Yesterday Carwyn and i attended a seminar by Ken Blakeslee a consultant from Web Mobility Ventures, Ken's a self proclaimed mobile fanatic and has specialised in the area for many years. It certainly came across in his talk, with is passion and eagerness to explain mobile technologies available to deliver content in innovative ways. I've been intrigued by Augmented Reality since Julian showed me some of Moving Brands work a few years ago, I've even played with a little using flash and some open source libraries, but I've not even scratched the surface; not even as a user of AR. Ken spoke about some AR examples that are available to us through products that we buy, like Marmite, KitKat and Walkers crisps, but until last night I was unaware of. So today I downloaded the Blippar app for the iPhone and just about scanned everyone's lunch from Cadbury's Dairy milk through to Heinz ketchup and discovered some games and no so great recipes hidden in AR.
Another of ken's examples was Esquire magazine back in 2009, when a whole issue was produced with extended content in Augmented Reality. It was a great evening presented by Software Alliance Wales and Dinamo Productions, one of hopefully many more that I'll attend.
A few weeks ago Elin was working on the research phase of a branding project, an element of that research surrounded minimal, clinical and colourful website design. Being Hoffi's resident geek and having worked in interactive design for well over the last decade I've built up quite a repository of directories and sites which I visit to stay up-to-date and generally get excited by the latest trends and technology. I thought it would be a nice idea to publish some links here, not only for us, but also for our friends and customers to see what's current in digital brand communication.
Since December 2010 we have been working with Neil and Zoe; owners of The Grove, a luxury boutique hotel based in Narberth Pembrokshire.
They approached us to develop the Grove brand and enhance its positioning as a luxury hotel and restaurant based in Wales. The superb 16th century building had been restored to the finest specifications and is now a true indulgence, a great venue and already with several high profile hotel, food and wine awards.
We approached the brand through a series of refinements; making subtle changes to the typography, colour and treatment used throughout all of the Grove's brand communications. Over the last few weeks we have been putting the finishing touches to the Grove website, which launched on the 11th of June. Like the refinements made to the brand identity, the website was approached in a similar way; working through the previous content with a copywriter to achieve a consistent tone of voice, tweaking the interface to ensure that the design is centred to the user and functional across browsers and screen resolutions.
Visit the Grove's website www.thegrove-narberth.co.uk
