Bar the fantastic New Adventures conference in Nottingham in January organised by  the talented Simon Collison, for some reason, the Midlands often gets overlooked when we talk about the Web industry in the UK. The “hottest” places tend to focus around the South (London, Brighton and Bristol) and North (Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle). Rarely do you hear of large scale events occurring in the UK’s so-called “Second City” of Birmingham. Why this is, we’ll never know but as a creative evangelist of the region (co-founding the Multipack), I’m keen to change this and raise the Midlands’ digital profile.
Throughout the Summer months, I’ll be visiting a variety of design/Web/creative agencies around the West Midlands as part of a Design Tour of The Midlands to promote agencies in the region and find out how they work.
There are several reasons for this tour:
- raise the profile of local agencies to emphasise the talent in The Midlands
- ask the agencies how they compete against the bigger agencies in more popular design regions of the UK
- get out of the isolated office to bounce ideas off peers, finding solutions to real-world problems
All the visits will be tweeted (with hashtag #dtotm) and summarised in a blog post, promoting the agencies’ recent work as well as thoughts on the design problems discussions.
First stop will be The Higgs Design Co on Tuesday 24th May where I will be meeting Andy Higgs et al, talk about some of their recent work, what’s coming up and how to solve an existing design problem I’ve recently encountered (TBC).
I’m also planning to pop along to some of the region’s other agencies including:
If you’re another design agency reading this, interested in me visiting your offices, fire over a tweet or send an email to “simon (dot) jobling (at) gmail (dot) com” and I’ll get in touch to arrange a date.
RT @Si: ★ My plans for a Design Tour of The Midlands http://jobl.in/hc
Nice idea Si, I’ll look forward to the result blog posts. Also — if you get the chance — it would be nice to see some photos of the studios and workspaces, they’re always something I’m interested in seeing.
Good luck!
Good idea, Martin. Working environments are very important so I’ll do my best to capture decor and workspaces during my travels.
Interesting.
We do something with our first year students that may be of interest:
http://theplan.co.uk/a-three-hour-walking-tour-of-b
Also for a while a group of us at BCU have been kicking around, but never doing anything with the idea of a “Creative Industries Tour Itinerary” for Birmingham. We see it as being a resource rather than an organised tour – an itinerary and suggested route around town for any visitors to the city. This comes from being treated to similar things in other cities while working on the Creative Metropoles project (http://creativemetropoles.eu/). The idea here would be to demonstrate a breadth of creative industries community and a creative culture, while also dropping in on some creatives at work where possible.
Is it possible to articulate your project in this way? With routes, maps and guidance to create a pathway for the next traveller?
Nice idea Jon.
I’m keen to make a point of Birmingham and surrounding areas as a hub for the creative scene, bringing to light the success stories as case studies rather than just back-patting friends. All this would lend towards improving the general perception of digital media in the region, consequently attracting new students to the colleges and universities (in my opinion, one of the primary sources for the region’s creative strengths having attended Staffordshire University myself and my wife teaching art in Birmingham).
We’ll put our heads together further into the project to see how we can present the data in a more inviting manner.
RT @Si: ★ My plans for a Design Tour of The Midlands http://jobl.in/hc