It’s an often quoted fact that more graduates stay on in Sheffield than in any other UK city, and Sheffield regularly tops the charts when it comes to best student city. The heart of the ‘Sheffield Made Us’ campaign encourages students, past and present to share their memories and experiences of how their time in Sheffield made them who they are.

Rckt created a suite of above the line material to support the campaign which included an overall identity, You Tube channel, print advertising, outdoor media and online banner advertising.

So, if you happened to study the University of Sheffield and have some great memories to share why not visit their You Tube channel and submit your own memories!

http://www.youtube.com/user/SheffieldMadeUs

The web is a wonderful place. Again and again little things appear that grab our attention and make us smile, and sometimes they also make us think. Wordle.net is one such application.

The concept is very simple; submit some text, a URL or even your delicious user name (oh how very web 2.0!) and wordle will generate a rather beautiful word cloud. Now this is all very exciting and actually quite addictive, but it also throws out an interesting new angle on your copywriting. The wordle clouds are generated by looking at the submitted text and ranking the words by order of their frequency. Here is the wordle cloud generated by the text on Rocket’s very own ‘about us’ page:

This shows some interesting results. The page is meant to be all about Rocket, who we are and what we do. The most popular words are:

Work
People
Rocket
Things
Together
Experience
Really
Team

Now some of these words are quite good. It’s nice to see Rocket, people, team, experience listed here. But others are less helpful, why have we used the word ‘things’ so often?!

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Are you are a digital native or digital immigrant? The fact that you’re reading a blog suggests you might be a native, Gary Small’s new book “iBRAIN: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind” might have the answer.

We’re all familiar with the concept of evolution, even if certain US vice-presidential candidates have a few issues with Mr Darwin’s theory. But did you know we were evolving at such a rate, in fact simply by reading this blog you’re brain is changing.

According to Gary’s research those of us who are tech-savvy and use the Internet daily display twice as much brain activity in regions of the brain responsible for decision-making and complex reasoning. According to the neuroscientist ‘reading’ the web stimulates more regions of the brain than the printed word.

Gary then identifies two types of web-users that display quite different brain activity. The digital native, often younger people that have never known a world without the web and the digital immigrant, frequently older and with brains hardwired long before they first saw the Internet.

It’s the digital immigrant, who is better at face to face interaction than navigating websites, that poses some interesting questions for information architecture and page design. The digital immigrant takes things one step at a time, and acts methodically.

Following our success at the most recent BBC Innovation Labs Rocket have won a place at the 2008 Crossover Labs. A worldwide series of events that bring together the best innovative thinkers from the world of the media and digital technology. Here is how the people who are running the project describe the concept of crossover:

“Social media, social networks, alternate reality games, serious games, user generated content and participatory story-telling: just some of the terms used to describe emerging digital media formats. With the BBC calling for ‘360′ proposals and Channel 4 describing itself as ‘network publisher’, are there new ways to engage audiences with factual topics and documentary subjects?”

Find out more at their website by clicking here.

Nick, our chief digital guru is the lucky one off to the rather nice country hotel for the week, where we hope he’ll keep us up to date through his blog.

The Horbury Group is a business at the heart of the UK construction business. Comprising a range of companies providing a variety of construction solutions, the business has a turnover of over £70m.

The job we had here at Rocket was to really show off the calibre of projects the Horbury Group are involved with. Luckily they have been instrumental is some of the UK’s most high-profile building projects such as the landmark Beetham Tower in Manchester.

We’re pleased as punch to announce the launch of the site, and even happier that the clients love their new site as well.

Take a look for yourself

There are not many times where we get to indulge both our passions at once; designing beautiful things and damn good food. This project was one of those special occasions where the designers were all falling over each other to lead the project. Coleman’s is a bit on an institution when it comes to great food and drink. Well known and well loved in it’s native Peak District the deli wanted a fresh new brand that would help tell the world what Coleman’s stands for.

The Rocket design team wanted to focus the new brand on some of Coleman’s core values; quality, natural and delicious. This approach led us to a visual identity that simply has a wonderfully natural feel, and really reflects the quality of the place. As part of the first phase of the relaunch Rocket have so far produced a range of marketing collateral, signage and a neat little website.

