The studio is most renowned for its films made using stop-motion clay animation, and in particular for the characters Wallace and Gromit. In its 40 years of existence it has produced a vast array of successful films, shorts, TV episodes and ads.

We needed to execute a creative concept in intricate detail. We identified that the best approach was to use a highly specialised motion control rig with the ability to capture a variety of intricate camera movements. This prompted our decision to approach Aardman to use its famous Milo rig – also used on motion pictures like Chicken Run and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, as well as commercials and music promos worldwide.

The Milo is the world’s best portable rig. With full 360° movement, there is almost no limit to what it can do. By programming in key focal points, we were able to ensure smooth and seamless movement throughout the process. Its architecture allowed us to film from above while avoiding obstruction from rigging.

At Harleys, we have a wide network of contacts we can partner with on projects. This allows us to fulfil any specialised requirements in a cost-effective way, while retaining control over content and creative concepts.

For our clients, this offers limitless possibilities. By combining cutting-edge digital delivery with our expert knowledge of their business and brand, our clients receive fresh, contemporary material which aligns with their corporate objectives.

I picked a weekend in May for a quick trip to Barcelona – a single traveller with one 20 kg case and a set of golf clubs. Leaving from London Stansted, I was sure to fly into the central Barcelona El Prat, as budget airlines are renowned for dumping tourists in provincial airports miles from their actual destination.

The initial visual onslaught of the Ryanair homepage is something to behold: a bizarre selection of colour clashes, modal windows, and links to everything from bakeries to poker. It also manages to bypass my popup blocker with an ad for hotels.

easyJet in comparison is faithful to its brand, and although there’s still a lot to look at, it’s a pleasant experience, with relevant links and a nice image area.
Once I’ve chosen my flights – comparable trips leaving on Saturday morning and returning on Sunday evening – I can check the prices. Ryanair’s total is just £82.33 – cheaper than the journey to the airport and back – while easyJet is almost twice the price at £140.98. If I wasn’t cynical I might forget easyJet and go ahead with Ryanair, but I’ll stick with it and carry out the task with due diligence.

After adding my suitcase and clubs, the easyJet price has gone up by just over £70. That sounds on the expensive side, but I do expect to pay a little more for my specialist needs. Ryanair on the other hand wants £100 for my clubs and £50 for my bag. That makes my luggage nearly twice as expensive as I am.

Then comes the part where I feel like someone’s hand is in my pocket. The Ryanair site forces me to deselect extras for SMS confirmation, speedy boarding, travel insurance and even suitcase purchase options. Most ridiculously of all, rather than simply checking ‘no’ for travel insurance, I have to search through a drop down list of destination countries to find the ‘don’t cover me’ option.

To be fair, easyJet offers me largely the same range of extras (apart from the suitcase), but rather than making me deselect them, there is a big, bright ‘continue’ button which I can hit repeatedly until I get to the final page.

Once I get there, easyJet’s price is £212.98 as long as I pay on debit card – the cost has stayed the same since the initial hike following the addition of my luggage.

Ryanair on the other hand has increased the price three times during the booking, and it is now £244.33 – more than easyJet, nearly three times what I was originally quoted, and still with the threat of an additional administration fee.

The verdict? easyJet has developed its brand and UX to present a credible offer for travellers of all kinds, with pricing that is transparent enough for you to make a reasonable comparative judgement. Ryanair on the other hand may attract unwitting travellers with its low cost claims, but a shocking experience leaves the consumer feeling depressed and disgruntled before they’ve even got to the airport.

The venture, which supports and inspires talented sportspeople between the ages of 12 and 15, needed a clear, recognisable identity. The task assigned to the students was to develop an original brand and logo which could be used on the Talent Hubs sites, promotional material, Wesport website and coach sports kit.

“We felt that it was an excellent opportunity to gain some fresh new ideas to support the launch of a new project for Wesport,” explains Richard Colman, the organisation’s Coaching Development Manager. “It was overwhelming entering the room with all of the designs covering the walls on the presentation day. We are extremely pleased with the winning design.”

We were presented with some thoughtful and inventive concepts this year, and have been very impressed by the high standard of work received. The work was judged according to three key criteria: creativity, relevance and execution.

