Sugru Launch and Maker Faire

Sugru has officially launched! After five months of scaling up production, redesigning packaging and processes, building a custom e-commerce store, and many pints of blood, sweat and tears, sugru is available to buy online now. It's selling fast so pop along and get your mitts on a pack as soon as possible.

We also took a trip to the coolest/geekiest show on earth with the sugru folks - Maker Faire! We got to meet real sugru fans, work with some lovely volunteers, meet the Make chaps, run around San Francisco till our feet hurt and generally have a great time. You can see more photos here. We're so happy to see FormFormForm kicking ass. We feel like we're part of the family and when they have big grins, we have have big grins. Long live sugru!

Street Feast

Street Feast is a brilliant concept. It's one day in the year where neighbourhoods across Ireland host a lunch in their streets, local parks or front gardens. It's a great excuse to share good food and meet interesting people who live nearby.

Samuel and the Street Feast team asked us to help them get the word out so we developed a friendly look and feel, a custom typeface, a website that enables “Feasties” to register a lunch or find a nearby lunch to join and a downloadable guide to running your own feast. If you're in Ireland hop along to streetfeast.ie and join the party on the 18th July.

Pete speaks at NI Design Alliance Event

The NI Design Alliance is a partnership between industry, education and stakeholders who are committed to seeing good design practice in Northern Ireland. A mission that we whole-heartedly support. Pete spoke at their first event about our thoughts on responsible design, how genuine transparency and integrity can be great for the design industry and business in general. Ralph Ardill also spoke about how authentic design principles can transform a business from the ground up (we are now fans of Ralph).

New and Sausagey

The Good Little Company have launched their second product - Great Big Sausages. We created new packaging and a new animation for the launch. (Top tip: they're especially great on barbecues).

The best news is that they have also donated over 3 million meals to those who need them most. We're so proud.

Belfast HACKquarium

Atto Partners hosted a sugru HACKquarium on Tuesday night at the Black Box and invited 40 chums to come and hack their old stuff better. A HACKquarium is basically a chance to gather some like-minded hacker type folks together to fix, adapt, repair and improve their stuff with some beers and nibbles. It was a bit of a trial run before HACKquariums (HACKquaria?) are launched around the world. Some super interesting hacks were produced, these are the two winners: ultra-delicate handiwork by silversmith Samantha on her USB key and a loud and proud shoe hack by Esther.

Special mentions go to Tim's ginger eyebrow goggles, John's new Mr Potato Head feet and hat, and of course Karys' work of art that was originally a broken vase.

Victoria Gault Shop Launch

We helped our favourite florist, Victoria Gault, launch her very own Wedding Floristry Boutique in Queen's Arcade, Belfast. We helped her create a dapper new look for her small, but perfectly formed new shop and website (yes we even helped apply the lettering ourselves). If you're looking for amazing flowers and a good natter, do pop by and say hello to Victoria.

Sugru London Launch

Sugru has landed! The good news is that it has sold like hot cakes, the bad news (for you) is that it's sold out.

Jane produced 1000 packs (a predicted one month's worth of stock) for launch and they sold out in 6 hours! The 3000 pre-order packs have also sold out in a day. We could hardly believe our eyes as huge blogs like Boing Boing, the Daily Telegraph, Wired, Core77, Treehugger, Shiny Shiny and loads more picked up the story and loved the idea behind the product.

Here's a few shots of the launch party in London.

MA Multidisciplinary Design Masterclass

Last Friday we lead a full-day Masterclass with the MA Multidisciplinary Design students at University of Ulster. They're a very talented, welcoming bunch and we thoroughly enjoyed our day with them.

We spoke about creating a values-driven business, lead a workshop on excuses for not being awesome then set a transformation design project for the students. Lots of great (actionable) ideas emerged, as did energetic and lively discussion. We always enjoy finding talented new friends and were really encouraged by the quality of their work.

Big hat tip to Chris Murphy ( @fehler of Web Standardistas fame) for inviting us. The MA course is his baby, and he's doing a fantastic job of fostering the next batch of game-changers here in NI. We just wish we'd taken some decent photos!

Kabosh: This is What We Sang

We've been working with Kabosh over the summer to design promotional materials for This is What We Sang, their new play showing as part of the Belfast Festival at the end of October. We used the old Jewish art of paper-cutting as the foundation for the imagery with many of play's themes portrayed in a single hand-cut illustration (including many Belfast landmarks). Keep an eye for the special edition poster we made with vinyl for the John Hewitt's window. (We can't wait to see the play now).

One Million Meals

The Good Little Company has now donated 1,000,000 meals through its buy one, give one free offer. That's a little bit world-changing.

