SERVICES

We provide a full spectrum of business services including strategy, consultancy, mentoring, automation, brand development and design.

We have produced solutions for fashion houses, film, galleries, tech and sports giants through to tv channels and national museums.

Experience

Over the last 25 years, the founders of Institute, have worked on thousands of projects that includes work for the following brands:

Adidas, Barclays, BBC, Bench, The Body Shop, Boots, The British Museum, The Carphone Warehouse, Cartoon Network, Cath Kidston, Clarins, Conde Naste, Daks, The Design Museum, Diesel, Disney Stores, EMI, Esquire Sport Magazine, Exposure, Fate Face, Fred Perry, Givenchy, Gieves & Hawkes, Godiva, Habitat, Halifax, Haribo, Harrods, House of Fraser, Hedkayse, HMV, The Independent, Kookai, Levis, Marks & Spencer, MGA, National Gallery, Procter and Gamble, Royal Court Theatre, Selfridges, Schuh, Sony, Superdry, TATE Enterprises, Ted Baker, Three Mobile, Tower Records, TKMaxx, UNIQLO, United International Pictures, Virgin, Vodaphone and Zoological Society of London.

We bring this experience of the design and delivery of a diversity of projects to Institute.

Business Development

We provide mentoring in business practice and development. We cover the progression of practice, the nuts and bolts of running a business through to brand strategy and development. We provide consultancy and think-tank style services for creative businesses, organisations and initiatives. We cover strategy, identity frameworks and business development. We are used to thinking outside the box and asking the right questions that result in the right frameworks for success.

Consultancy

We tend to focus on SMEs, as they are the collective powerhouse of the UK Economy and often do not receive the support they require. An external support structure characterised by objective analysis and targeted support is often a key mechanism for the success for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Our business consultancy is run by Steve Barradell. Steve is an approved business mentor for Enterprise Nation on the Help to Grow initiative.

Enterprise Nation exists to shortcut the route to trusted business support. Founded by Emma Jones CBE in 2005, Enterprise Nation has grown to a community of over 120,000 people. They support people to start and grow their own successful businesses and represent their views to the government and media: www.enterprisenation.com.

Steve is also a member of The Association of Business Mentors: www.associationofbusinessmentors.org and a Creative Business Mentor on the EMC2 Create Growth Programme: www.eastmidlandscreategrowth.co.uk

Our recent work includes the running of an incubator Course for Phoenix Arts (the REAL Initiative). We supported 25 Digital Artists and Documentary Film Makers in getting them business ready, providing them with strategic advice, support and mentoring and to create a platform for growth. We are about to start a short series of courses for East Midlands Creative Consortium: Conversations with a Machine

We have extensive experience in Branding , Business Planning , E-commerce, Communication, Freelancing, B2B Marketing, Data & Analysis, Problem solving, Strategy - both business and creative, Sales.

The Benefits of Mentoring

Gaining new perspectives

Since mentors, by definition, have more experience than their mentees, they look at the world with a different perspective. As each decision is considered, the mentor will bring an informed opinion to bear as it is likely that they have seen the pros and cons of this situation before.

Improved leadership abilities

A mentor often performs many leadership duties, such as inspiring their mentees, providing guidance, and even solving taxing problems. They may also give constructive feedback to their mentees. Developing these skills will help you become a better leader in the future.

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs tend to like ‘going alone’. Business owners will often state that If I had their time again, they would have worked with several mentors to learn valuable lessons from each. From not making certain business decisions to fostering certain partnerships, a mentor can help guide you through your entrepreneurial journey.

Networks and contacts

Your mentor has already acquired a variety of valuable contacts that could be out of reach to you. Your mentor can facilitate access and open doors, giving you the opportunity to develop your business and grow your network. Networking opportunities are often the key to business growth.

Confidence building

Confidence grows through the mentoring process. You will have a guide for the ups and downs of business and develop the ability to succeed.

The Benefits of Consultancy

You need an outside / objective opinion

Sometimes it’s difficult to solve your own problems because you’re just too involved. You might just be so close to the problem that you’re missing an obvious solution. When there are tough decisions to be made, sometimes it’s easier to leave it to an expert who isn’t personally involved or emotionally invested.

