Epix Media

🚛Delivery! 🚚

The second phase of the new Jerry Green Dog Rescue website is now live! 🐶

Like any growing charity they have multiple priorities and a varied audience - but that doesn’t stop us creating great brand impact and delivering a good User Experience to all.

Not only does the design pack a punch, but this website is full of features and integrations that help the charity streamline what they do best.

Certainly a project to be proud of 🧡

This week we swapped our cameras and keyboards for laser guns!

Another team social - this time at Frontline Combat 🎯🌳

Having a defined Tone of Voice is crucial for any brand.

But have you really nailed it down and documented it?

A brand is much more than colours and visuals. It's the consistent use of every element – from the style of photography to the way it communicates – that builds authenticity and memorability.

Tone of Voice guides how the brand speaks. And the more specific you are, the more consistent it will be.

Here’s what to include:

✔ Guidelines on sentence structure and length. Some brands like to never use commas so everything sounds pointed and efficient. Others, like us, welcome them to sound more chatty.

✔ The desired tone. Like “fun” - but what kind of fun? Like a pleasant game of Uno, or the kind of fun that involves waking up with a traffic cone on your head?

✔ Whether to use contractions. Some do, some don’t.

✔ Punctuation, capitalisation and grammar preferences. Maybe your brand can go rogue and put an “And” at the beginning of a sentence… 👀

✔ Legal considerations. If your industry is regulated, how can you say what’s compulsory, but in a different way?

✔ Examples! These show other people in your team the parameters they need to follow:

➡ Approved vocabulary and phrases to use (or avoid). Maybe you have “customers”, or “service users”. Perhaps “clients”?

➡ Key messages that capture your brand's essence

Defining your Tone of Voice starts with understanding your audience and brand values. These values shape how you want people to feel when engaging with your brand.

With this foundation, you can craft a Tone of Voice that resonates.

📢 📢

Being an agency clients can depend on is at the centre of who we are. We know where and how we can deliver good value and excellent, high performing brand creative, and the feedback from the last month says is all…

“I know how much hard work you’ve all put in to deliver this early and we do truly appreciate it, it looks amazing!”

“It's a much needed level up for the brand, and your team has got it spot on”

“Wowow these are absolutely fantastic!!”

"As soon as you showed it on the screen I had a big smile on my face as it just felt right”

“Thank you very much for your outstanding work“

🚛 Delivery 🚛

The updated Jerry Green Dog Rescue brand is all about reflecting the unique energy of the charity, and enhancing the emotional connection between human and pooch.

The original logo featured the founder's beloved dog Rusty, so we recreated him in his younger years and changed his eyeline to looking more upwards, with those puppy-dog eyes that are begging for cuddles 🥰

Overall the visual identity has a lot more flexibility to support an ambitious charity on their mission. A broader range of colours has been introduced (including "Rusty orange" as a tribute) along with more playful graphics and imagery to bring personality to the forefront.

We also flexed our usual approach to website delivery by staging it. Phase 1 of a rapidly developed, streamlined website has gone live, with phase 2 coming along soon.

It’s a busy week in the studio - whilst we enjoy some April showers outside, the team are hunkering down and cracking on…

🎥 Matt & Will are on the road for a shoot

🤞 Two new website proposals are whizzing their way to prospects

🎯 The team have a big strategy meeting with a client tomorrow, to discuss current and future projects

💻 We’re in the throws of the final tweaks to a site before its go live next week

Lincoln Hack is back! This weekend will see tech amateurs, enthusiasts, students and professionals coming together to spend 24 fun and food-filled hours building, coding and dreaming up tech-based solutions to tricky challenges.

And we’re sponsoring! We’ve supported every Lincoln Hack since the beginning, helping make our home city’s stand-out tech event happen.

We’re putting in a challenge and have some pretty cool prizes lined up…

See you there!

How it started vs how it ended

How do you get a brand’s web project off to the best start? Go and interact with their products.

Back in the Summer, Zoe and Will headed to a major motorhome dealer to secret-shop Auto-Trail’s model range. Seeing products through the eyes of buyers, looking at what else is vying for their attention, and walking through the decision making they’ll do gives much deeper insights that then inform the design of the site.

