Abbey Road revisited

This summer saw lots of media coverage for the anniversary of The Beatles' Abbey Road. All their albums became iconic and you can often gauge how much album art has been absorbed into popular culture by the number of parodies. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, The Simpsons, Booker T & the MG's, Lego, and many more have paid homage to Abbey Road.

In 1984 Pan Books published Pete Brown's account of his time with The Beatles. Gary Day-Ellison, then Creative Director for Pan, wanted the cover to show the exact spot with the band now missing. The record label would not permit the re-touching of the original sleeve. So one Sunday morning it was off to St.John's Wood with delightfully gentle photographer Peter Williams and a set of step ladders to shoot from scratch. With a very limited budget for models or props the were some Hitchcock cameos by Gary, Sandy Nightingale, Richard Moon, Creative Director of The British Council at the time, and his VW. We left the 'For Sale' sign in for Beatles' fans to spot.

The zebra crossing itself is an international pilgrimage destination for fans of The Fab Four braving the London traffic to get that souvenir shot of themselves on location.

Visually, we are quite taken by the wit of the tank on The Beatles Bike that puts the motorbike in Abbey Road wherever it is. A shame the airbrush artist went on to pepper (apologies) the machine with so many other references too. Neat tank though.

Great Women

Sandy Nightingale  is busy in the studio on a favourite project she has been developing with Sandi Toksvig. There are quite a few paintings with accompanying text as the project looks for the right home. History is festooned with fabulous females. Sandy and Sandi take unusual slants on the most famous - Elizabeth I and Mata Hari - and relish the marvellously obscure women who deserve to be discovered and celebrated - Pope Joan and the chaos that caused, Domestic Goddess, Fanny Farmer and Dame Ethel Smyth conducting an orchestra of suffragettes with a tooth brush from her prison cell window, to name just a few.

The list of subjects and paintings is always growing while publishers tread water over the potential of a book about half the population with an audience of more.
  
They are having great fun with lots of women to celebrate but suggestions are always welcome . . .

Introduction

Sometimes our clients wish to update the content on their sites. We can update or develop the site. More complex sites may need a database CMS (Content Management System). For simple text changes there are a client-side solutions such as Adobe's InContext Editing (rumoured to start charging ongoing fees) or Open Source software such as CushyCMS. Whichever is the right tool for the job, everyone wants to avoid compromising the appearance of the site and the client's brand image.

What about the potential of Posts instead?

Twitter is popular but designed for short messages.  We monitored Tweets for some weeks with a tool called Twendz (Exploring Twitter Conversation & Sentiment) we found on Ubercool. The brevity seems to tempt users to more towards reaction rather than reflection. Of course, like the Web itself, the delivery technology does not determine the quality of the content. But then Ubercool is a Blog that includes Tweets. Interesting to see how it develops . . .  What do you think?

A  Blog is a longer-form option and it can provide a good way to for a site to keep its audience informed, advised with both text/images/relevant links. It too encourages book-marking and mail-links that improve the traffic driven to your site. 

We are opting to test the Blog option on ourselves. 

What we will do is introduce our new projects, promote selected links, post some of the things that we are finding inspiring, curious or might even suggest to future clients something they hadn't thought of us for. We might even show a little work from our archives if it has a story to it.

Your feedback, opinions and enquiries are very welcome.