Synthetic Egg | Portfolio

RGC Conversion to WordPress

Raymond George Consultancy is a Rec2Rec agency covering the US, Canada and the UK. They loved their existing website visually, but functionally it had problems and was too expensive to maintain, so were looking at converting it to WordPress.

ATR: Brand and website

The Alliance of Tenant Representatives is the commercial real estate organisation at the forefront of client advocacy and best practice, both domestically and internationally. They needed a new brand and website to refresh their member organisation.

Springwood Ceremonies

Springwood Ceremonies create bespoke weddings, baby namings/welcomings, or funeral ceremonies, tailoring each ceremony according to the wishes of those involved so that they come truly from the heart. As a new start-up they needed a competitive package of identity and marketing materials to help launch and establish their brand, and loved the fact that Synthetic Egg could offer everything they needed in one place.

CultureMix Arts

CultureMix encourage engagement in carnival arts and music through experiences, education, professional development and employment. They also incorporate RASPO, the Reading All Steel Percussion Orchestra. I worked with them rationalise and give clarity to their offerings on, and update the CMS behind, their content rich website. I also gave it a modern new look and feel and added a shop.

MALP Tutors

MALP Tutors helps psychology students and teachers gain extra information and support to aide their progress and future endeavours. Synthetic Egg helped them bring new clarity to their offerings, and created a consistently branded fresh new website to promote their services and sell their courses and revision materials.

Wessex Coin: Updated Website

Wessex Coin is one of the leading distributers of coin operated gaming and amusement equipment. Supplying new and high quality refurbished machines across the UK and abroad it was important that their website was simple and easy to use.

Food Photographer: Tony Briscoe

Tony Briscoe is a highly experienced London based food and drink photographer with 20 years experience. He recently moved studios and wanted a new website to showcase his updated portfolio.

Norwegian Log Event Display Stand

Norwegian Log produce Classic Scandinavian and Contemporary Inovar garden buildings. For the Farm & Country House Business Innovation Show at the NEC they needed a new display stand and they asked me to brand their stand and fill it with images to work as a discussion board.

Dreamspace UX

Dreamspace help their clients deliver engaging and profitable relationships through applying innovative user experience techniques to visionary branding and design. Together with technical insight and analytics, they create websites that surpass customer expectations by understanding what they really need. Being part of Dreamspace's extended team, I helped create their relaunch website.

Norwegian Log: Company Profile

Norwegian Log offer strong, attractive and durable buildings in two contrasting styles: Classic Scandinavian and contemporary Inovar. Whether classic or Inovar, their buildings set the benchmark for log construction quality in the UK. They needed a new, combined, company profile brochure that positioned their range of buildings across their markets, covering garden buildings, transportable/mobile homes, holiday homes, granny annexes and classrooms.

Inovar Contemporary Buildings

Inovar is the new contemporary buildings concept from Norwegian Log which works alongside their more traditional log buildings. I've worked on their identity, website, social media, brochures, event collateral, signage and more.

Ballet Revival

Sarah Briscoe is an ex-professional classical ballet dancer who was trained at The Royal Ballet School, running adult ballet classes in studios around St. Albans, Hertfordshire. As a start-up Sarah's budget was tight but together we agreed on a package that gave her the look she wanted.

Downsizer Homes

I was involved in the UI and web design, as well as HTML5/CSS coding of the front-end. The site utilises the Bootstrap framework with supporting JQuery, giving a rich user experience with a user interface including image sliders, lightboxes, video, Google Maps and StreetView and Tabs etc, all of which are fully responsive. The site also leverages social sharing and has email newsletter signup integration.

Tony Briscoe: London Food Photographer

London based Food Photographer Tony Briscoe has an excellent body of work from his wide client base. His work has a fresh, natural, graphic quality that needed to be supported by a modern clean and responsive new content managed website.