And now it’s live, ready for customers to explore and get excited about new adventures.

Brand and marketing thrive on quality thinking.

Opening yourself up to play, and freely exploring your mind, helps creativity and problem solving.

You can even do it with a Lego Serious Play session.

Zoe and Sophie have been learning how Lego’s process helps creatives work independently or as teams.

See the completely self-explanatory models below on how to build a high performing team 🤔

Will was talking to his barber recently about what they really sell.

As a customer you pay for a haircut (and a rather sharp beard trim), but what you leave with is a haircut AND a bunch of confidence.

There’s a difference between “cost” and “value”, and a product’s value can be wildly different depending on the needs of different audiences.

It’s essential for brand and marketing teams to deeply understand the value they provide to different audiences and build campaigns around those. With those insights you’ll start to see new category entry points - new ways for audiences to buy.

What does your brand really sell?



(Photo by Nate Johnston on Unsplash - thanks Nate)

The better we know our suppliers and their processes, the better the end result for clients.

Sophie and Marty took a trip over to Sheffield to visit one of our print suppliers, Northend, checking out their capabilities across litho and digital print, and even their vintage die cut machine that runs off an engine, but still works hard cutting clean shapes to this day.

Thanks for the tour @‌Chris Strawson 🧡

There's so much value in watching potential buyers interact with products.

At trade shows like this, buyers are walking round looking to make purchases worth tens of thousands of pounds. These are big, emotive, dream-buys, so seeing the people hone in on a stand and then go through a decision making process tells agencies like ours a lot about what branding and marketing efforts are working, and what we should be optimising next time.

Who killed Private Investigator, Nell Phryp and disgraced stage magician, Charlie Young?

This week, Team Epix put their best detective skills to work. After feeding the grey cells with a Nando’s, we split into teams to investigate 2 detective cases.

We didn’t manage to crack both cases (we won’t talk about the 4 innocent people we sent to jail 😂) but it was an evening of fun and mystery.

Name the brands. Tell us in the comments!

We had a debate in the studio about a recent piece of advertising that featured one of these images on a billboard, but didn’t show the brand logo.

Now, in theory this is all fine when your product is a “distinctive asset”, something that the market instantly recognises and mentally connects with your brand. Imagine the Cadbury’s purple colour, or the shape of a Coke bottle - they unmistakably belong to those brands.

But our Director Will would argue that the product in question isn’t quite distinctive enough, yet.

So name the brands. Tell us which brands a, b and c belong to.

This week in the studio:

✔ Training a fast-growing start-up on their new website

✔ Creating a video with the Chief Exec of a large brand to promote an exciting new vision to their internal teams

✔ Adding product pages to another brand's site to support new product lines

✔ SEO work to keep up with the steady awareness gains we've made for a client over 18 months

✔ An annual catch-up with one of our team, and celebrating another's work birthday!

Lots of tactical work, all as parts of bigger strategies to help brands grow!

The right photography tells a story.

This week the team are putting some finishing touches on a design piece featuring a set of very important images.

Last week, they were working with a specialist photographer and stylist to create brand images that help set the tone of the product.

Can we just shout out the Lighting Tech who jumped into a role with only 20 minutes rehearsal?! That takes some bravery 👏👏

Panto is a bit of an Epix tradition. Dinner first at a lovely new restaurant in Lincoln, then out to the theatre. This year we saw Aladdin, and as the curtain went up we could tell there was one actor whose style was a bit different to the others on stage. At the end the crew announced that one of the main actors had pulled out with only 20mins rehearsal to go, so a member of the tech crew stepped up and gave it their best.

What an effort - the show must go on!

Cash for Kids are on a mission: Mission Christmas. Their mission is for every child to wake up at Christmas with presents to open, but thousands of families may not be able to afford that luxury.

Team Epix have been collecting gifts to help their mission and you can too. To donate online or to find your closest gift drop-off point, visit the Mission Christmas page:

https://cashforkids.org.uk/mission

Sometimes the best inspiration comes from unusual places.