Business consultants are experts in their field. They’ve helped numerous other companies to work through similar issues and they know what’s worked in the past. This experience means that they can bring new and innovative ideas that you might not have thought of yourself.

When you hire a business consultant, you’ll get a new perspective on whatever problems you’re facing, from an outsider’s point of view.

You lack time or resources

No matter how important the problem is, sometimes you just don’t have the time to dedicate to solving it. You’ve still got your day-to-day business to focus on and finding the time to resolve your challenges just feels impossible.

You could hire a new employee to give you the time to focus on the issue at hand, but you know it’ll only be temporary and training a new employee can be time-consuming.

Hiring a business consultant is a great way to outsource your problems to a professional. They’re used to moving around different companies, which means they’ll get to know your business quickly with minimal training required. And most importantly – you can continue with your day-to-day operations so your business doesn’t suffer either.

You have a tactical project you are struggling to complete our to resource or expertise.

Design

We help creatives, brands and organisations to develop their ideas and to design solutions that communicate these ideas to their chosen audiences.

We believe in the maxim, Form follows function. The solutions that we produce should look, feel and essentially, be, the answer to your problem. Each problem requires a unique solution that emerges out of the design process. By going through the discovery stage to define the core problems to solve, we are then free to develop a solution that solves these unique problems and is fit for your purpose. This is a formula for success. It encourages clarity in the way we think about the project objectives. That aids communication with each other. This clarity allows us to get from A to B in an understandable way but allows us the freedom to produce dynamic solutions.

Projects Portfolio

Graffio Arts 1/1/23 Graffio Arts 1/1/23

Documenting the War Widows Quilt

The War Widows’ Quilt is a beautiful and moving piece of collaborative art that relays the realities of war widowhood in Britain, past and present. We were asked to turn it into a book.

The book tells the moving stories that lie behind the squares of the War Widows’ Quilt, a collaborative piece of art made by more than 90 war widows.

Graffio Arts were honoured to be approached to design a book to document the War Widows’s quilt. The quilt, made in collaboration with arts company arthur+martha, is part of the War Widows’ Stories project, led by Dr Nadine Muller (Senior Lecturer in English Literature & Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University) and the War Widows’ Association of Great Britain (WWA).

Part of the War Widows’ Stories project, led by LJMU’s Dr Nadine Muller (Reader in Women’s & Gender Studies) in collaboration with the War Widows’ Association of Great Britain, the War Widows’ Quilt is a beautiful and challenging piece of art that communicates the realities of war widowhood in the UK through quilting and poetry.

Released for Remembrance Sunday, allows people to discover the quilt and the stories that lie behind each of its squares, as well as the creative and research work that inspired this stunning piece of textile art.

Nadine said: “I’m delighted that we’ve been able to make a digital version of the book available for free as we mark Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday.

“The War Widows’ Quilt has provided a creative, therapeutic and immensely impactful way for the women to tell their life stories, and to process and share their love, loss and grief, as well as the social and economic challenges they have faced.

“The restrictions of the COVID pandemic have meant that we’ve not been able to exhibit the quilt since its display at the Queen’s House, Greenwich, in 2019. I’m so pleased that people can now discover the quilt and the stories behind it through this beautiful new edition of the exhibition book.

“The experiences so many women have shared through the War Widows’ Stories project are an incredibly important part of the history of war and conflict that must not be forgotten, and we have a duty to continue to hear and learn from all those affected and left behind by conflicts around the world to understand the real cost of war.”

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

The War Widows’ Quilt is a beautiful and moving piece of collaborative art that relays the realities of war widowhood in Britain, past and present. Made from second-hand armed forces shirts by over a hundred war widows and their families, its squares tell stories of love, loss and grief that connect women across generations, from the Second World War to the Falklands, Iraq, and peacetime.

In this event, we explore the power of creativity at the centre of the War Widows’ Stories project, asking how the meditative process of stitching and sewing can offer an outlet for the memories of those we have loved.

