Dyke House Responsive

It’s been confirmed that Homer Creative are to design and implement an exciting new school website for Dyke House Sports and Technology College in Hartlepool.

Dyke House is an Ofsted Outstanding school and has just moved back into its partly new and partly refurbished building. It is a very progressive school and as part of the rebuild programme they have installed 600 Apple Mac computers including iPads.

We are looking forward to reflecting the ethos and success of the school in the new website. And this is a great opportunity to roll out our new web responsive design package plus an added game element. Parents, students, prospective students and all the community’s stakeholders will soon be able to engage with the site from any device they have: desktop computer, tablet or smart phone. Responding to client need and responding to new trends in communication – that’s Homer Creative. You can read more about responsive web design in our blog here.

Call Brian, Sue or Matt on 0121 551 5544 or email us here and we’ll respond immediately!

A candle for Christmas

With all the upheavals in the world this looks like being the century of the stranger and we are supporting the work Coventry Refugee and Migrant Centre are doing to assist all who find themselves strangers in a new land this winter. Our student designer, Kirsten, who has come to us via Bournville College from Deltion College, Zwolle in the Netherlands, has produced a candle design for one of their Christmas cards this year. Using design and illustration skills she produced a typographical image using words taken from the Declaration of Human Rights. We think it's modern, fresh and can be used as a greetings card for all the festivals being celebrated in this mid-winter season. One of four designs on offer, it can be purchased from Coventry Refugee website by clicking here. Proceeds go to their HOPE destitution fund.

Acorn Schools' Annual Reports Impress

Homer Creative have just completed eleven annual reports for member schools of Acorn Care and Education, one of England's foremost providers of education and care for the most vulnerable and hardest to place young people. The challenge, for our creative consultant and senior designer Sue, was to fit 17 tables into six pages and thus keep costs down, but ensure that the readers' toes don't curl. And then to do this eleven times ensuring there was appropriate individualisation in each school's communications while keeping an overall look and feel for the Acorn group.

She met this challenge in her usual, elegant way. The variety of table designs were changed and streamlined and easily understood bar charts were introduced. Areas were sectioned off with boxes, allowing the eye to navigate easily through the information. Each report has key elements from that school's brand identity but all housed in the same clean, simple design style. We also edited information where necessary to fit the space we had.

So a great success down to Sue's design skills and a good working relationship with our client. In fact the style was developed with the first report done for Waterloo Lodge School, and they were so pleased with the look of it that the design has now influenced the look of their new prospectus. Acorn's Marketing Manager has commented on all eleven: "Very impressive when together. Paper quality is spot on. Design works really well for all brands. Brilliant job!!" And according to our creative consultant as well as looking good and feeling nice, they even smell great!

Self Portrait Birmingham: latest update

Our new Self Portrait Birmingham project, commissioned by Birmingham City Council as part of the Library of Birmingham project, was launched at this year’s Artsfest on Saturday 10 September. Over the weeks that followed we set up photographic studios at different locations around the city and, using the latest digital technology, local people were invited to take self-portraits of themselves. And it's gone very well. Brian Homer and Timm Sonnenschein are now editing the images and just amazed at the breadth and diversity of the people who have taken part so far. It is intended that the resulting photographs will form a major installation in the Library of Birmingham, which opens in 2013. But we also hope to be doing more sessions before then. For more information go to www.selfportrait.org.uk.

New breathing workshops can transform your life

Valerie Jenner of Homer Creative is one of three partners in a new venture called Birmingham Breathes.

Her aim is to enable people in Birmingham and the West Midlands to discover and experience Transformational Breath® - a specific breath technique that can bring great benefits in well being and vitality. And we could all do with some of that. There's a chance to experience this for yourself in two linked breathing workshops, on Saturday afternoon 29th October or all day Sunday 30th October. For more information see www.birminghambreathes.co.uk

Bedankt Kirsten

In September Homer Creative welcomed Kirsten Bangert from Deltion College, Zwolle, in the Netherlands on a placement.

Students at Deltion get the choice of work experience at home or abroad, and Kirsten, who has an English grandmother, chose Birmingham because of the links between her college and Bournville College's International Student Placement Scheme. She says, "I've always liked the UK and have picked up English pretty easily." Kirsten will be with us until February. She has already proved extremely useful helping out on our Self-Portrait project and on design work including images for our library section on this web site. Bedankt Kirsten, we hopen dat je een leuke tijd krijgt in Birmingham.

It's the economy not so stupid

We're working at the moment on a video about the economy for UNISON the public sector trade union.

It will form part of a package of learning resources for members and activists that looks at the reasons for the economic crash and at the value of public services. As we were all state educated here at Homer, all use the NHS and will all hopefully grow old, this is something close to our own hearts. We've interviewed Larry Elliott the economics editor of the Guardian and a whole range of people, some UNISON members, some not, all working as experts in the field, many on the front line of service provision. And we think their arguments are very strong. So watch out for more news about this later.

Northern Education web site launched

Our latest web site, for nationally acclaimed educational consultancy Northern Education, went live recently and is proving a great success.

The site is designed to show the benefits of Northern Education's wide-ranging services and to allow the client to manage their own content. It's the first to use the latest version of FineTune CMS, co-developed with our associates Twelve20. Like all our site designs it's easy to navigate with clear signposting from the Home Page. There has been a lot of positive feedback so far with staff at Northern Education finding it much easier to update and change their content. So if you're interested in clean, modern design, clear navigation and a user-friendly content management system, and think your system is in need of an upgrade, talk to us today.

See the Northern Education site here