Hutchhouse is a digital design agency. This blog reflects the interests & musings from those within the team.


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  • We’re hiring!
  • A return of the traditional
  • The “Wow” Factor in Web Design
  • #Glug does it again!
  • Allworkedup 2 is launched
  • Shop by colour
  • 24 hour start-up
Benjamin Hutchins
Creative Director | Follow on Twitter

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Just a very quick announcement that Allworkedup 2 has been launched and is ready for new users. Allworkedup can seriously aid your project management efforts. It helps to increase the efficiency with which you manage client feedback and move through design iterations and record design versions.

Try it out: Allworkedup – Project Management for Designers by Designers

Along with our good friends at White October and Nonsense we have given ourselves 24 hours to conceive, design, build and promote a new web based start-up company. It’s currently 03:16am and the office is mostly quiet apart from the odd murmor from the development team and the tip tap of keys.

The project situation is pretty healthy. We have a name. Dr.Hue. We have a business idea (shopping by colour) and we have a brand. We even have a holding page Drhue.com. The main site is being templated, whilst the templates are being finished off and there’s a whole host of image manipulation trickery going on in development. In the background, accross the room, the marketing boys set about promoting the site and pulling together a campaign.

And of course… you can currently see it all unfold: 24hour-startup.com

It’s 9 hours into the new start up business and things are flying along. We are close to a brand execution and the developers are steaming along (lots of odd sounds coming from that quarter). Looking at the developer plan it all seems to be finished by 1pm – which is a little ambitious – although as we all know developers always underestimate things….

Continuing-on from my apology earlier, we have been genuinely busy this year and have had our noses pressed firmly against the millstone.

Back in February we won a fantastic project with BT. There’s not much we can say about it unfortunately because it’s all under lock and key, but needless to say it’s kept all of us at Hutchhouse very busy. We’re excited about its implications and with phase one out the door, we can’t wait to get stuck into phase 2. This is a huge project and likely to be ongoing for the rest of the year

In May we did some work for a local company based here on the business park: CMS Industries & CMS Ergonomics. They required two websites to cover both aspects of their business. For the ergonomic website they saw a requirement for some videocasts which we filmed, edited and compressed for the website. You can see them here (bottom right video library). A big thanks to Matthew Royan for his help as the cameraman on this shoot.

Around this time I went to New York with my good friend @NickClement. We had a fantastic week meeting up with old friends, cycling around Manhattan and generally enjoying the trappings of the metropolis. We visited the MoMa and the New Museum. Both rammed to the rafters with inspiration.

During June I did some designs on behalf of White October. Working in conjunction with the RSA and Carbon Limited to create an online web application based around the emerging Carbon Trading Market. I was particularly happy with the design for this and think it’s easily one of the best works to date. I’ll post up here when it’s live.

July also saw the release of allthingsbeer.co.uk. One of our first projects where we gave our Junior – Paul Clement – as much control as we could. Paul got stuck right in and produced a good website which the client was more than happy with. He also did a fine job of the business cards, logo and comp slips, also producing a glossy brochure that eventually reached over 1000+ copies.

August saw us push through two more websites for local businesses Space2Think and Landscapia. Neither of them are live yet but they both went through the design/build process seamlessly and should be ready before long.

Another two happy customers added…

We’ve just finished designing/building our first Wordpress theme for an overseas client. After advising them this was a cost effective way to get what they wanted the client was happy to install all the plugins themselves before handing over to us for styling. Check out youropex.com to see what we did!

That brings up up-to-date. Along the way we’ve done plenty of other bits and bobs which has also kept us on our toes. We’ve started using Harvest to clock our time-sheets for the larger projects and our ‘high tensile project line’ has been put to the strength test at last.

We were also (un)lucky enough to have regular visits from the wasp nest that’s formed in the wall below our window this summer. There’s a picture of what we called ‘The Killing Fields’ after the jump. Because of this we’re glad to see Autumn coming.

That’s all for now. More to come…

…promise.

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