After reviewing all the entries, we can now reveal that this year’s winner was Barbara Szente, who impressed the judges with her distinctive illustrative style. “I had the idea for the concept at quite an early stage,” says Barbara. “It was tough to come up with a campaign and keep it consistent, but luckily we always had feedback. It was demanding but exciting at the same time.”

“The annual Harleys project always creates a buzz at the college, not to mention a healthy dose of friendly competition”, says course lecturer Alistair Myers. “The students rose to the challenge very successfully, many of them making some great advances in their concept development and technical skills.

“I think that the winning design strikes a good visual balance between successfully communicating the Talent Hubs brand, using a strong logo, and incorporating a range of well crafted illustrative elements that will appeal to both young people and to their parents.”

We discussed the controversial 2012 Olympics logo in one of our previous blog posts, but what’s more unusual is the logo that has been selected for the Jubilee – and how it was created.

In a bold move, the logo was chosen following a national competition organised by Blue Peter for children aged between 6 and 14. The winner was ten year old Katherine Dewar from Chester, whose design features a crown-topped Union Jack surrounded by diamonds.

At first glance, it is not the sort of logo you would expect for such a prestigious occasion, but perhaps that is the point.

Branding expert and competition judge Martin Lambie-Nairn said that giving a child the chance to design the emblem was “a brave ambition”, and that the result is “beautiful, fresh and practical.”

The internet is awash with company logos that have drawn criticism or mockery due to their design. But when a logo is hand-drawn by a ten year old out of a sense of national pride (or a desire to meet The Queen and get a Blue Peter badge) it shows that they don’t always have to be the compromised result of a committee decision.

This may or may not have been at the forefront of Chris King’s mind when, while working on the Sainsbury’s customer services team, he received a letter from three year old Lily Robinson. In her letter, Lily asked why tiger bread was called tiger bread, pointing out that its pattern bore a closer resemblance to a giraffe, and suggested that it be renamed giraffe bread.

Chris’ witty and endearing response (which included a £3 gift card) so impressed Lily’s mother that she posted the letter on her blog. It quickly went viral and on the back of that publicity, Sainsbury’s announced that they would implement Lily’s suggestion and rename the bread.

This simple act has given the supermarket a free advertising boost, and won it favour from many in the blogosphere. It is a prime example of just how far an act of “above the call of duty” customer service can spread.

Here are some examples of other unexpected successes generated by customer engagement and social media:

1. Bring back Wispa

In 2003, Cadbury’s discontinued the Wispa bar due to a decade of falling sales. However after a Facebook group dedicated to its return drew impressive numbers (and media coverage), Cadbury decided to bring the bar back.

Cadbury’s also cannily turned the opportunity in to a creative and media strategy.  In order to overcome budget restrictions, they started the “For the love of Wispa” campaign which quickly went viral and saw Wispa become the UK’s best-selling chocolate bar with sales of GBP 92.5 million.

2. Coca-Cola causes ‘Happiness’

According to Coca-Cola, the only other thing that spreads faster than a viral ad is happiness. That seemed to be the thinking behind their campaign that saw a very special vending machine placed on a college campus. The resulting video was watched by over a million people on its first day through showing that everyone likes to be cheered up – and that students love free stuff.

3. Snakes on Social Media

In 2006, Snakes on a Plane was released and despite it being quite a poor film, it arrived to extreme online hype. Why? Because of the phenomenon that was the Snakes on a Plane meme.  When it was first announced, the online community leapt upon the ridiculous title and nature of the film and made it part of the cultural consciousness.

New Line Studio, of course, embraced the madness and cancelled plans to rename it to the more sensible Pacific Air Flight 121. They even ordered reshoots to bring it in line with growing fan expectations that included more snakes, more nudity and more Samuel L. Jackson f-bombs. No studio has since been able to duplicate that level of free publicity.

The growth of an increasingly liberal culture coupled with the rise of the online arena has bred a new kind of consumer – one who responds to more ‘human’ brands. It’s a trend known as Maturialism: exposing people to more challenging, uncensored ideas.

For business owners, this means thinking beyond conventional offerings. There has never been a better time for being bold with brand image, nor a greater market for unusual, outspoken material with personality and wit.