The local NHS has been conducting a major advertising campaign round here lately – here have been posters on buses, phone boxes, and a leaflets drop through the letterbox. Here’s both sides of the leaflet:

It’s advertising the fact that you can now choose which hospital you go to. But it does so by implying that some hospitals are no good – on one side, the ginger child in the broken wheelchair says “I will choose a hospital with the lowest superbugs rate”. Logically, this implies that some NHS hospitals have high superbug rates – completely the wrong message to send out! What the public really wants to know is that all hospitals are free from superbugs.

On the other side of the leaflet, the message is “I will choose a hospital with the best quality care”. Again, it implies that some hospitals offer poor quality care, and unfortunately the man saying this appears to have lost his trousers, had his genitals removed and been dressed in high heels. That’s really not the kind of care I’d want.

We hear enough about the NHS’s problems in the media, without their own advertising subconsciously reinforcing them.

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EXCLUSIVE! Government figures released today proved a direct link between dentists and Benzine emissions, a known carcinogen, in the Sheffield area. When plotted on a map, the figures clearly show the correlation between the density of dentist surgeries (stars) and the quantity of Benzene pollution (darker purple means more pollution).

Of course that is pure Bad Science – not that it stops the tabloids from using the figures in that way.

The government launched a new website today to encourage people to mash-up it’s data. As you would expect, the various branches of government hold a vast mount of statistics and data, most of it paid for by the taxpayer, but not available to the public. This site aims to encourage people to come up with innovative mashups, websites and services using it. Putting it’s money where it’s mouth is, it also claims to have made gigabytes of government data, from census figures to NHS data, available to work and play with.

One service which I’ve immediately had fun playing with is the Office of National Statistics’ Neighbourhood Statistics
site. It enables you to browse a vast amount of data, from the number
of people working in your neighbourhood, to the air quality. You can
also compare one against the other on Flash maps, and get
hold of the data through the APIs.

And the wrong statistical conclusions you can come up with this
service are amazing – surely years worth of stories for the Daily Mail
/ Daily Express / etc. For example, it only took me five minutes of hard journalistic research to discover the shocking exclusive above.

Making public data available is a massive step in the right direction, although they could still learn a thing or two about making APIs friendly and easy to access – whereas services like Digg, Amazon and Last.fm make their APIs dead easy to register for andget started, many of these new government sources force to you to register, and undergo a manual approval process at their end before you can start using it. Their documentation also seems to be fairly verbose and heavy on the public-sector speak.

So now to pitch our idea – the tabloid scare story generator…

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You may have heard recently that ICANN, the body in charge of running and regulating the net, has approved a major relaxation of the way top level domains are created. (BBC: Internet overhaul wins approval).

While the mainstream press reports proclaimed “The decision means that companies could turn brands into web addresses, while individuals could use their names.” the reality is not nearly as rosy.

Currently, there is a very limited range of “top level domains” or TLDs – common ones include .com, .biz, and .net. In addition, every country in the world has it’s own TLD, e.g. .uk

Each TLD is run by a “registry” who is responsible for registering and renewing domain names, and maintaining the technical infrastructure that make it’s domains work.

For example all .uk domains are registered with Nominet, a not-for-profit company who maintain the registry and the name servers that make the whole .uk domain system work. This is who we pay domain registrations and renewals to.

Creative Pitches, for those who are not in the know, are far from credentials only presentations. Of course the nature of tenders vary from client to client, so to detail the ‘typical’ is done somewhat in broad strokes. That said:

1. Invitation to Tender
2. Credentials Document and a Creative Pitch, often presented in person by several members of the team.
3. Contract awarded.

Done… to sound all Ramsay for a second.

For a long time I’ve thought of this process as being akin to asking several builders to build one room each before you award the contract to build the house. Not going to happen is it.

The work involved in creative pitching places unacceptably high demands on the industry as a whole. A huge amount of work has to be done upfront by each agency invited. This investment