AFX: Responsive Lighting Catalogue

A product catalogue utilising WordPress to create a responsive, easy-to-update website. This allows the client to keep their products up-to-date for prospects and provide support for customers. The site also allows the client to load their videos from YouTube.

Reading RESCUE – cleaning things up

The team at Reading RESCUE wanted a revamp of their old WordPress website. On a tight budget I selected a new WordPress Theme and applied some Custom CSS updates to their WordPress.com hosted site to style the site up with their existing brand.

Drive Xtra: Teaching the drivers of tomorrow

DX is a sub-brand of UCC aimed at a younger, more inexperienced, demographic to their usual driver training courses. I created the corporate identity and logo, designed and built their website landing page and launch brochure and print collateral.

UCC: Drive Xtra Logo and Flyer

DX is a new course from UCC targeted at young drivers and families, and basically anyone who is an inexperienced driver. They needed a sub-brand to market this course to a younger audience, so I created a logo and flyer to fit the bill.

IDASS: Keeping you healthy

IDASS provides equipment for gyms and fitness centres around the country. As part of their promotion of healthy living, and to support fitness trainers, I created a mobile microsite to help in measuring body fat, with social integration to promote use and exposure.

Wessex Coin: Digital Marketing

Wessex Coin supplies gaming and amusement equipment across the world. Managing Director Chris Skelly got in touch to discuss how to start to implement digital marketing in their business.

Night to Remember 2012

The Night to Remember midnights walks have helped raise nearly £1 million for the hospices over the last few years. For 2012 the decision was made to upgrade the CMS system managing the website/s. I produced the new sites and set up the functionality so that event registrations have PayPal integration (with Instant Payment Notification to reduce administration time) and offer registrants the options of automatically creating a JustGiving fundraising page (which was achieved via the new JustGiving API). There is also Facebook and Twitter connectivity.

Digital Christmas Greetings

Continuing my trend of Xmas greetings cards: the 2012 edition was festive and communicative wishing my clients a merry christmas and also informing them opening times over the holidays. Plan ahead and get a bespoke design created for your greetings cards (for whatever holiday you want to celebrate!).

Synthetic Egg: Xmas email card

It's always good to keep in contact at Christmas and the traditional way is the good old Christmas Card. Over recent years an email Xmas greeting has become recognised as a far more environmentally friendly, and indeed cheaper, way of sending out your yuletide messages. I like to keep clients informed about my plans around the holidays so this years card doubled as an update on opening hours as well as the simple reminder about the services I offer moving into 2012.

ITF: email invites

On the back of the new event websites I produced for ITF there was a requirement for a pair of event invite email templates. Working within the brand style previously developed I worked with Andrew Whiteman of Open Globe Marketing to design and develop the new email templates, which include layout options and social media links.

ITF: logo and event websites

The previous ITF event websites were mis-matched and didn't offer the brand continuity or functionality needed by the organisations. Working through Andrew Whiteman of Open Globe Marketing I evolved the logo so each organisation had a clear but connected identity, and designed and developed 2 new websites in WordPress CMS which allowed them full control over their content. They can now easily upload and manage their own event listings (with location map and EventBrite connectivity) which get ordered and listed automatically to keep the homepage and event list up-to-date.

Artemis Studios: Creative course listings

Artemis Studios is an award winning performing arts school based in Bracknell, delivering a wide range of Dancing, Singing and Acting classes in a professional studio environment for all ages (3yrs to adult). They needed a new brochure to promote all their classes and the school itself, which needed to work both as something they could send out to prospects and something that they could distribute via schools and libraries etc. As such it needed to be lightweight and visually exciting.

IDASS: Health related fitness

IDASS care about helping people get fit for life. It's about healthy eating and targeted exercise. The main IDASS website promotes their range of health and fitness related products, but they also have a WordPress blog where industry experts chip in with tips for a healthier life. The existing blog was supposed to mirror the look and feel of the main site, but it was falling short in a number of areas. IDASS needed a quick solution and turned to me to optimise their WordPress installation for their needs and add a few extras such as image slider and social networking links. I also added plugins to help manage their site for areas such as SEO and database backups.