Here are some examples of modern brands which have embraced the more provocative side of marketing:

• Antonio Federici Italian Gelato combines an image of a pregnant nun eating ice-cream with the tagline ‘Immaculately Conceived’.
• Saint & Sinner, an Australian wine company, label their wines in the style of vintage phone booth calling cards.
• Spanish clothing brand Desigual ran an offer at its stores in Madrid and Barcelona, where customers who arrived semi-naked were rewarded with free clothing.
• Gwilym Davies, 2009 World Barista Champion and owner of the Prufrock coffee house in London, created a new take on the traditional customer loyalty card with a customer disloyalty card, encouraging customers to try coffee at other independent stores.

Brand identity is important, but so is brand humanity. In a world full of faceless corporations, it’s nice to come across something different now and again.

Forming a module of the college’s FdA in Graphic Design with Interactive Multimedia course, the award gives students the opportunity to experience and respond to a live client brief. The project is mutually beneficial, providing value for the organisation as well as the students.

This April, Wesport will be launching a new initiative called Talent Hubs, designed to support and inspire talented sportspeople between the ages of 12 and 15. Through weekly training sessions, the scheme aims to provide them with the core skills necessary to help them move forward in their chosen discipline.

The task allotted to the college design students is to develop a strong, creative identity for the Talent Hubs campaign using a range of promotional materials, from posters and business cards to t-shirts and water bottles. If successful, the new brand will be used to promote the scheme across the South West.

“The Harleys Design Award is a great opportunity for the students to build on their creative skills within a professional context,” explains Ken Hale, Creative Director at Harleys. “It enables them to apply the design principles they’ve learnt to a corporate identity, whilst at the same time making a valuable contribution to a worthwhile cause.”

“The previous students set a high standard in 2011, and we are very much looking forward to seeing what is produced this year.”

Clients, suppliers and friends alike were invited to have a go at our interactive seasonal game, designed by the Harleys team and based on the world-famous British Christmas Dinner. Entrants were then asked to send us a screen grab of their score.

Some of the more ‘creative’ entries included photoshopped screen grabs with astronomical scores – but genuine winner Inga Mills, Marketing Communication Manager at Saab, has a bottle of champagne on its way to her.

If you missed out on the chance to enter, let us know, and we’ll add you to the list for next time. And if you want to relive the festive spirit, you can still have a go at the game here – no more prizes though!

“It’s just plain wrong,” said an angry John Richards, chairman of the Apostrophe Protection Society. “A bookshop is the last place to be so slapdash with English.”

He is not alone. On Twitter, one user believes that the apostrophe was dropped “to facilitate morons”, whilst another user labelled ‘highly influential’ describes it as “one more reason not to shop in Waterstone(‘)s.” Others are righteously calling out to “protect our language from decay.”

But Waterstones aren’t the first to face the apostrophe dilemma. While Sainsbury’s and McDonald’s have both retained theirs, Clarks, Currys, Harrods and Selfridges have all said goodbye to pesky punctuation.

James Daunt, the managing director of Waterstones, defends the decision as one of common sense and practicality: “Waterstones without an apostrophe is, in a digital world of URLs and email addresses, a more versatile and practical spelling.” He has a point.

Tim Waterstone, the founder of Waterstones, has had nothing to do with the company since 1993. But while some believe that the removal of the comma is insulting to the founder, Daunt insists that the change “reflects an altogether truer picture of our business today which, while created by one, is now built on the continued contribution of thousands of individual booksellers.”

So does it really matter that Waterstones has dropped its apostrophe? Are its customers going to stop buying books there as a result? Our guess: probably not.

• January – the World Cockroach Championships in Australia
• February – the next leap day
• March – The end of Facebook, according to Weekly World News
• April – Edinburgh Beltane Fire Festival
• May –  Gloucestershire Cheese Rolling, where competitors chase a wheel of cheese down Cooper’s hill in Gloucestershire, England
• June –  the last transit of Venus we are likely to see in our lifetimes
• July – the opening of the London Olympics
• August – Mars Science Laboratory due to land on the red planet
• September – six men wearing reindeer horns perform the traditional yearly Horn Dance in Staffordshire, England
• October – China will follow the European Union with the phase-out of inefficient light bulbs
• November – total solar eclipse in some parts of the world
• December – the world will end, according to the ancient Mayan calendar