If you’re at the Carswell Senior Golf Tournament in Oxfordshire on Thursday the 15th of July then you’ll see us at one of the holes (tbc). We really wanted to get involved with some local events and saw this as a good opportunity to dip our toe in. We’ve made a vinyl banner for the occasion (which for us digital designers is really quite exciting!).

Big thanks go to Nick Ruck at Falcon Signs for getting our sign finished in double quick time. Good luck to everyone playing in the tournament!

It’s 9 hours into the new start up business and things are flying along. We are close to a brand execution and the developers are steaming along (lots of odd sounds coming from that quarter). Looking at the developer plan it all seems to be finished by 1pm – which is a little ambitious – although as we all know developers always underestimate things….

We have been genuinely busy this year and have had our noses pressed firmly against the millstone.

Back in February we won a fantastic project with BT. There’s not much we can say about it unfortunately because it’s all under lock and key, but needless to say it’s kept all of us at Hutchhouse very busy. We’re excited about its implications and with phase one out the door, we can’t wait to get stuck into phase 2. This is a huge project and likely to be ongoing for the rest of the year .

In May we did some work for a local company based here on the business park: CMS Industries & CMS Ergonomics. They required two websites to cover both aspects of their business. For the ergonomic website they saw a requirement for some videocasts which we filmed, edited and compressed for the website. You can see them here (bottom right video library). A big thanks to Matthew Royan for his help as the cameraman on this shoot.

Around this time I went to New York with my good friend@NickClement. We had a fantastic week meeting up with old friends, cycling around Manhattan and generally enjoying the trappings of the metropolis. We visited the MoMa and theNew Museum. Both rammed to the rafters with inspiration.

During June I did some designs on behalf of White October. Working in conjunction with the RSA and Carbon Limited to create an online web application based around the emerging Carbon Trading Market. I was particularly happy with the design for this and think it’s easily one of the best works to date. I’ll post up here when it’s live.

July also saw the release of allthingsbeer.co.uk. One of our first projects where we gave our Junior – Paul Clement – as much control as we could. Paul got stuck right in and produced a good website which the client was more than happy with. He also did a fine job of the business cards, logo and comp slips, also producing a glossy brochure that eventually reached over 1000+ copies.

August saw us push through two more websites for local businesses Space2Think and Landscapia. Neither of them are live yet but they both went through the design/build process seamlessly and should be ready before long.

Another two happy customers added…

We’ve just finished designing/building our first Wordpresstheme for an overseas client. After advising them this was a cost effective way to get what they wanted the client was happy to install all the plugins themselves before handing over to us for styling. Check out youropex.com to see what we did!

That brings up up-to-date. Along the way we’ve done plenty of other bits and bobs which has also kept us on our toes. We’ve started using Harvest to clock our time-sheets for the larger projects and our ‘high tensile project line’ has been put to the strength test at last.

We were also (un)lucky enough to have regular visits from the wasp nest that’s formed in the wall below our window this summer. There’s a picture of what we called ‘The Killing Fields’ after the jump. Because of this we’re glad to see Autumn coming.

That’s all for now. More to come…

…promise.

Here at Hutchhouse we’re always trying to streamline our workflow to both maximize efficiency and keep the wasted design time to a minimum. Over the years we found a natural course for presenting our designs online which has culminated in the creation of AllWorkedUp: An online management tool for designers.

At Hutchhouse we predominantly design websites so it’s only natural that – during the design process – we should want to show these designs online. Like most agencies our clients are dotted around the country so it has proved really useful to upload our creative work to a protected area and have clients access them. It guaranties everyone is looking at the same design wherever they might be located.

When we had some spare time we added some further functionality to the system enabling members of a project to leave comments. This works great for both designer and clients as notes can be added when a creative is uploaded, and the client can then comment against them. Once a comment is submitted all members of the project are notified. This really helps small teams like ours react to client responses without having to always go through the Project Manager saving countless emails flying back-and-forth.

This week we put a Beta version live offering 200 free accounts on a first-come basis. We’re interested in hearing what people think of the system, whether it has some legs or whether it should be thrown out with bath water! Any feedback regarding tweaks, added functionality or obvious floors would be gratefully received!

Please, have an account on us!