Turnkey Concept: Email Template

Turnkey Concept offer a range of kitchen and bathroom solutions for both trade and public. They needed a way to communicate all their new products and suppliers to their wide audience and decided on an HTML email template. Synthetic Egg was recommended to them and I provided them with a cost effective solution which could be used both directly from their local Outlook email client as well from any email marketing software, with just a minor change to the small print to ensure the recipients could unsubscribe.

Synthetic Egg eNewsletter

Email marketing is an important part of my own digital marketing plan, being used to help me keep in touch with those interested in my services, and as a means to communicate discount offers. It was important for me to keep the template look and feel consistent with the rest of my brand collateral (most notably the website), and also for it to be flexible so I could vary the number of articles in each category without the template struggling. As such I opted for a clean and simple approach to keep the focus on the features and offers, with a clear call to action in the footer. Subscribe to my enewsletter to take a look, and let me know what you think.

Compared&Reviewed: Review writing

The team at Compared&Reviewed needed an online expert to trial software for their increasingly popular comparison site. My task was to download the latest versions of a number popular FTP programs and put together objective reviews of the products to fit within a supplied template. Whilst I dabble in writing, creating reviews such as these was a new venture for me but it was one I found enjoyable.

Tony Briscoe: Email marketing

As part of his marketing plan Tony had been sending out irregular emails containing images his latest work to his client base. He needed to take this to the next step so I set up an online email marketing system which allowed him to better manage this process. He can now send out consistently branded emails (using the email template also developed) containing a mix of text and photography which he can prepare and send via the online system.

Ellingham Darcy: Recruitment

Ellingham Darcy is a recruitment consultancy working in niche areas within the media industry. Having recently rebranded they needed a new content managed website to communicate with their audience (both clients and candidates). WordPress was the perfect solution, and utilising a core Theme they already owned I developed this website to fit their requirements of incorporate vacancy listings as well blog posting, along with core company details and their latest twitter feed (as social media is a key tool for the company).

Windsor Globe: Wind in the willows

For the 2011 season The Windsor Globe Theatre were preparing a production of the classic Wind in the Willows for performance in the beautiful grounds of Alexandra Gardens by the River Thames in Windsor, with views of Castle.

Abbotsley Country Homes: Cambridgeshire retreat

Abbotsley Country Homes is an exclusive development in 6 acres of delightful Cambridgeshire countryside with 20 plots all destined for lovely wooden lodges. Having worked with me previously through Designation when I built the original website, the team were keen to work with me again to update the site ready for Phase 2 of their plot release.

St Barnabas Hospice: Open to the public

St Barnabas Hospice were putting the finishing touches to their brand spanking new hopsice building when they approached Article1o to provide an online booking system to reward their donors with a guided tour of the premises. With multiple thousand people involved and very specific requirements regarding the bookings and the output of tour group data for the guides, a bespoke system made the most sense.

Architectural FX: Seeing the light

Architectural FX design innovative and creative LED based lighting solutions. They approached me to update their website to include 2011 products and revised information, as well as to start to address some little annoyances in the Joomla CMS system. I provided them with a mix of web editing (content updating) and development (where changes were needed in the Joomla templates).

Artemis Studios: Jungle Book Summer School

Artemis Studios offers training to performers of all ages, covering singing, dancing and acting. One of their services is a fun summer school for kids aged 4 - 10 to introduce them to the performing arts and get them involved in creating their own performances. With popular tutors this is a fun, noisy and high energy week! I was approached to design marketing material (A5 printed flyer) for the themed event based around the Jungle Book.

Artemis Studios: Dance Weekend

Artemis Studios is, amongst other things, a private performing arts facility which offer training to performers of all ages. Current and graduate students can be seen in the West End and in film and television. In their lead up to summer 2011, Artemis wanted to promote their Dance Summer School Weekend, working with Alex Kordek at Pineapple Studios in London, and asked me to produce a design for use on a printed A5 Flyer (and poster).