Artwiculate

Exciting new thing thing alert! We have finally launched Artwiculate - our Twitter-based Word of the Day competition that helps clever people look clever and helps the rest of us learn new words.

We've been working on this for a while now and we're so happy to see it live and working with 1000s of followers learning and using new words everyday. Big thanks to Mashable and Swiss Miss who picked it up from day one and to all our secret beta testers for helping us to make it great.

Go to Artwiculate to join in the voting and follow @artwiculate on Twitter to play along.

Now, if we could just convince Stephen Fry to become the patron (saint) of Artwiculate ...

Refresh Belfast

Thanks to everyone who came to see us take over Refresh Belfast last night. The Atto Partners team delivered two talks: Responsible Design and How to Tell Authentic Stories that People Enjoy Telling Other People. We had a great night and met some lovely people.

If you were there, and got a badge, don't forget to wear it out and about. It'll give us shy creative types an excuse to say hello when we're standing in the queue at Tesco.

WIMPSmobile

Keep an eye out for the freshly vinyl-ed WIMPSmobile on the streets of Belfast in search of unsuspecting politicians to pester.

the Good Little Company

It's no exaggeration to say that Atto Partners are now a real part of the Good Little Company family. We've helped form every part of the company including naming, core values, business model, brand development, packaging design, web development, animation... you name it! Working closely with the fantastic GLC team has resulted in a truly complete set of values, look and feel that we can all be proud of.

We could go on all day about their first product - Good Little Sausages - but to cut a long story short, they're just about the best sausages you can buy (85% outdoor bred pork, no nasty chemicals, gluten-free, the list goes on) AND we've worked out a great plan with Christian Aid so that every time you buy a pack of Good Little Sausages, someone in a country like Malawi gets a meal every day for 2 weeks. We're great believers in corporate responsibility that goes (way) beyond looking good and actually ends up doing good, so it's a privilege to have helped such a great thing get started.

Take a look at the Good Little Company web site, and join the Facebook group or follow them on Twitter and the Good Little Company will donate a meal on your behalf. Even better - go buy the sausages in your local Tescos (they're great with mash and onion gravy).

At the time of writing (about a week after launch), the Good Little Company have already donated about 90,000 meals to families in developing countries. How. Exciting.

Build a Beard Workshop

Last Friday, we had some fun and made a thing. Long story, but it involves beards and helping people in developing countries. Take a look at the site, raise some money for Kiva and help us go bankrupt!

Participle

It's not very often you get a chance to be a part of something so much bigger than yourself. When Hugo Manassei asked us to team up with the talented folks at Participle we said €"œyes please"€. Participle is a new social venture to design the next generation of public services - it is headed up by Hilary Cottam, Charles Leadbeater and Hugo Manassei which makes it a force of nature.

We worked with the ever-wonderful team at FRONT to help them transfer their research, vision and ambition online with a bold, project-based design for their website.

Sesame Tree

Well, we're all finally back from our summer adventures (hooray!). On our return, we were greeted with a terribly exciting email from the BBC. Apparently the Sesame Tree site is making everyone rather happy. We even have numbers to prove it:

April: 14,654 page impressions
June: 253,232 page impressions
August: 2,662,160 page impressions (wow wee)
We worked our socks off on this earlier in the year with the super-lovely people at Front. Atto Partners brought the illustration, animation and general joyfulness and Front added their unique blend of making it all look nice and work brilliantly.

Nancy Stevenson, Director of Character Design at Sesame Workshop, liked it too...

We love what they did with the characters. The look, design and colors of the art is delightful... Jim Henson would love it!

We couldn't be more chuffed that it's a huge success for the Beeb. Oh, and we're still singing the songs.

Dekko monsters

Not so long ago our friends at Mammoth commissioned us to create a set of monster characters to promote Dekko's big summer sale. This was a fun job. Martin, Emma and Barry appeared on billboards around every corner in Belfast. Meet the the not-so-fierce but slightly bemused and very friendly Dekko monsters.

Restore Practical Counselling

Restore is a new counselling service based in North Belfast that aims to help people in a real and practical way. We worked with them to define how they present themselves to the world, as an organisation focused on the the needs of the individuals they work with.

A Sad a Beautiful Place

We've just finished working on 'A Sad and Beautiful place' - a book full of insight into life in the townships of South Africa. It's comprised of compelling photography, by Gordon Ashbridge, and engaging real stories and poetry, by Steve Stockman, inspired by their trip to Cape Town.

All proceeds from the books and limited edition prints go to Capetownship, a justice mission poject working in South Africa.

Free Idea: Carbon Brilliant

We're always interested in working out how to help people talk about products, services and ideas we care about. Carbon Brilliant (or maybe just Brilliant?) is a little idea we had. It's really just another carbon offsetting service. The major difference is that we invented this one (although it'll probably never actually see the light of day). It's a little bit viral too.

