As a designer, there are a few skills I’m required to have. Coming up with new and exciting ideas, bringing those ideas to life and generally making things look pretty. However, never in my career have I had to showcase psychic powers and predict the future to be able to do my job, that is, until I started working with @mediaquery.

What is @mediaquery?

@mediaquery is a relatively new feature of CSS which can be used to dictate how a website or email renders on particular sized screen such as a mobile device or desktop computer. I won’t bog you down with the details, but basically the way @mediaquery works is that the code is hidden in the email and only comes to life when it detects that your screen is below a certain size. As soon as it detects that you’re using a device with a smaller screen, it switches on the hidden code which manipulates and overrides elements of the email, changing its look and structure to suit the smaller screen.

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Foreign restaurants are an absolute goldmine for bad spelling. Most of us have enjoyed a giggle at the ‘innovative’ dishes that pop up on menus in exotic climes… like the ‘friend eggs and tose’ I had for breakfast in Thailand, for example. Delicious it was too.

In this context, typos are funny, endearing and completely forgivable; they don’t negatively affect your opinion of the restaurant or the quality of the service you expect to receive. But what about when you visit a new business online? If you’ve got no prior knowledge of the company, how do you feel if you open their website and it’s full of spelling mistakes and bad grammar? Bet you’d be more suspicious than I was tucking into my friend eggs… Read more…

When Stuart and I were developing the film competition for Jessops and The Mob Films that would eventually become The Shot we had three strong looks that we wanted to explore… top of our list of the three was a Saul Bass type feel that would really make this campaign stand apart from any other work Jessops had done before.

We’d also been inspired as well by seeing some quite retro interpretations of some modern film posters by such designers as Olly Moss who had created some minimalist posters for The Alamo Drafthouse. Luckily for us, we had a designer on board who really loved our initial thoughts and took them on and created some fantastic poster designs.

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I like Creative Mornings. I don’t mean waking up and deciding to put odd socks on, wearing your hair a bit different or doodling on a steamy bus window on the way to work. I’m talking about the monthly breakfast lectures titled ‘Creative Mornings‘.

Creative Mornings is a series of monthly breakfast lectures given by leaders within the worldwide creative industries. Each event is totally free of charge and includes a 20 minute talk plus coffee. What a perfect way to start the day, eh!

The lectures are currently held in New York, Zurich, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Now, I know what you’re thinking. What’s a girl who lives in Salford Quays doing jet-setting across the globe every month?

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As marketers we don’t expect things to stand still. We’re always searching for new trends and ready to try new channels and methods to get our client’s brands out to the consumer market.

Facebook is one of those channels that doesn’t stay still for long. 2010 saw the launch of Facebook Places. Now not far into 2011 and we’ve already seen the launch of Facebook Deals, with the likes of Debenhams, Starbucks and Mazda all jumping straight on the bandwagon. But I think one thing every marketer should be keeping a close eye on over the coming months is the new Facebook Messages.

There has been much speculation since Mark Zuckerburg announced his plans in November 2010, both as to what this means for Facebook users and more importantly for us, how it is going to affect the way we market to them. Some think it won’t make much difference, yet others are heralding it as ‘the end of email’. Whatever your personal opinion or business agenda, it is now gradually being rolled out to all Facebook users, and a few of us at Red C have been testing it out.

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Picking up from where Julian left off on Day 1, I started my day at Earls Court by throwing myself into a seminar on “stories of multichannel marketing success” and started to quickly understand why Julian had been so impressed the day before!

“Consumers now have a megaphone”

Grabbed my attention straight away.  The marketing landscape has changed dramatically. If we only look back to the year 2000 – it is enough to make me feel like I have been part of a pretty impressive revolution! Previously as marketers we all focused on a “push” strategy, we planted ideas in consumers heads, told them what to believe, and what to buy. The interaction was all one way and we just kept on banging our big marketing drums!

Times have changed…

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It’s regarded as one of the greatest sports events in the world with over 100 million viewers tuning in. Yet despite all the pre-game build up and talk of who will win there are two things that are just as big as the actual game itself… the Superbowl half time show and what will be showing in the advert breaks!

Looking over from this side of the pond it’s hard to understand why Americans are so obsessed with what will be showing in the advert breaks of a sporting event. I mean, no one over here gets obsessed with what will be shown in the advert breaks of the FA Cup!

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After all the pigging out over the festive period, lots of us are worrying about our expanding waist belts, cursing the extra mince pies on our hips and making New Year’s resolutions to hit the gym and get our bodies back in shape in time for our Easter holiday. But looking around, maybe we don’t need to keep striving to achieve that washboard stomach. Maybe fat is the new thin?

It seems like curves are in fashion all of a sudden. We’re seeing a growing trend in the use of plus-size models on the runways, in magazines and as part of advertising campaigns. And according to Yildiz Blackstone, the president of Luca Luca, “fashion is cyclical, but this is a trend that is going to stay… it is healthy to have curves.”

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Imagine you are in a restaurant in a sleepy Spanish village. You are starving and you don’t want to order the sheeps eyes or the testicles by mistake…. well now you don’t have to worry. Just whip out your iPhone and hold it over the menu and is if by magic the words translate into perfect English in front of your eyes all within a matter of seconds.

Word lens which has recently launched on the iPhone apps store is an augmented reality application that instantly translates whatever you point at it. It cleverly combines optical character recognition and augmented reality all through the camera on your iPhone allowing you to translate almost anything within a matter of seconds.

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Whilst Jack Daniels has been spending the big bucks on its marketing campaigns, especially in the run up to Christmas, my award for the “best marketing idea from a Kentucky Bourbon producer” has to go to ‘Makers Mark’.

Not blessed with the huge marketing budgets of their larger rivals, the company has chosen to embrace the loyalty and vanity of its customers to conceive its ‘Brand Ambassadors’ campaign.

The idea is fiendish in its simplicity. If you sign up to become Makers Mark Ambassador they’ll engrave your name on a barrel of their whiskey! For me, the proposition was too intriguing to ignore. I went onto the website and discovered that the benefits of being an ambassador didn’t end there. I’d also be sent updates on the aging process of my batch and be given the opportunity to buy a bottle once it had reached maturity, brilliant! All I had to do to attain ambassador status was to give my personal details, easy. Then promise to spread the word of Makers Mark far and wide, which I do anyway.

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