A to Z of services
Animation
Animation adds movement and excitement to your project, either as incidental decoration or to illustrate key aspects of your project in graphical form. We can provide you with sleek, dynamic animation produced using Adobe Flash for presentations, websites, or banner adverts.
Using Adobe ActionScript, we can create eye-catching animations without huge file sizes so your website’s performance won’t be compromised.
Working with Tea Design, we produced interactive animations for their client InSight Now to introduce viewers to their service offering. You can view the full animations at the Insight Now website.
Blogs
Got something to say? Want to be able to say it without relying on web designers to update your content. We can develop a blog website for you, using the WordPress blogging tool. This allows you to have the website design that you want with all the tools and features that you will need to update the content as and when you require.
We developed A Slice of Cherry Pie for the author and gourmet, Julia Parsons, to maintain her impressive collection of recipes and food narratives and to support the publication of her first book.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
A web content management system (CMS) is a collection of tools and procedures designed to manage workflows and the publication of web content, particularly by multiple users. They allow users to update web content without requiring technical knowledge, and help ensure consistency of style and branding.
Unlike Enterprise CMS platforms, many web CMS are open source projects, avoiding the significant costs of the larger systems and providing a host of plug-in features developed within the open source community.
We work extensively using the Joomla! CMS, customising the system and features to match our clients’ needs. The modular nature of Joomla! means we can provide the functionality you need such as animated sections, JavaScript and JQuery plug-ins to enhance your website’s capabilities.
We developed a new website for the Museum of Wimbledon using Joomla!, integrating the CMS with a backend database storing all the Museum’s exhibit catalogues and archives. The simple publishing interface means the curators of the museum can now update and manage their collections online with minimal technical skills, allowing them to focus on the important task of maintaining their extensive collections.
Dreamweaver
Adobe Dreamweaver is one of our main tools for web development. Many non-CMS websites still rely on Dreamweaver use to maintain their content. If your website is one of those and you’re not ready to make the jump to a CMS yet we can customise and develop templates for your existing website to give it a new lease of life.
Event graphics
As well as online graphics, we’re equally at home with offline environments, particularly graphics for corporate events. We’re experienced speaker support designers and have managed the graphics for conferences for many of the major blue-chip companies.
No matter the size of your conference, if you need some engaging speaker support material get in touch and we’ll ensure your delegates remain attentive throughout your event.
Flash
He saved every one of us?
Not that Flash, but the vector-based animation software.
Flash provides sleek, high resolution animation and interactivity to websites, and it’s something we’re huge fans of. Flash can be used to build simple Rich Media banners, incidental animated decoration for your website or even be used to build the entire site.
Its versatility even extends to offline applications, turning flat presentations into dynamic animated experiences to engage your audience and breathe new life into your events.
Google analytics
So you’ve built your website, but how do you know if your target audience are actually visiting it? When we build your website we’ll setup a Google Analytics account for you, which will provide you with up-to-the-minute intelligence on the activity at your website; number of visitors, which pages they are viewing, which pages are under performing, and how long visitors are spending at your site.
Armed with this information, we can help you shape your content and website to raise its potential and keep them coming back for more.
HTML
HTML is the predominant markup language for web pages, but its use doesn’t have to stop there. Do you send out regular email marketing campaigns and newsletters to your audience? Do they fall short of your company branding? Or do they just look a little unengaging?
If you’d like to take your email marketing up to a new level, give us a call and let us talk to you about creating HTML email templates, introducing style and design to your emails and helping them to stand out when they arrive in your clients’ inboxes.
Information graphics
Information graphics are graphical visualisations of data or information, designed to present complex information in a succinct and logical format.
With backgrounds in corporate graphic design, we have considerable experience taking complex diagrams and schedules and turning them into things of beauty for your website or for your bid materials.
As well as producing new graphics, we can also conduct an audit on your existing graphics and provide a high resolution set of collateral material for your bid teams to deploy across all of their documents, ensuring brand consistency throughout your pitching process.
JavaScript
JavaScript is a scripting language developed to enable web authors to build interactive websites. Like Adobe Flash it can be used to add dynamic content and applications to your website. While its animation capabilities are not as advanced as those within Flash, it does have the advantage that it can be accessed by virtually all devices and in particular, Apple iPhones and iPads.
We can develop mini-applications and functions for your site that will be accessible via mobile devices and provide your audience with dynamic content regardless of their viewing platform.
Keywords
Keywords are the words or phrases used to perform a search on the web, and the relevance of the keywords associated with your website will directly affect the traffic to your site.
When we build your website, we will research your business or service and identify the most relevant keywords to associate with your website in order to produce the highest ranking within the search engines.
Logos
We’re happy to work within your existing brand, but there’s nothing we love more than the opportunity to help you develop a new identity for your project, and ensure its presence is felt across all forms of media.
We’ve created logos and brands for corporates and charities, even a record label. Tell us the aspirations you have for your project and the audience you are targeting with it and we’ll produce some eye-catching designs to give it an identity all of its own.
If your project will sit within your existing brand, we’ll create a unique sub-brand that will help reinforce your existing company identity, while at the same time letting your new project stand on its own two feet.
Microsites
As well as building full websites, we also create microsites for our clients.