Here's how it works:

Someone pays Brilliant either £20, £30 or £40 (depending on the size of their car) and Brilliant offsets their emissions. In return, they get a sticker to put on their car windscreen that tells the world that they've offset their emissions for the whole year. (Based on the Road Tax Vignette principle).

The sticker scheme works because it's a mark of pride. It shows that the user cares, but it isn't just about bragging; it's a way to share the idea, spread the meme and support the cause. It's a social object that's inherently viral - you can see whole groups of friends picking the idea up and running with it.

Oh, and the message, call to action and pricing are all super-simple. That's important.

Dunadry Hotel

We've written before about working for Dunadry Hotel; an idiosyncratic, strangely beautiful place with history coming out its ears. Until recently, Dunadry Hotel had always been talking about itself as if it's just another off-the-shelf hotel (sorry Hilton, Radisson etc). Over the last year, we've been helping shape their message. We summed it up like this:

A place of shared stories; old and new, rich and beautiful.

The Dunadry is (and always has been) all about stories. Their staff are some of the most helpful, friendly people we know and just about every nook and cranny in the place has a story attached to it.

We commissioned photographer Gordon Ashbridge to take a look around for us, and we're really quite pleased with what he came up with. Here are a couple of his shots:

Free Idea: Parking Cards

I'm not sure if this is universal, but most car parks (parking lots) here in sunny Northern Ireland work a bit like this...

1. Drive up to the ticket machine/person
2. Press a button (or talk to a person)
3. Receive a card/ticket
4. Drive to your parking space

The interesting thing (to us) is that, between step 3 and 4, you have a piece of card in your hand without a particularly good place to put it. From minutes of research and analysis, we predict that around 53% of people put the card in their mouth while they drive to a parking space.

So... if we were designing the most remarkable car park in the world, it would have to have Flavo(u)red Parking Cards.

I think the folks at Moto might be able to help (more here).

Concentrate at John Lewis

Our terribly clever friends at Concentrate now have their wonderful Fruit-Friendly Food for Thought Lunchbox (pictured), Bottlecoolerpenholder, Chairpadbookbag and Lunchbox Coolerbag stocked at John Lewis.

Read about why these products are so clever on Concentrate's site then go and buy them all!

Linen Hall Library Summer Events Guide

Belfast's legendary Linen Hall Library asked us to do their Summer Events Guide, so we thought we've have some fun with it. We're big fans of the library, and we tried to incorporate a feel for this marvelous place with lovely vintage summery illustrations that captured the sentiment of the booklet.

We're not fond of blowing our own trumpet, so we'll let the library's Director of Arts and Cultural Programming, Hugh Odling-Smee, do it for us.

...our best looking events guide thus far. I really like the way you took what was a fairly loose concept and delivered a cogent and aesthetically beautiful document that dovetailed nicely with the needs of the users. There is a particular finesse in Atto's work that I haven't seen in other designers, lifting it from the usual design that we see in the arts in Belfast.

Aww. Thanks Hugh.

Cleland McKnight win small business of the year.

Congratulations to our Image Consultant friends over at Cleland McKnight on winning the NTCM Small Business of the Year Award. We're particularly chuffed that the panel commended them for their creative marketing approach.

We've been involved with Cleland McKnight since day one; helping frame their message, build their brand and design their web site and print material. They're a true anomaly in their market; genuine, honest, ethical people who want to have a positive effect with what they do. We wish them every success as they continue to grow.

Dunadry Booklet

We just got this back from the printer's, all delicious and copper foil-y. It's one of the first bits of printed work for our brand re-think for Dunadry Hotel.

Innovation Week 07

For the last few weeks, we've been working on a walk-up animation for Invest NI's Innovation Week. Commissioned by our friends over at AV Browne, they took care of the design, voiceover and the lion's share of the storyboarding, so really we were just making it move a bit for them.

Rachael Gardiner

We had the lovely (and ever-thoughtful) Rachael Gardiner in for work experience with us over the past couple of weeks.

We knew she had a great whimsical illustration style (she wooed us with a beautiful, hand bound cv/portfolio) so we chained her to the desk and made her churn out some gorgeous, quirky designs for potential Henry Pancake wedding stationery. She fitted in to our wee team very well and we know she'll do fantastically well in her final year in Leeds. Keep an eye out for her work ...

Friday Night

We had a lock in day for a new brand job on Friday and we ended up working until just after 2am. There was office swimming, face painting and several bouts of uncontrollable laughter as we tried to stay awake and get things done.

As with all of these things, it wasn't much fun at the time, but we look back on it with fondness already. The only thing remarkable about this is that it's remarkable i.e. we don't do it nearly as much as we used to; we're getting old.