Archive for the 'Unusual' Category

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Everyone wants to take the trophy home!

Published on November 27, 2009 in Unusual. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .
Everyone wants to take the Trophy home!

Everyone wants to take the Trophy home!

There’s good news and there’s bad news.

The good news is that Barclays are extending the entry period for the Barclays Home Win prize draw.

The bad news is that there are already over 12,000 entries which have been logged through the prize web site, so you’re going to have to be pretty lucky to win that prize.

The prize (let us just remind you) is to spend a day with the Barclays Premier League trophy.

Get your team photographed with it. Let your kids take it to school. Use it as a charity fund-raiser. What you do with your prize is (within reason!) up to you. The trophy comes with its own security staff too, so you don’t need to worry what might happen if it got stolen. Remarkably, too, the prize is available wherever in the world you are – Azerbaijan or Zambia – Barclays will (somehow!) get that trophy to everyone who wins.

Modesty forbids us to mention who designed the web site for this competition, which Barclays are hosting to celebrate their Premier League sponsorship contract being extended for another three years.

For more information, go to www.barclayshomewin.com

Christmas, and the Recovery

Published on November 25, 2009 in Unusual. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Just a month now before Christmas is upon us. Next quarter (so we’re told) is the one when the UK finally emerges from recession.

Whether it does or it doesn’t, companies around the UK should be better structured to take advantage of the opportunities that do come along – more efficient probably, with every kind of expenditure monitored and scrutinised.

Marketing expenditure is no different. Fortunately, because we can offer a very cost-effective service, we often benefit when times get tough. So, we’re lucky that things haven’t really slowed down at all this year. We’re grateful for the opportunity that Christmas provides, to get our new identity complete and rolled out.

At the moment, our web site is a holding site, but not long into the new year, it should be available with much more content, and show the wide range of work that we are involved in. Please come back and take a look at www.designwildwest.com in 2010.

Electronic Christmas? Our first brief of the year

Published on November 11, 2009 in Corporate and Unusual. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

It must be Christmas soon.

We’ve just had our first brief for an electronic christmas card, which, like the first cuckoo, is a sure sign that the season is about to change.

A lot of our clients and friends like cards that can be emailed. They’re fun, they cost a whole lot less to deliver, they’re environmentally friendly and what’s more, companies can give some money to charity from the budget.

Gif animations can be delivered to pretty much any email box. Flash animations are trickier but there’s usually a way to get recipients to take a look at what a company has created. And if a card like this is done with a bit of flair, it can help underline a company’s position and credentials, and become an effective piece of marketing weaponry, without looking inappropriate.

So, with Christmas around the corner, what will you be sending this year?

Get your hands on the Premier League Trophy!

Published on November 9, 2009 in Sport and Unusual. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .
The Barclays Premier League Trophy could be yours - for just a day

The Barclays Premier League Trophy could be yours – for just a day

No. You don’t have to spent half a billion buying a team. All you have to do is to go to www.barclayshomewin.com and enter the Barclays free prize draw.

20 winners from around the world will get the chance to have the Premier League Trophy for the day.

What could you do with it? Well, just think. You could lift it aloft with the team you play for. You could take it to your kids school. You could use it as part of a fund-raising opportunity for charity. Or you could just put it on your mantelpiece and dream.

But you’ll have to enter quickly! Our information is that a number of unnamed Premier League managers want to get their hands on this unique prize…

Web site and promotional advertising is by Wild West of course.

Web Site Statistics – A New Twist

Published on September 17, 2009 in Unusual and Web. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Putting privileged information on your web site, probably in a password-protected area, has advantages beyond treating special clients in a special way. Because each password is linked to a particular person or company, you can track very closely statistics like:

- how often did each one visit the site (if at all)?
- what files did they download? (and so what are the hot topics for that individual?)
- what pages did they visit?

These kind of statistics can be interesting when trying to assess how and why shareholders, investors, journalists and others behave as they do, and can be important for your sales and management processes, as well as providing valuable input to a sales team or marketing campaign.

Safety on Ships

Published on August 27, 2009 in Display and Unusual. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .
One of our series of animal safety posters for Charles Taylor & Co

One of our series of animal safety posters for Charles Taylor & Co

We were asked by marine insurance specialists Charles Taylor & Co to produce a set of posters to promote safety on ships. Ships’ crew knew about safe working procedures, but they occasionally ignored them, with sometimes disastrous results. Of course, each one of these incidents was not only serious, but expensive too, and Charles Taylor wanted to do all it could to prevent them. One problem was that crew members’ first language was often not English. Another was that previous ‘blood and guts’ approaches were being ignored. Our solution was to use animals to point up messages. We hoped that by raising a smile and providing an attractive, friendly image, we could make more of a point. Our series of posters was enthusiastically displayed on ships, and helped to reduce the number of crew injury incidents and, just as important, the value of claims that stemmed from them.

Helping to Eliminate Pollution

Published on August 24, 2009 in Corporate, Design and Unusual. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .
Guidance on Responding to Pollution for Dutch shipowners

Guidance on Responding to Pollution for Dutch shipowners

All over the world, shipowners and seamen are being told to eliminate pollution, to such an extent that, in many areas, it is a criminal offence to cause or allow pollution to happen, even accidentally. Much of the burden of this problem – and everyone agrees that pollution must be prevented – falls on those who insure commercial shipping. This is true especially for the many commercial craft who ply their trade on Europe’s waterways. One of the leading insurers is the Standard London organisation, whose managers are longstanding Wild West clients, the city-based Charles Taylor & Co., part of Charles Taylor Consulting.  As part of their response to the need for continued vigilance about pollution and the need to handle it effectively, Pollution Response sheets like these are designed and produced by Wild West in a variety of languages – Russian, Dutch, German and English. Just another example of how designers have to deal with multi-lingual issues these days! You can see more our design work for Charles Taylor at www.standard-club.com/knowledgecentre/

Hi-Tech Concepts Brought to Life

Published on August 11, 2009 in Unusual and Web. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Okana are a very specialised high-tech company. Using search technologies from Autonomy, they create tools and appliances that help companies to search electronic traffic well beyond the limitations of text and data. Okana asked us to provide animations that would help them show what they were able to do on their web site. These are what we came up with! See them live (and at the proper size!) at www.okana.com

Explaining complex products – how the web can help

Published on July 23, 2009 in Unusual and Web. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Some companies are so innovative that they have a tough job explaining just how their products work.

Take Secerno for example. Conventional wisdom says that to protect valuable information resources, you have to build a wall around it. The trouble is that when you do, the resources lose their value simply because they aren’t easily accessible, and anyway, the people who want to damage your databases, or steal them, may not be outside your company. What about the disgruntled employee passed over for a pay rise? Or the sales rep who is going to work for a competitor?

Secerno’s database security product works by looking at ‘normal’ patterns of use. Then, when something odd happens (the sales rep tries to download all your customer data, for example), alarms are triggered and the potential damage can be stopped.

Now, that isn’t so easy to explain, but an animated diagram on the Secerno web site does it much better than we can do here, just using words. Take a look at http://www.secerno.com/howitworks/diags.html

Animations like this can help potential buyers to appreciate just what it is that your product or service is offering.