A year of creativity

This month marks a year since we rebranded The Hideout and it seems to have flown by! Over the past year we’ve been nominated for and won a number of awards, raised over £1000 for Children in Need by cycling 170-miles and created work that we’re immensely proud of. Thanks to all our clients, the judges and all of those we’ve met over the past 12 months. Here are some of the highlights from the past year that the team have picked out.

My One-Year Highlight: Sarah

Supporting our clients

My highlight of the year is continuing to work and support our lovely clients. It may sound cliché, but whether it’s being on the end of the phone when there’s a crazy deadline to meet, meeting up to discuss a new project, replying to that 10pm email or popping a bottle of fizz when we’ve completed a job! It’s all in a days work for us but it’s the little things that count and being there when it really matters!

It’s obviously also great to have some of our work recognised by winning a number of awards over the past year. It’s a massive pat on the backs for us all and a chance to really celebrate together! There’s definitely been a few sore heads over this past year!

My One-Year Highlight: Frauke

Monkey Business

While the actual Hideout rebrand is a pretty awesome highlight in itself, winning multiple awards for the logo and website design for our friends at Loud Monkey takes the cake.

What makes this project so special to me personally is that I actually had one of those creative blocks in the beginning, but with the support of the design team it turned out a little bit of teamwork goes a long way. Once the logo was finished, the website followed shortly after, and with some clever development tricks we created an awesome website that Loud Monkey can shout about.

Having received a great response about the new brand, we decided to enter the logo into Wave 2 of LogoWave, a logo and identity award, where the winner takes home $300 and gets published on their website. And sure enough, we made it! We proudly took 1^st place, but the excitement didn’t stop there: Sam and I were asked if we wanted to feature on their website in an exclusive interview – of course we did!

We then took it a step further and entered the website into the Kent Digital Awards 2017 and after a drum roll please, we had another reason to celebrate: We took home Silver in the category Website: Small Businesses! That’s definitely something to remember!

My One-Year Highlight: Sam

From Mac to reality

Most of the time I get to work on every element of a project and see it grow from a sketch on a post-it note to a fully-fledged creative campaign. This was exactly the case with Body Design.

This is a meal replacement food range we created for Protein Dynamix, and has to be my highlight from the first year of The Hideout’s re-brand as it was a true team effort. The whole team clubbed together to come up with the initial concepts and numerous late nights helped to get the presentation and ideas ready to show the client. We mocked up boxes and started to see glimpses of how it could look on shop shelves. We were over the moon when the client loved the idea and we rolled out the concept onto other flavours and product types. The advertising campaign followed, which called on my photography skills to shoot the models to showcase the range through print and digital adverts.

What made the whole thing a reality is when I saw the range on the shelves in Superdrug, which is always an odd thing to see the design you had on your Mac screen being picked up by customers in-store. The products are growing from strength to strength and looking back now it was a challenge the team and I relished!

My One-Year Highlight: John

The first of many

The memory that tops the year for me has to be the winning ‘Graphic Design Agency of the Year’ at the Kent Creative Awards! The Awards were one of the first we entered following the rebrand and it seemed to set the ball rolling for the others we ended up winning, both individually and as a team, throughout the year. After all the hours and hard work by everyone in the studio it was great to get the feeling that everything we had done had paid off.

A panel from every part of the creative industry; Artists, sculptors, designers, and performers to name a few judged the awards. We pride ourselves on our creativity, so to get this approval from other like-minded individuals felt even sweeter. It was also nice to see a few old faces such as my old college tutor, Neil Brown, a person who taught me a lot of what I know today.

The award sits proudly on the studio shelf and serves as a reminder of the rewards you can get if you work hard. I guess the thing is we’ll have to try and top it this next year.

My One-Year Highlight: Keith

A onesie, a bike, and a £1000

My highlight has to be the office ride for Children in Need. It’s not every day you can say you threw up in the name of charity.

The team took on and completed a 170-mile cycle challenge and I was the one nominated to wear the Pudsey onesie while doing it. It’s been a long time since I rode a bike and as you can imagine cycling in that, with the heat of the studio on you can take its toll. After riding 20 miles, enough was enough and a quick dash to the toilet was in order.

It wasn’t all-bad though, we raised over £1000 for Children in Need and are now immortalised in their fundraising pack with a Team Hideout picture!

My One-Year Highlight: Si

Call me Steven Spielberg

There have been lots of great things that have happened in the past year, but the one that sticks out for me the most is directing my first short film. Flush is written and produced by Emily Chapman of 91 Productions and is a story set in the early 90’s rave scene about two girls who forge a life-changing friendship in a nightclub toilet. It was an honour to be asked to direct and a project I couldn’t wait to get my teeth into.

It was a real labour of love from casting, directing, starring in and even building the set. It’s amazing what you can turn an old barn into with just a few wooden pallets and some clever lighting! The shoot lasted three long days but the crew and cast were amazing which made every second worth while! It’s definitely something I’d love to do more of.

Even though the shoot has finished, the hard work isn’t over yet… the film is currently in post production and we’re aiming to hold a screening party before the end of the year!