A microsite is a set of web pages, usually with their own unique URL, which focus on a single subject such as a project with a fixed end date or a single product with its own brand.
The Law firm Lovells LLP acted on behalf of the Paralympics GB team during the Paralympics in Beijing, and to highlight their work and to blog live from the games, we created a microsite for the team.
If your project has a short lifespan, or you just want to highlight your services for a specific event, get in touch and we can create an engaging and dynamic microsite to support you.
Newsletters
Our focus has always been on digital production, but we have a wealth of experience working with print design and typography as well.
Using Adobe InDesign, we can produce high quality brochures, newsletters and other documents, print-ready and adhering tightly to your corporate brand. In addition, if your print brand is not fully established we can produce new templates for you, both in InDesign and in Microsoft Word to allow your internal staff to maintain your brand continuity across all printed documents.
Online adverts
No job too small as the saying goes. If you need some dynamic advertising for your website, we can create either static banners or interactive, animated Rich Media banners. Any size, any shape, and always designed to give your products the advertising edge they need.
Presentations
We’ve all been there - trapped in a conference hall, while a guest speaker rambles through 500 slides, reading each one to you with all the enthusiasm of a tannoy announcement at Liverpool Street station.
There’s no getting away from presentations, but they don’t have to be ‘death by PowerPoint’. We’ve worked with many of the big corporates to turn their wordy presentations into graphically-rich multimedia experiences combining PowerPoint with Flash animation, video and sound.
We can take your existing presentations and deploy them within your brand templates in ways you may not have considered before.
Alternatively, we can take your branding and create bespoke templates for your presentations.
We’ve even created full template sets from scratch for our clients and supported them with training for regular users to ensure internal staff can produce presentations on brand and on message.
Quick turnaround
We prefer to work with measured deadlines and realistic schedules to ensure you get the maximum value from our work. However, we appreciate that there are those times when events overtake the project and it has to be live tomorrow, with no room for maneuver.
Don’t panic. Providing there is an immovable deadline, we can pull out all of the stops and get your materials to you for that meeting first thing in the morning. We will charge a premium for this work, but when push comes to shove you’ll find us very accommodating.
Relationships
We’re all about building relationships with our clients and understanding their business requirements. Don’t think of us as an external agency, think of us as your virtual design team, always at hand when you need to add a little magic to your materials.
We’re always available to help you, even just for a chat if you have some ideas that you would like to explore and get an alternative viewpoint on.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
‘Build it and they will come’ does not unfortunately hold true with the web. Considering the billions of pages of content available, getting your website to stand out from the crowd is becoming increasingly important.
At Equilibrium Creative, we can help you review your website and modify your pages so that they rank as highly as possible in search engine results. We use a mixture of thematic page design, consistent HTML tagging and linking strategies, while focusing content on core keywords to maximise your website’s relevance to potential visitors.
Templates
So you have the brand guidelines, and the expensive graphics produced by your branding agency, but what about your templates? The ones your staff use everyday? Often your MS Office templates are pushed to the bottom of the pile when rebranding takes place, and often their performance is not given the same care and attention that your premiere marketing materials receive.
We can take your MS Office templates (even those poor, unloved Excel templates) and integrate them with your branded marketing material, ensuring colour consistency, correct font usage and document control.
Once we’ve finished, we’ll provide a set of guidelines - written in plain English - for your staff to refer to when creating those late night pitch presentations. And, if you need assistance with your brand imagery, we will prepare it in the correct formats to be dropped into your lovely new templates.
Usability
How users interact with your website, and the journeys they undertake to locate their desired content is as important as the information presented to them. Unintuitive navigation, site structures with too many levels, lack of signposting - these can all lead to dissatisfaction and the user leaving your website, all of which is bad for you and your site.
We keep usability best practice in mind at all times when developing our sites as we want visitors to get the most from them, and in the most enjoyable manner possible. Even if your site is already developed, we’d be happy to review it for you and make suggestions as to how the user experience might be improved.
Versatility
As we hope you can see from our A to Z, we have many years of experience working within corporate graphic design and we bring that experience to every project we work on. We are not about selling you a ‘one size fits all’ solution, but look at each project and identify how to best maximise its impact and success. If there is a solution that we haven’t direct experience with, we’ll call in one of our many expert contacts to provide the necessary skill set.
Web accessibility
Accessibility for websites is not only best practice, but under the terms of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) it is a legal requirement. While there are caveats regarding certain types of content which cannot be made accessible, the requirement exists to make reasonable adjustments to ensure universal access to your content.
We are firmly committed to providing accessible content in all of our digital projects; providing consistent and meaningful tagging for imagery, ensuring navigation is accessible, and that all Rich Media content has non-graphical substitute content for those unable to view the main content (both due to vi, but also due to technology platform).
Xmas cards
Does your business go through the same process every year? Spending time and money producing printed Christmas cards, then spending further time and money sending them out to clients, only to discover the contacts at those clients have moved on?
We’re sure you have better things to be spending your time on, so why not give us a call and let us build you a digital card? We can build you a simple animated angel or a complex, interactive card, complete with 3D animation.
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or contact us if you have a project idea and would like to discuss it with us.