’t. Taking the time to describe the process as it’s specific to each project works for us.

The DBA came up trumps with the quantitative data. Essentially, clients don’t look at websites (93%), they rarely read newsletters (44%) and they don’t actually know what we can do for them (63%).

We don’t need to worry about the newsletter thing because we don’t do them. And we’ve got the blog, which we know clients (existing and prospective) read because they tell us. If there’s any problem here, it’s with the fact we operate two blogs.

Analytics tell us that the studio blog is more popular than the Tumblr, which operates as a home for our ‘personality’ (blowjob) blogs. So while yes, we definitely need to overhaul Tumblr, we can place it on the back burner for now.

The DBA’s data is worrisome because it backs up what we already know about our audiences. It’s not a design-buying audience. And when design buyers turn up, the site isn’t a true representation of what we can deliver.

So, at the end of two family sized bags of Haribo we reached a consensus:

Our portfolio should no longer dominate the site; slanty, drop shadow photographs of flyers are not a true representation of our abilities.


Large format photography is overbearing and relegates our design research and thinking to a thin sliver on the right. They need to go. 


We must present and evidence our skills in such a way clients can understand their immediate benefit. 


And we must do all of this without losing any of the personality that has attracted the caliber of clients who have kept us sane these past 24 months. 


Tonight, armed with a content audit, more Haribo and some refreshed copy (which I’m going to write now), we’ll start to understand how this will behave on screen.

[wellmadestudio]

Meet Leicester, a sight impaired mouse with a Tango addiction and mascot of ad industry veterans Three Blind Mice. 

[wellmadestudio]

This is what your business stationary looks like when your mascot is a Tango’d mouse. 

[wellmadestudio]

Happy brand design for http://www.three-blind-mice.co.uk/

[wellmadestudio]

An Own Goal For The Copycats

By Gemma

In April 2013 we branded a football magazine. We used a goal in the logo and thought ourselves exceptionally clever for doing so.

In June of the same year, Elmwood released their identity for football brand Goal, using the same goal post logo mark.

Dear me did we kick right off.

We sought legal advice, bitching to anyone who would listen about the David and Goliath-ness of our plight. You know it’s serious when you start calling out the copycats on Creative Review’s comments section, which is exactly what we did.

Only our original work compared a little too closely to The Homeless World Cup. A footballing brand whose name-in-a-goal-post-logo preceded both Well Made and Elmwood by 2 years.

So we piped down, embarrassed that nobody had taken the time to properly analyse the football brands we occupied space with.

Visual design is a fairly dense spot right now. However, I’m not going to bash on about how trends are eviscerating our industry. Because sometime after two decades we stop calling them trends and rename them ‘epoch defining styles’. Then we raise up the best examples of these trends as classics, ignoring the thousand other designs for soap, lipstick or apps everyone else was smashing out at the same time.

Ignoring the rip-off merchants selling the work of others as their own; I’m coming out for the copycats. We’re all unintentionally influenced by the convergence of culture. Our appetites for the limited amount of quality we're fed is ferocious. Ingesting the same big ticket experiences, we can’t help but regurgitate this good stuff through our work. 

Nobody’s perfect. Nor are they original.

We denigrate trends as if fresh new ideas are abundant. They’re not. Most projects, some 80% of every studio's monthly output covers the wage bill by delivering exactly what the customer ordered. Little is truly brilliant.

We didn’t intend to rip off The Homeless World Cup in much the same way Elmwood probably don’t know we exist. More influence than coincidence, we three studios, working for our respective brands couldn’t help but deliver the same obvious idea.

And while I want to make a big difference between thieves and copycats (thieves should be taken down with speed and sound), let’s leave the copycats well alone. Chances are they’re busy going about their day, unaware of our epoch defining design genius.

[wellmadestudio]

Logo mark for the freshly rebranded Ugly Duck. 

http://www.4749tannerstreet.com/ugly-duck/

[wellmadestudio]

[wellmadestudio]

We don't get much chance to bosh out a logo these days. 

However, that's exactly what we did with Ugly Duck to help the rebrand and relaunch their arts space.

http://www.4749tannerstreet.com/ugly-duck/