CREDITS

The War Widows’ Quilt was edited by Lois Blackburn (Lead Artist), Philip Davenport (Lead Writer), Nadine Muller (Project Lead), and designed by Graffio Arts.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE WAR WIDOW’S QUILT

THE BRITISH ACADEMY

Stitching Remembrance: The War Widows’ Quilt

The British Academy Summer Showcase ‘21

Speakers:
Lois Blackburn, artist, arthur+martha
Dr Nadine Muller, ‎Senior Lecturer in English Literature & Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University
Mary Moreland MBE, War Widow and former Chair of the War Widows' Association

LIVERPOOL JOHN MOORES UNIVERSITY

New book reveals lives, loves and losses behind War Widows’ Quilt

Article

WAR WIDOWS’ STORIES

War Widow's Stories

VIEWING THE BOOK

You can download a digital version of the book from the project’s website at www.warwidowsstories.org.uk or via this direct link.

Graffio Arts 3/26/22 Graffio Arts 3/26/22

Turning Cancel Culture into Cultural Debate

Pillars of Society was a community project investigating public art in the Welsh town of Carmarthen and asking who are our pillars of society?

Graffio Arts worked with Emily Laurens from Oriel Myrddin Gallery in Carmarthen, Wales, to create Pillars of Society. Pillars of Society (Hoelion Wyth Cymdeithas) is a community project investigating public art in Carmarthen and asking who are our pillars of society?

The project is a response to the national (and international) debate around statues, monuments and colonial history. It provides an opportunity to discuss race, equality, diversity, Welsh identity and language, and the experience of Wales as coloniser and colonised.

We created a set of souvenir postcards and a project within our augmented reality app showing alternative public art created by first year sculpture students from Carmarthen School of Art as well as a set of humorous animations depicting the students work.

Project information and postcards were available at Oriel Myrddin Gallery, Carmarthen Library, St Peters Hall Nott Square and other venues in Carmarthen.

PROJECT DESIGN

The premise of the project is that the alternative public art pieces created by the students should be viewable within the app as an overlay when pointed at the monuments- a discussion point rather than a physical replacement of the current monuments.

The project had to be accessible to anyone with a mobile device. To generate 3D models of the students work required iOS technology thats not currently available to Android users so we had to develop two ways to display the augmented reality. We created six short, animated films depicting the current monument and the proposed student replacement that would play through the screen when pointing at the monument for all devices. For those unable to travel to the monuments in Carmarthen, we set the front of the postcards to also display these animations.

The back of the cards presented a map and trail for the monuments throughout Carmarthen and also acted as triggers to release the 3D models for those with iOS devices.

For augmented reality to trigger it requires a visual marker. The app recognises the marker and plays an augmented layer over the top. In this situation the markers would be of monuments that would be lit differently throughout the day. This presented quite a challenge. We took multiple photos of the monuments at different times of the day and created additional versions with low-light, and no cloud cover and high contrast to increase the chances that the app would be able to recognise the monuments. In the end, it worked better than we could have imagined.

THE CONTEXT

The project was created in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and the physical dismantling of statues in the UK and other parts of the world. The project emerged out of art gallery with an agenda to engage with art and culture in Carmarthen. The project had to be disruptive to a certain extent but tread the fine line that encourages debate rather than polarising opinion.

The animated sequences that we created had to be mindful of this and we called upon some old fashioned tricks for our baseline.

We used a visual language influenced by Terry Gillam’s work for Monty Python in the 1970s.

Monuments would be toppled or squashed by large hands, this would be accompanied by an audio clunk. The students work would replace the current monuments but all with the virtual world of AR. We made a big deal out of crediting the students and used a variety of music and sounds to convey the context of conflict in a light hearted way.

CONVERSATION vs CONFLICT

The project was well received and helped Emily and the gallery reach a broad audience when it was picked up by ITV news: Wales This Week: An Uncomfortable Truth. The project was a technical and cultural challenge but in the end, it managed to frame the student’s work without putting them in the firing line- the animated sequences were just too silly to cause offence, we had replaced community monuments without anyone breaking a sweat and Oriel Myrddin Gallery engaged positively in debate with it’s target audience and beyond.

THE CARDS

CREDITS

Design, augmented reality and animation: Graffio Arts. 3D objects: First year sculpture students at Carmarthen School of Art. Project Coordinator: Emily Laurens.

LINKS

Emily Laurens - Community Co-ordinator at Oriel Myrddin Gallery.

PoS Facebook Page

Art Wales

An Uncomfortable Truth