Author: DTW Agency

Providing solutions outside the traditional PR toolbox is a fun and exciting way to broaden horizons. One of the recent projects I’ve worked on uses interactive mapping technology to keep people up-to-date about road and construction work in their area, and about how it might affect their daily journeys.

By blending traditional skills of communication with new technologies available to us on the web, we have helped our client meet the needs of an increasingly tech-savvy populace, more used to navigating with a smartphone than a road map.

The project in question is the Mersey Gateway bridge. A £2 billion landmark piece of infrastructure spanning the River Mersey. Work on the bridge affects the whole area of Halton Borough Council, and tens of thousands of residents, commuters and road users. It’s a massive project, with work across multiple sites, and with hundreds of people involved.

Using a custom Zeemaps overlay that works with Google Maps, we developed the ‘Down Your Street’ tool. It allows people to navigate at a street-by-street level to see how their daily journeys could be affected by project work. The tool is readily available on the project’s website, and works across mobile devices.

The interactive map is highly visual, simple to use and is broken up into nine main project sections. Visitors can click through each section to find out about construction work, road works, road closures, footpath diversions and tree clearance work.

Each map is illustrated with graphics of the work going on within that section, and visitors can select these to bring up even more information about what’s happening. The map is updated daily and provides our client, Merseylink, with an agile solution to provide people with information to help their day-to-day journeys.

The system is flexible and allows us to add information as and when we need to. Of course, to complement Down Your Street, we still provide information on road works to the public through traditional channels, such as press releases.

Ultimately, blending new tech, with tried and tested communication methods results in the end user – in this case the people who use the interactive tool – having a wealth of information at their fingertips.

*** Don’t forget to turn up your sound when watching! ***

When working in the world of film there is one strict rule of thumb – don’t work with children and animals. In the spirit of DTW we thought we would challenge it, get ten children, two dogs and a pretend horse to re-create Christmas for our video greetings.

A very early morning start saw props, staff and toys for all girls and boys loaded up and carefully and decanted into one of the director’s houses. As if by DTW magic, a converted church and outdoor woodshed that doubled up as a perfect grotto, were dressed and filled with fun and mayhem.

The script was carefully recorded and, amongst the very crazy chaos, perfect gems of elvish monkey business were captured. Much to the DTW team’s surprise, there were no diva fits, tantrums or doggy mishaps. Although the children were quite bemused as to why members of staff were enrolled on the mock naughty and nice list.

The children’s camera elfie – selfie photography was outstanding – obviously their parent’s artistic nature has rubbed off onto said offspring.

The elves did a sterling job; they were extremely happy, full of chocolates from retakes and covered in glitter.

The smaller members found the wrapped presents with no contents very misleading, so took it upon themselves to rewrite the naughty and nice list, as team DTW have of course, been absolutely amazing this year!

See the antics that our elves got up to last year

Its’ important not to become entrenched in what we think, we should do, as designers and artists, it’s important to listen to other disciplines. This can only enhance what we do as agencies. The Design Museum is a fantastic example, lines are blurred, boundaries are broken and this place brings all walks of life together.

Times like this reminded me of the importance of leaving the bread and butter for a day, and how important in an ever-changing design landscape, it is to renew our ideas and thinking and to lead in our field.

I travelled through the life and work of Louis Khan, a revolutionary architect of our time. There was such a strong bond between his work and the work I had been presented last month by Suzhou and Wuxi University from China.

I could feel a whole conversation bubbling inside and unraveling around the use of architecture in everyday design. This was only then reflected and confirmed by the next exhibition.

Daniel Weil is a partner in the international art group Pentagram. Like myself he questions and shakes those boundaries. I simply loved the personal approach of raw sketchbooks. It is an intimate journey as you see more than a sketch – from beginning to end you see someones outpourings of expression and critical design thinking.

He draws on personal exploration whether that is exploration, travel, parenting, sport or fashion. Showing his relationship between personal aspirations and clients aspirations are fused.

Hairs stand on my neck as he quotes,
“My design doesn’t compromise the opportunity to invent, it gives you the sense that everything is connected.”

This man sings from my song sheet, this is my ethos too.  As designer, artist or visual thinker we must make connections. It could be through the context of social media, a visual conversation or collaboration.