Artemis Studios: Henry’s Arabian Nights

Artemis Studios is a private performing arts facility, casting space and agency, which offers training to performers of all ages. Current and graduate students can be seen in the West End and in film and television. I was approached to design advertising material (A5 printed flyer) for their 2011 summer show, Henry's Arabian Nights, to be performed at the Kenton Theatre in Henley-on-Thames.

Clare Greenstreet: Styling food

Clare is a food guru who, when she isn't coming up with new recipes or styling food for the top food photographers, can be found supporting a wide range of well known celebrity foodies on TV and Radio with presentations and demonstrations.

DAV Management: Leading the way

DAV is an independent project and programme management company. In late 2010 DAV decided the time was right for a new skin for their Eddie CMS website, as well as a new WordPress blog, as part of a rationisation exercise to help communicate their competitive advantages.

Blue Tomato: Serving London’s foodies

Blue Tomato is indeed emerging as the premier restaurant and food magazine for the capital. With inspiring articles, the latest news and key events for the foodie in us all. Built using WordPress 3.0 at the moment of it's release the site proves how far the ex-blogging platform has come to now be a serious player in the CMS arena.

Claudia Riccio: Advertising photographer

Claudia is a creative commercial photographer with over 10 years experience working with a wide range of clients. She needed a website portfolio to fit her brand and distinct preferences. I created a clean, easy to use portfolio site that fitted her requirements perfectly.

ControlCircle: Events microsite

ControlCircle: Max2Go

Sarah Britten-Jones: Appropriation

Sarah Britten-Jones is a British visual artist with a background in ceramics. Some of her work involves the process of appropriation, where something is taken and changed very slightly in order to create a new piece with new meanings, so her website has been designed to look similar to the website of a large well-known global furniture store. The site is built in WordPress and acts as Sarah's portfolio and her blog.

Blue Tomato: Email marketing

Blue Tomato is a growing food magazine for London, with an expanding readership and mailing list. They needed a simpler and more effective way of managing their email marketing. I set up a online email system for them, with a bespoke branded template, so that even non-technical staff could easily send out great looking eshots on demand.

Anthony Briscoe: Capturing special days

Anthony is a gifted wedding photographer specialising in reportage style images as well as the more traditional formal wedding images found in most couples albums. His focus is the Herfordshire and London catchments (and surrounding area) but he works across the country when the right projects come along. He needed a clean understated website to showcase his work, with smooth image slideshow and gallery (built with XML and JQuery).

Designation: Touchpoint

Touchpoint is the appropriate name for communication from Designation, focussed on the monthly e-shot supported by a blog where subscribers can post their feedback. The e-shot is on edition 25 as I write this, meaning it's been going out on time every month for over 2 years, which is a remarkable achievement for a company this size.

Doxense: Email marketing

Communic8 wanted to run an email marketing campaign for their client. They urgently needed someone to manage the delivery side. I set up the mailing system, added the lists, coded all the emails and scheduled the mailings, with the first email ready to go out the same day we were commissioned. I then managed the system and provided tracking reports after each mailing to give Communic8 the marketing information they needed.

Verasseti: A solution provider with integrity

When Dreamspace wanted to evolve they came to Designation having worked successfully together in the past. I ran the brand consultancy phase including workshops with the client. This phase following the Designation brand process to research and define a new brand based on the big idea that was identified to match the new direction the company was going in.

MyRetailTherapist: A shopaholics heroin

The shopaholics at MyRetailTherapist needed a CMS website that would support their addition. As well as having a blog, news diary (linked into NewsNow), a directory of favourite stores and a feature to allow people to pick their shopping brains, the site has a poll and online advertising functionality. Basically it’s an integrated tool also used to support digital marketing channels such as Twitter.