We’ve been reading the incredible How Not To Plan from Les Binet and Sarah Carter, and it mentioned a time when Great Ormond Street Hospital worked with a Formula 1 team. It sounded fascinating, so we had to find out more.

Essentially, the team from GOSH realised that they were having issues when transferring patients from the surgery team to aftercare. The surgery team had spent hours getting to understand the patient and their condition, but had only a few minutes to share all of that information to the team that would be looking after the patient next.

They thought about who the experts were in working precisely in high-pressure situations, and contacted the McLaren F1 team.

Makes sense right? F1 pit crews have to work incredibly fast, with total precision, again and again.

They worked with GOSH on breaking down each element of the task to make every input as efficient as possible.

Sometimes the best inspiration and insights come from looking at how others tackle your challenge. Think deeply about your brand’s challenges, get to the core of the problem, then look at who else is solving it.

November sees the launch of Grin Orthodontics ✨😁✨

This brand went through our Discovery process to create the visual identity, getting into the minds of the ideal customer, building the values looking at the competitor set, and even workshopping brand names.

The brand opened its doors this month and the team were there to see it happen!

📣 Project go live 📣

Simplifying the user journey can have a massive impact on sales.

This week we launched a new website for the Simpsons Beauty group brand.

As well as building on the brand look and feel, part of our master plan for this website was a completely re-engineered treatments section, cutting the user booking journey down by half!

Take a look for yourself!

Every Friday at Epix we have Hippocampus - it’s our weekly free creative session.

This month the team have released their inner child, got crafty, tested AI tools and learnt through tutorials and books!

What have you done in the last few weeks to expand your mind?

Question for you: Without looking, does your brand’s website have a Home button? (No peeking 👀)

Lots of people will read that and go “well, yeah, of course it does…”. Some will say yes, then realise they can’t picture it. Then there’s always one that will say “what are you going on about?!”. Well, we’ll explain…

Websites used to almost always have a home button. But, over time, users got wise to clicking on the brand’s logo to go back to the homepage.

We love looking at user behaviour. Knowing the quirks of how users scan read websites and how they get to what they’re looking for fascinates us.

So the habit of clicking the logo to go back to the homepage stuck. It’s now pretty much universally understood, so if you have a “Home” button, your site might be wasting space. A decluttered website is a more effective website.

OK - now go check yours. Let us know if you passed the Home button test.

Blending hybrid and remote working is a hard culture balance to get right, so we bring our remote team members together with the rest of Epix every two months.

Everyone has some great face-to-face time, our remote team have proper check-in time with Zoe and Will, and there’s an opportunity to just relax together too.

Remote doesn’t have to feel so remote.

Presenting web projects in person is so important!

Marty and Sophie have been on the road to show a client the progress on the design of their new website.

It means we can explain every design decision, talk through how each element works towards the client’s goals, and proves their budget is being used intelligently.

And it all went well, so now it’s on to the build!

A BIG brand design presentation is just the beginning of the journey.

After months of Discovery and User Testing, we’ve developed a brand that could be in a store near you soon. We’ve balanced data and creativity, and are ready to pitch the idea to the client.

Even if it’s approved, that’s just the start. From there, we look at how the brand will be applied across all touchpoints, how it becomes part of a balance of long term brand comms and short term promotional activities, and how we maintain consistency across all of this as the range expands.

Great brands are about so much more than aesthetics - they’re strategically-driven memory makers.

Great brand photography and video can make or break first impressions.

Our team are on the road this week and next week capturing the authenticity of a nationwide brand that needs to instil trust and reliability in its audience.

We often talk to brands about “trust signals”, those little moments and details that make a potential customer feel like they can believe you. Custom imagery is a great start.

We can control most things on a brand shoot, but the weather isn’t one of them.

Sometimes we can make a virtue of the rain. If the brand has toughness and resilience at its core, rainy conditions show how it pushes through challenges.

But this brand shoot needed a bright, positive feel. And this brand is all about big things, outdoors - they can’t be hidden under an umbrella.

The shoot’s postponed (for now), so we can get the right kind of content when the weather’s better.