Dune unveiled their new stores in the Trafford Centre Manchester and at the recently opened Stratford Westfield. The ‘catwalk on the ceiling’ concept has gone down a storm with customers and staff – and you just have to admire how the shoes stay up there!

I was a teacher for the morning last Friday at the City of Leicester College in Evington. As part of the Young Chamber Industry Masterclass, I took a class of Year 9s on Working in the Creative Industries. It began with a half hour talk about the range of  industries, types of jobs, things to look out for and a quick run through my career and a ‘week in pictures’ (the most interesting one I could find!).

They were then set the task of taking pictures and designing a poster that sold the college to new parents and students. It was a relief when they all came back after the break… and interesting to get them brainstroming ideas. All picked out multiculturalism, business enterprise and the  ‘new’ school buildings as the main things to sell the college and produced some good early poster ideas with powerful images. I was pleased to see that we had a few young budding photographers in the group. For those who are old enough, I think it was more Please Sir (hapless teacher tries in vain to control unruly bunch) than To Sir with Love (against adversity dishy teacher succeeds in controlling similar bunch).

I’ve just returned from the ISPO trade show in Munich, where I was networking on behalf of design agency, Mynt.

Those lovely people at Mynt produced the exhibition stand that you can see here for travel clothing company, Craghoppers,  an impactful and graphic-led stand that got across their close association with all things related to world travel and adventure. Again, I was happy to see one of my images – of the travel books – as the background graphic. A variation of this stand will also be seen at The Outdoor Show in Friedrichshafen in the summer.

I’ve just got back from a trip to the Bread & Butter fashion trade show in Berlin working for retail design specialists, Mynt. It was an amazing event with every imaginable fashion brand from Barbour to Boxfresh via Bench with some impressive and elaborate stand designs. None more so than the stands designed by Mynt for Lee Cooper and Gola. Drawing on the heritage of the brand, the Gola stand concept was 1970s football changing room with original shower heads, benches, tactics chalk board and other lovely details. The Lee Cooper stand had a  London theme with Abbey Road zebra crossing, park bench, tube graphics and the obligatory pigeons!  It was also great to see one of my shots – the railing with red pillar box you can see here – used as the background graphic for the Lee Cooper stand.

What do you think of this site by the way? I’m really happy with it and it has been quick and painless to produce and update thanks to Tom at TADJU Design. The site’s linked to a CMS so I can update regularly (and we all know that search engines love new content) and linked to Photoshop Lightroom for the gallery images; and has plug-ins to enable me to send newsletters and for users to subscribe.

In recent years I’ve project managed the production of a number of sites including this one, Proventure Consulting and Elevate East Lancashire; Tom has produced many web projects in both agency and freelance capacities. His work can be viewed at his website, here: www.tadju.com.

We’re more than happy to use this experience to produce sites for others (and, in fact, are now working on one for an independent Pensions consultancy). And without the overheads that come along with agencies, trust me, costs are competitive. So, you could leave everything to us from the design and build through copywriting and motion graphics to CMS training. Do get in contact if you’d like to talk more.