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Year 4 and here’s our fourth website.

As designers, we can’t sit still and we hope you find our latest website our best yet… Mainly because it’s taken a lot of time and effort and we don’t want to go changing again in a hurry!

Check out the detail in this ceiling cornicing, in the meeting room at the new Robot Food HQ at Tower Works in Leeds.

It’s been restored by making moulds from the original and painstakingly replicated to reproduce the former glory. Sheets of opaque glass will be added to the middle and above the suspended ceiling there will be permanent lighting and a couple of roof skylights.

We’ve just had news that we’ll get keys by 1st of May and we can’t wait to be in!

Today we’re excited by the arrival of our newest Senior Creative, Julia D’Arcy. Julia brings a big, bulging bag of experience in branding, packaging and illustration, having worked at Junc for the past six years.

We’re stoked to have her valuable input and know that her style will add a further dimension to the work we produce.

WooHoo!

DJ Yoda has been tweeting his reviews of various biscuits and a link to our blog appeared in his review of Toffee Dodgers.

We’re now buddies and there’s a whole lot of love and retweeting going on.

Yesterday my inbox was filled with news of upcoming design awards and links to entry applications. One of these was for a new Pentaward called ‘Pentawards Concept’, that’s different to the main Pentawards which is now ‘Pentawards Classic’ as it’s solely for concept. This opens the field up to a whole host of potential new entrants and even students.

Pentawards is just one of many prestigious awards in our field and each has multiple categories. Not content with just one competition each year, Pentawards now has two. Design Week has it’s own, then there’s the DBA’s ‘Design Effectiveness Awards’ and much much more.

Soon there could be more design competition entry opportunities than design agencies, so do any of these awards actually mean anything?

Surely an award within a specialist field is only worth any merit if judged against the whole field. Not every agency enters the awards I’ve mentioned and a large reason for this is probably that each is costly to enter. These awards are therefore by nature, elitist.

Elmwood claim to be “the world’s most effective brand design consultancy” and this stands to reason because they have more ‘Design Effectiveness’ awards than any other company.

I suspect that there’s a correlation between this and the fact that they are also one of the largest consultancies, working on the most amount of projects. They can afford to enter huge amounts of work into a lot of different categories. How can they therefore be judged against any agencies that aren’t as big, producing as much work, entering as many categories each year?

Even if Robot-food could afford to enter the DBA’s ‘Design Effectiveness’ Awards, we would be unable. This is because we haven’t paid to become members of the DBA. We can’t compete with Elmwood and because of this Elmwood will never been judged against us, so who can say that their work is actually more effective?

Sure, it would be nice to have a shiny lump on the shelf that seals our position as an ‘award winning agency’, but in a world where not having an award makes you stand out, maybe it’s good for us to remain remarkable.

As packaging designers, our work is on the shelves for all to see and judge. It would be lovely if someone, one day, decided our work was worthy of an award – Just as long as we didn’t have to fill out any forms, upload any images or hand over any money.

Yes! We’ve just bee appointed by Flavour Coffee experts Beanies, to refresh their branding and redesign their packaging ahead of some new product launches in spring.

Of course that means plenty of sample coffee to keep us going while we work on it.

Check back soon for more info.

Okay, it doesn’t look much at the moment, but here’s our new studios in the Holbeck Urban Village in central Leeds. The two rooms were the director’s offices of the Tower Works, former needle factory – currently being renovated. The 800+ sq ft units are linked by a door and are the certainly the coolest rooms, which together make up the largest unit in the old part of the listed building. Each has huge 20 foot ceilings with exposed beams, fireplaces and areas of brickwork, which will be left exposed.

Although it’s hard to visualise the end result, it’s going to be impressive and the whole development will be exclusive to creative, marketing and media companies. It’s five minutes walk from Leeds train station and the new public square at Tower Works connects a beautiful stretch of the Leeds and Liverpool canal to the great public spaces at Round Foundry.  Over the road are the Cross Keys pub and The Midnight Bell, which are arguably the best pubs in Leeds, together with numerous cafes, restaurants and juice bars.

We can’t wait to become a part of this thriving independent business district and will be moving in February!