Byrom, one of the most successful companies in the North West, specialise in providing turnkey solutions for accommodation, ticketing, information technology, hospitality and transportation.  They provide these services to Organising Committees and Rights Holders of major international sporting events such as the FIFA World Cup, the Confederations Cup and the Ryder Cup.

C21 recommended an integrated approach, including a refresh of their existing corporate identity and incorporating a variety of additional creative communications to ensure accurate message delivery to their very specific target market.  The project will also involve creating a dynamic, intuitive and vibrant new website and we’re looking forward to delivering a great result for Byrom.

Just in case you missed our previous post, Barnsley Hospice provides specialist palliative care for hundreds of local people each year. The hospice’s main priority is to achieve the best possible quality of life for patients with a life limiting illness, whilst supporting their families, during the period of illness and bereavement.

Applying the fresh, creative direction and the bright new colour palette, designed at the end of 2012, we created a brand new campaign for the Legacy Fundraising arm of the hospice, to be utilised partly to promote ‘Make a Will Month’ this February. As part of the campaign, a selection of local solicitors kindly agreed to write a simple will in exchange for a minimum £50 donation to Barnsley Hospice.

Campaign collateral included posters, leaflets, flyers and bookmarks which have been distributed locally to participating solicitors and local businesses alongside the hospice’s database.

This latest campaign sits seamlessly with the ‘Target2’ fundraising collateral produced in 2012, at the heart of which are striking graphic elements and a fresh, modern approach. The objective – to showcase the hospice whilst promoting ‘Make a Will Month’ and generating much needed legacy gift donations.

You can find out more about Barnsley Hospice and the amazing work they do here.

The community interest company offers high quality, mobile, flexible solutions to suit any childcare need.

Whether it’s a company organising a staff fun day or a family organising a wedding, children of all ages can be cared for by qualified and experienced members of the childcare team who will transform your venue into a play paradise!

Our brief was simple, to produce a corporate identity and marketing materials that would be fun and exciting, appealing to all children regardless of age and gender.

The result was Planet Child’s Play: a name that embodied the creative and unique environment created just for kids. Consisting of an ‘out of this world’ logo and memorable alien character, C21 produced creative concepts for a full stationery suite, van livery and mascot to accompany them to events.

Taking the brief a little too literally, we produced a mascot that would appeal to both boys and girls by creating a dual sided costume. On one side we have Al and on the other Leanne, both who have their own unique characteristics and colour theme.

Look out for Planet Child’s Play and their mascots Al and Leanne when you are out and about in Manchester and if you are thinking of hosting an event and need to arrange childcare, be sure you give them a call.

To find out more about Planet Child’s Play click here.

Barnsley Hospice provides specialist palliative care for hundreds of local people each year. The hospice’s main priority is to achieve the best possible quality of life for patients with a life limiting illness, whilst supporting their families, during the period of illness and bereavement.

For the past few months, C21 have been working together with the team at the hospice in order to create an identity for the charities new fundraising campaign, Target £2.

C21 have provided a fresh, creative direction for what is one of the charity’s main income streams. A bright new colour palette has been created to sit alongside the existing corporate brand style. Whilst a colourful graphical approach and clever headline messaging brings the campaign to life, puts the fun in fundraising and conveys the personality of the hospice.

Elements created as part of the campaign include a fundraising ideas leaflet, donation envelope, sponsor form and several posters which are all contained within a handy A5 folder. The pack will be distributed by the hospice to encourage and support fundraisers, whilst raising the profile locally.

C21 will continue to work alongside the charity, assisting in the delivery of their integrated marketing and communications campaigns in order to build positioning, maintain brand image and to improve the reputation of the hospice within the local community.

Creative work has already begun on a follow up campaign which we’ll post on our website in the New Year.

You can find out more about Barnsley Hospice and the amazing work they do here.

C21 has been reinstated as the creative agency for the Central Manchester Foundation Trust Charity after a tendered, three way pitch, which saw us win back the account from the incumbent agency.

Having worked on the account for four years previously, from 2008 to 2011, we made the difficult decision not to tender for the business in 2012, due to the significant changes that had impacted the agency the previous year.  However, we are now delighted to be working with the CMFT team again and are extremely excited about the fresh, creative direction that won us the pitch.