University of Reading: Taking a Quantum Jump

Reading Uni knew that there was a real lack of secondary school teachers in certain subjects. To tackle this they set up some new Subject Knowledge Enhancement (SKE) courses aimed at fast tracking new recruits onto the Post-graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) courses needed to become a qualified teacher.

Atkins Management Consultancy: Clever suits

When a client (Mantix) was taken over by the huge entity that is Atkins (becoming their Management Consultancy division) I was lucky enough to be able to continue on the account managing their website. I’ve been involved with their site over ten years now and I recently (Sept 09) made the 4th evolution of their website live. This new site incorporates numerous MooTools scripts to add dynamism to their content.

Sarah Graham: Darling of the art world

Sarah Graham is one of the up-and-coming darlings of the art world. Her paintings are fun and engaging so the website had to follow suit. The homepage is clean and simple with lots of interaction (using the MooTools framework) with colourful thumbnails showing off her work. The site is content managed (CMS) so Sarah can keep her fans up-to-date with all her latest news.

TVCCG: A five letter acronym on the lips of business

TVCCG were looking to expand and update their email marketing capabilities, as part of a push on their digital marketing. I provided consultancy to help them decide on the best solution for their multiple needs and then implemented (with the ability to integrate into their CRM, website and analytics package), and supported, the chosen solution.

CTH: Take the challenge, Pass it on

This is a campaign microsite to support the Chestnut's Challenge which aims to raise awareness and support for the Chestnut Tree House children's hospice in Sussex, led by some great kids within or connected to the hospice itself.

Nationwide People: Online recruitment

I've worked with the team at Nationwide People for over 10 years producing and supporting their public website and private intranet applications for their recruitment services. The public site is on its 3rd evolution, and the ASP and SQL Server based intranet is still going strong and meeting their bespoke needs.

Kyocera Greenlight: Promoting environmentally responsible business

As part of Kyocera's Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) mission GreenLight is a hub for information and interaction on the topic of business and climate change. If you’ve got an opinion, an insight, or need inspiration then it's the place to go.

Reflexxion: Exciting people

Reflexxion was founded with a desire to deliver world class standards in People Development across the Retail sector (i.e. they train retail staff to ensure they live up to their clients brand promises). The Reflexxion brand was developed by Designation to reinforce the companies desires and the website continues in that vein offering a smart professional appearence with that little bit of fizz that the Reflexxion directors both appreciate. My main involvement was guiding the design and developing the website.

London&Reading: Developing value

London & Reading Developments is focused on creating value in commercial and residential property. They needed a clean website that help promote their properties and services and give them a online presence to help in their marketing. My main involvement was in developing the website which utilises JavaScript galleries to showcase the properties in the portfolio.

The Capability Company: Supporting positive change

The Capability Company is committed to working in a way which is empowering and which recognises the importance of diversity and equality of opportunity. Designation developed the brand and online presence that helped reflect this positioning. My main involvement was in the development of the website.

SLS: Overlay, Look and Fit-out

SLS Group is an event delivery and implementation company that provide services Worldwide for a event organisers who need overlay, look and/or fit-out services. Be it temporary structures, way-finding, flags or fence scrim SLS can do it all.

Rotary Club of Reading: Serving since 1922

The Designation MD has been a member of Rotary for years so the current website (Eddie CMS / ASP / XHTML / CSS) is the second generation of sites produced for his local chapter/coven (or whatever). They do good work both in the local community and beyond and needed a site that could update themselves but looked modern to help bring the club out of the dark ages.

Glo Catering: Scrummy culinary delights

Glo Catering is the creation of Chef Gregory Glowatz, personal chef and event caterer. He approached Designation for a website to help promote his growing business. Designation did a photo shoot of his tasty recipes and utilised these in a simple website (developed by yours truly) to give Glo Catering the online presence that they desired.

Oddies: Odd socks of the world unite!

The Oddies are a series of childrens books (and hopefully soon a TV series) from the author Grant Slatter. Using the great character illustrations produced by the Oddies team we produced a number of Flash and CMS driven websites covering both Oddieworld itself as well as the ReadWithMe week campaign that was rolled out over the following years. I was involved in the production of all the website as well as interactive CD's that supported the ReadWithMe campaign.

