While most of us at Silk Pearce like to spend our weekends relaxing, our creative director, Gail Russell has other ideas. Gail spent last weekend with a group of like-minded designers, jumping from a plane! After free falling for the first minute, before the parachute was released, Gail was then able to relax and enjoy the surrounding 60-mile view.
Gail jumped with UK Parachuting in Beccles and was bound to an instructor throughout the jump.
Gail Russell gets the Silk Pearce award for bravery - her first parachute jump
Gail Russell, second left, with her brave parachuting buddies
These bright and beautiful swatches have just arrived in the Silk Pearce office. The A5 swatch and
fan swatch, for paper merchant Rothmill, were designed by creative director and colour specialist,
Gail Russell.
By adjusting the colour order within the waterfalls Gail was able to create palettes of colours that are arranged in families of hues. These are separated by a larger increment to help identify the
different palettes.
The striking graphics were inspired by the waterfall inside the A5 swatch
The fan swatch includes a swatch for each weight of paper
The striking cover has a strong graphic approach, “I took inspiration from the waterfall effect created by the swatches and designed the cover with strong strips of colour,” says Gail.
Rothmill sells high quality paper and board products to the design, education, print and stationery markets.
Silk Pearce has redesigned the Norfolk & Norwich Open Studios website to help attract new visitors. In the first three weeks since its launch, the site received 1,000 visitors.
The 2013 scheme is expected to attract around 30,000 visitors and involves coordinating activities from 450 artists, across 231 locations in Norfolk.
Andrew Sharman, website designer at Silk Pearce, designed a site with larger imagery, cleaner page layouts and improved navigation.
The redesign of www.openstudios.org.uk includes a powerful new web application, which in the future will allow every participating artist to directly upload details of their planned activities and will help Open Studios streamline planning and production processes.
Shown here: Artist, Sarah Cannell's individual directory page.
‘Silk Pearce has created an exciting new look and feel for the Open Studios site to improve the visitor experience but has also helped streamline our in-house production processes,’ said Kirsty Falconer, Project Officer at Norfolk & Norwich Festival. ‘Their recommended approach using online forms will save significant admin costs, eliminates several labour-intensive proofing stages and makes it easier to manager subsequent mailings of brochures, posters and other materials,’ she adds.
Open Studios is managed by the Norfolk & Norwich Festival and the site redesign features many of the colours and branding elements from the Festival’s own new visual identity, also designed by Silk Pearce.
Silk Pearce has created four striking images of well-known Norfolk and Norwich landmarks featuring specially-created letter ‘N’ 3D models as part of its distinctive design theme for this year’s arts festival.
Silk Pearce designers, Ian Coote (left) and Rob Steer, at the launch of Norfolk & Norwich exciting new programme.
The consultancy’s work for Norfolk & Norwich Festival 2013 (10 to 26 May) includes designing the programme brochure detailing all events, lamppost banners, pop-up displays, staff T-shirts and other promotional materials for use in the run up to and during the Festival.
This year’s brochure was specifically designed to highlight the Festival as a feast of the arts, to create excitement and to promote the entire county as a world-class cultural destination, as well as a rich source of creative talent. The front cover features an intriguing image with the two ‘Ns’ on the beach at Holkham, with the internal pages showing the models outside The Forum, within Norwich Cathedral cloisters and in the fields at Happisburgh Lighthouse.
You can't miss the sculptural 'N' models positioned outside The Forum in Norwich.
The brochure has a square format giving the content a more integrated fee. The hand-crafted woodblock font Black Monday is being used for titles and headlines and large areas of bright yellow, purple and blue suggest a true festive spirit. Large format images of this year’s artists, performers and venues also feature throughout. Images and design elements from the brochure have been extended onto the other items that are being developed by Silk Pearce.
Silk Pearce's brochure design for the Norfolk & Norwich Festival.
“This year’s design theme builds on the Festival’s new visual identity that was developed by Silk Pearce as part of a rebrand last year. The brochure has been designed to encourage people to explore what is on offer but also to emphasise that the Festival involves activities, venues and stunning landscapes from the whole county, not just Norwich,” said Peter Silk, joint creative director at Silk Pearce.
Silk Pearce has compiled a video to promote Favini’s new paper range, Crush. The eco-friendly paper uses by products of fruit and nuts, which are then added to paper pulp to give the range its unique look and texture.
“The video was a natural progression following the photo shoot of crushing fruit and nuts that we directed for the promotional brochure,” says joint creative director, Jack Pearce, “When we played the shots back, it looked like a flick book.”
The novel branding and marketing technique is certainly helping to make a noise about Crush, with Where’s my Banjo by Rimski, giving the tongue-in-cheek video its fast pace.
In true Comic Relief style we swapped our computers for aprons and had some fun baking cakes and raising some dough for Red Nose Day. With a mix of talent from the novice to the hobby baker, the challenge was going to be harder for some than others.
While nerves got the better of Peter Silk, who wangled a last-minute holiday. Jack Pearce was the first to complete his bake, but fell at the final hurdle when he left his cake at home. Ian Coote spent a week making croissants (lots of stages, apparently) and Andrea Gosling’s mis-shapen cakes turned into a happy accident. Gail Russell baked her one and only recipe and Diane Jarvis tried her first ever lemon cake. Rob experimented with a strawberry custard tart and succeeded without a soggy bottom, despite having to use his son’s mini plastic rolling pin! While instigator, Camilla Sharman, went for the posh option with St Clements cupcakes.
How we raised our dough
We each made a contribution to enter our cake into the competition.
Find out how you can bake and raise money for Red Nose Day