Work has already begun on reinvigorating one of the charity’s main annual initiatives, the Big T-Break, and further discussions are underway to map out all other key activities for 2013.

The Central Manchester Foundation Trust Charity supports continuing excellence in treatment, care and research at a family of hospitals across Manchester including the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, the University Dental Hospital of Manchester, Manchester Royal Eye Hospital, Manchester Royal Infirmary, Saint Mary’s Hospital and Trafford Hospitals. These hospitals provide world-class care to over one million patients every year.

C21 is delighted to be able to provide our skills, services and financial support to help the Charity deliver a better experience for sick people across the North West.

We’ve been busy helping Ixis take on the Public sector world.

Ixis deliver innovative web solutions to support business goals and provide a better customer experience. Clients range from large enterprises to public sector organisations, national charities and start up businesses and include the British Council, Epilepsy Action, Times Education Supplement, The Association of Corporate Treasurers, Barclays and UK General.

The UK government plan to reduce ICT spending dramatically in the public sector stating that by December 2015, 50% of central departments’ new ICT spending must be on public cloud computing services.

Ixis are the Drupal open source specialists; but what is Drupal? (Highly dissimilar to Droopy, Well, the cute American animated cartoon dog) Drupal is an open source development platform which powers some of the busiest sites on the web. It is easy to use, flexible and extensible, allowing you to quickly create, update and manage a website or web application.

More importantly, as a Drupal website gets bigger, it’s easy to add custom features from the thousands of modules available to download.

We thought such a complicated ‘Geeky’ subject should be put across in a simple, informative and professional way. So, we came up with a step by step pocket sized guide to Drupal open source and Ixis. Our guide describes how Drupal works using the analogy of baking a cake from a bog standard recipe, but adding your favourite toppings, miraculously making it the most amazing fat free cake you’ve ever tasted.

In addition to the guide, we created an exhibition banner to promote the never ending powers of Drupal with a ‘Sky’s the limit concept’ and word cloud graphic. A balloon icon piloted by Drupal characters was created to symbolise the effortless journey of migration from your old system to shiny new Drupal open source technology.

A post card giveaway acted as an introduction to Ixis, with the idea that when it comes to Drupal ‘We reign’ and used the Drupal logo as graphical raindrops which puts special emphasis on the professional expertise and technical knowhow of the IXIS team.

To ensure a fully integrated approach, the offline campaign elements were supported with a series of website updates in order to re-fresh the online presence whilst complimenting the campaign. The bespoke graphics created as part of this public sector communication, really do help establish Ixis as the specialists in Drupal development, hosting and support.

Not only have we managed to promote a complicated subject in a simplified manner to a public sector audience who could be confused about which direction to fly in! We have also given Ixis a friendly, approachable personality and have clearly shown that they are super nice people to do business with.

We have also proved that web developers have character and are not all ‘Geeks’ with brains the size of planets…even though one day they just may inherit the Earth.

You can visit the Ixis website here.

In the meantime, look out for our Ixis office graphics update which is coming soon.

There is a feature within the site where you can both listen and watch her latest music videos whilst viewing breathtaking photography enabling you to get a feel for Afrika’s infectious personality. There is also a live Twitter feed to keep the user up to speed with her latest whereabouts and links through to her Facebook page. The implementation of an automated process within the content management system and a controlled custom managed layout ensures a user friendly back end system that can be kept up to date with latest gig times and details of new records. You can buy Afrika’s latest single through itunes on the website (http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/rainbow-ep/id546394290) and listen to all of her other music through Soundcloud and YouTube.

The development of this new and dynamic website, together with her inspiring talent will no doubt encourage music maestros to visit the site and subsequently make enquiries. We wish Afrika all the luck in the world with her music career.

Have a look at her new website now to see it for yourself http://www.afrikafuentes.com/

The Tumbleweed world is a purely organic place. It’s a micro world of eco-composting and worm farming. It’s a world of fun and practical solutions for the environmental issues of today and tomorrow.

Tumbleweed are a company that make a significant contribution to our earth’s environmental sustainability by designing and manufacturing innovative products that encourage consumers of all ages to reduce, re-use and recycle organic waste.

With that in mind we designed a website that would communicate the brand values of Tumbleweed in a fun, informative and perfectly natural way.