Copeswood: Manifestation inc.

Copeswood's needed a new website to help clearly market their services. They wanted a clean and professional looking website with a couple of nice features. I developed a simple PHP site that utilised the MooTools JavaScript framework to add a modern gallery using MultiBox to show off their samples, as well as actually finding an actual justifiable reason to use the Reflection script on the homepage. I've also helped Copeswood with other eMarketing requirements in their communication.

Whitley Arts Festival: It’s not all pollocks

The Whitley Arts Festival is put together annually by Hogarth Productions. They contacted Designation in advance of the 2008 festival to provide brand and website services. My main involvement was in developing the festival website (Eddie CMS / ASP / XHTML /CSS).

Reading Green Business Network

Designation worked with Kyocera to support Reading Borough Council in setting up a website to support the activities of the Reading Green Business Network. I worked with the Kyocera marketing team (who manage/host the site) on the brand and the theme for the Drupal CMS that runs the site.

Norwegian Log: Building with nature’s best

The Norwegian Log website showcases the log buildings of various kinds they offer with lots of supporting material and case studies. The site is a CMS with is managed for the client as they are far too busy looking after the dozens of filtered prospects that contact them through the site every month (each one potentially a six figure sale).

Chestnut Tree House Hospice: Chestnut’s Challenge

Designation had been working with St Barnabas and Chestnut Tree House Hospices for a number of years running their main websites. The team at Chestnut Tree House came up with a new campaign idea to help raise much needed funds with the help of children either in or connected to the hospice. These Challengers have set themselves the task of promoting the work of the hospice and they are an example to us all.

Scienceworks: A woman of outstanding achievement

Averil has been a client of Designation for a number of years usually working as a project manager on a education based project either in print or online. She needed a site to showcase her work over the years and help promote the fact that she 'Woman of Outstanding Achievement 2007'. I worked as consultant and developer on this website which is designed to reflect her personality and to allow individual sections to be promoted seperately dependant on the audience she is talking to.

University of Reading: Reaching out to the teenagers!

We all know that teenagers reallllly need a damn good educating. As such when approached by the University of Reading to produce their Science Outreach website aimed at supporting GCSE students with their revision it seemed like a good opportunity to get involved in moulding the minds of the next generation.

Performance Unlimited: High performance enabled

Now onto my 6th marketing contact at Performance Unlimited (a company that is continually evolving) I've been involved in a number of programmes and projects with them over the years. At the peak I managed a programme of over 10 projects covering both online and offline delivery of the brand we'd just created for them. These included a new CMS website, domain name strategy, pay-per-click (PPC) marketing and newsletter.

Bronzeoak: Fuelling the future?

Bronzeoak deliver energy from sustainable sources so as bio-ethanol. I acted as a brand consultant and programme manager for their corporate re-brand and subsequent collateral updates. These included a new content managed website, where I managed external suppliers for site development.

Cubeez: They cubee-doobee-did-it

Cubeez is a kids TV show still seen occasionally in the UK (it used to be on GMTV) and elsewhere worldwide. When the first series launched in 2001 the production team wanted a state-of-the-art interactive website to support the show and continue the excitement of the characters into the online world. I worked as project manager, overseeing an 8 person team on this £130K project.

Tony Briscoe: Capital food photographer

Tony is one of London's top food photographers with an eye for detail that mirrors his palette. Having successfully produced his previous site he came back to me when he wanted a website refresh to go with his new brand. Working closely with him to produce exactly what he wanted we kept it clean and simple so the photography would do the talking.

Portfolio

A sample of work

This portfolio displays projects produced either for clients directly or indirectly via agencies (where approved – unfortunately I can’t show many projects owing to NDA’s).

Start the conversation

Email studio@synegg.co.uk or call +44 (0)774 744 0194