GRAPHIC DESIGN: DIGITAL & PRINT

It’s great to see something you’ve worked on published and made real and its even better to see it impress your audience.

Between us, we’ll work through the layouts, the imagery, the information architecture and the feel, and we’ll create something that your audience will want to keep. We’ll manage the process for designing and publishing real-world books, documents and reports and we’ll do the same for digital documents like websites and eBooks too. Remember that you’ll be working with a graphic designer who is also an illustrator, so there’s no extra costs or hassle with outsourcing if you need complex drawings and artwork.

We’ll take your ideas from floating notions, scribbled diagrams and Word documents to real-world things that your audience and clients will enjoy and engage with.

Big document design for stakeholders, academia and more

Big documents are generally things like reports (of the AGM variety, the research variety and the presentation variety), rather than brochures and flyers (of course we can make these too, but flyers aren’t always that popular with say, the Head Of Finance who wants to see where her budget has gone). Big documents usually contain a lot of information and they often – but not always – need graphs, illustrations, photos and infographics. They’re usually something that stakeholders will need to see and feel impressed by and, crucially, understand and comprehend without too much trouble. Language, visuals and information architecture are all pivotal elements that need to be activated and arranged just so for your audience. Between us, we’ll work out a way to impress them. There’s a page dedicated to the subject here, about big document design and putting reports together.

Brightening and reinventing brand assets

Being inventive with established branding is important and its a fun thing to do. We can work with your metrics, with your principles, with your imagery and brand guidelines or we can go way out into left-field with some wilder ideas.

General problem solving and making stuff work

There is also an element of making things work in general. At the request of clients, problem-solving should be seen as an important part of working together and things like fixing website niggles, company PDFs and decoding jargon are all valuable things that happen in projects like these.

Managing and designing your website

Websites are documents too. Its not often we think of them in that way, but they are. People don’t print them out thankfully, but they are derived from print design and they have many similarities to consider, such as information architecture, columns, headings and text.

If you want someone to administrate your site, provide you with graphic design work and generally behave like a design department for under £6000 a year (read more about that here), fire off an email and let’s talk.

If you’re interested, you can read the page about website design and maintenance.

CREATIVE DESIGN

In accordance with client’s wishes, on a given day we could be designing flyers, painting illustrations, laying out books, laying out big documents, coming up with ideas or putting front-end code together to make a web page sing.

Big, small, corporate, mid-sized, agile, charity and one-woman-and-her-keyboard style outfits all need this kind of work. Its pleasing and fun to turn creativity into reality for clients and at one time or another over the years, most kinds of organisation have come in through the door and been on the books.

Take a look on Instagram if you’re interested to see Engine Head’s creative range.

Creative team support

If you’re a business, you can hire Engine Head in 6 month blocks (or longer if you prefer) to help deliver large projects or to soak up your excess work. Need regular email designs? Website UI’s need turning into CSS and HTML? Information architecture needs a lot of work? Consider using Engine Head. And the price – less than £3000 for 6 months and less than £6000 a year – is much less than agency fees.

Smaller entities like micro-businesses can also use that same 6 month block system and get support with big, multi-platform projects, large e-commerce stores, websites with a lot of artwork and information architecture, book illustrations or whatever your imagination can conjure. They could all cost you less if you explore this option.

This arrangement is a good solution for businesses who need a creative on their team but don’t necessarily have the resources for someone full time. Some businesses even use this system to maintain contributions to their organisation indefinitely.

Read more about getting a creative on your team for less than £6000 a year in this blog post.

Website administration & support

If you have a website that needs a skilled administrator to look after it, keep it updated and to keep it running then ping off an email and ask for more details. Advice, quotes and discussions are all free. Engine Head have been working with CMS’s, code and companies for more than 10 years.

In addition, you’ll likely find it useful to have someone on hand with an artistic bent for email design, help with copy, graphic design and artwork, marketing stuff and generally coming up with ideas and solving problems. More about websites, digital and the online world can be found here.

ON THE DESIGN PROCESS

Its worth noting that sometimes the design process and the operations of creativity will throw up visuals that you don’t like. This is normal and its a valuable part of finding visuals that you love.