Recycling begins at home and right from the home page you know you are entering into a world that is in tune with the environment. We developed the Aussie, Tiger and Melony worm characters to help the user wriggle their way through the site and have kept the same friendly illustration style for the navigation bar and page headers, to ensure the site is user friendly. We had fun with fonts and gave the new website a fresh and a more organic feel. We learnt some amazing facts about worms too…did you know a worms favourite food is Melon?

We expanded on the ‘Kids stuff’ and ‘Educational’ sections of the site by creating Compostonaut, the space composter who fights the good fight for planet Earth against the evil General Waste. You can even help make one of Compostonaut’s paper-mȃché Carrockets plus learn about the environment and many other out of this world things to do.

A gallery, videos, news and press updates and a Q&A with TV composting expert Angus Stewart all help to keep the site content fresh and users fully up-to-date.

50% of household waste is organic and can be recycled into your garden. Tumbleweed are a company that cares about the World we live in and we hope the website conveys this. The composting and worm farming products are great fun to use for kids and adults alike and help everyone put something back into our earth.

….Because our Earth matters.

We handed over designs to the Australian team for the site to be developed locally, however it is now live and you can check out the pages for yourself by following this link.

Following a two stage pitch process which started back in 2010, C21 have been the lucky Agency chosen by Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust Charity (CMFT Charity) to design and develop their online presence – www.cmftcharity.org.uk.

CMFT Charity works hard to make a difficult time a little bit easier for both young and old within a family of hospitals:

• Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital Charity
• University Dental Hospital of Manchester Charity
• Manchester Royal Eye Hospital Charity
• Manchester Royal Infirmary Charity
• Saint Mary’s Hospital Charity
• Trafford Hospitals Charity

Although based in Manchester, the Charity provides services to people from all across the North West region and for some specialist services further afield. The general catchment area is as far north as Cumbria and as far south as Stoke.

Having worked closely with the Charity team for a number of years in order to establish a recognised brand and build awareness of the charity, C21 have a deep understanding of the organisation, their aims and objectives.

Following the pitch win we set about creating a dynamic, intuitive and vibrant design for the new website. The look and feel of the website needed to be fresh, friendly and approachable but at the same time reassuring.

It was also imperative that each hospital within the family was present and easily accessible via the homepage, and that each of the hospitals within the family received equal representation, using its own unique logo and colour palette.

Users land on the new website via a splash animation, created specifically to provide a friendly introduction and insight as to who the Charity are and what they do.

The animation is lively, dynamic and engages the friendliness and hands on approach of the Charity, whilst communicating the key aim – supporting continued excellence in treatment, care and research at a family of hospitals across Manchester.

When the homepage is revealed, users initially see a rolling banner which showcases each of the hospital Charities, revealing information specific to each Charity and acting as a one click way of directing users to the individual hospital charity pages which lay deeper within the site architecture.

A latest news feed and events calendar (both direct feeds from the website CMS) ensure that the

homepage is kept fresh, encouraging repeat visits and a prominent ‘Donate’ area encourages online giving.

Spotlight promotional areas encourage users to ‘Get involved’ and to delve deeper into the site whilst a simple sign up to e-newsletter, alongside a Charity video placeholder and social media links all encourage interaction.

Julie-Anne Weaver, Press Officer for the Charity said:

“We are delighted with our new website which is bright and clean and has varying levels of functionality; fulfilling the brief that we gave to C21. C21 has given us great design, fantastic service throughout the build and most importantly, they have given us the tools to continue to develop our website and keep our supporters updated at very low cost.”

The new site is such an important, integral and valuable tool which will enable the Charity team to engage and communicate with varying audiences (in varying locations) including current supporters, patients and staff as well as helping to attract new supporters and communicate key messages online.

The website has been built using the Drupal Content Management System (CMS) which is intuitive and truly extensible, providing a solid platform which can be developed, growing with the Charity as they grow, over the coming years.

For more information visit www.cmftcharity.org.uk

We're absolutely chipper about our success at the Chip Shop Awards.

Hannah and Shane (Haddock) were the ones tasked to go to the awards and pick up our prizes, as well as keep us up to the minute with tweets and texts. See their pictures here.

In total we won 1 chip and two vinegars. The winning work was:

Heart Stopping Moments

Goodbye Kitty

I Love Nicola Young

The competition was very though this year, so to even be nominated was an result.

And as chips are very moreish, no doubt we will be hungry for more awards next year.