On Thursday, we launched our latest online store. Which, on this occasion was for ourselves.

Why would a creative marketing agency have an online store? Well, there are two reasons for that.

One.

We love making things. We’ve been doing strange little things for the last couple of years, sometimes web-based and usually very experimental. (We’ve even had 99 jars of Red Pepper and Chilli Jam made for our second birthday next week! More details on that soon).

When Steve Jobs passed away, one of his most memorable quotes was mentioned on Twitter. It created an itch, and we had to scratch it. So we made a poster, and got a small run printed so people could buy one if they liked. That went rather well, and we’re now printing a new one, which is a poster featuring a John Lennon quote about growing up.

aaaaaaaaand Two.

By creating a store of our own, we’d understand how small businesses have to deal with orders, enquiries, lost parcels, order routes and everything else that is about running an online store beyond the technical/development bit. This enables us to create even better online stores for our customers and even better experiences for their visitors.

So, take a look at our little shop, we hope to add more products to it soon. If you want to see our products in the flesh before deciding to buy one, LoveOne in Ipswich will be stocking both the Steve Jobs and John Lennon posters very soon.

Update – our John Lennon poster is now in stock!

We love absolute transparency at Condiment, whether it’s showing you the quote from the printer to show you exactly how much your print will cost (we never mark-up print, just charge a small print management fee) or telling you the services we use for our online projects.

Hiding stuff from clients will always backfire. Maybe you’ll make a few quid out of them before they find out you’ve been marking up their print by 30% or something extortionate. But when they do discover what you’ve been up to, they’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks and never work with you again.

That isn’t a smart way to do business.

Instead, we rely on our own skills – as a creative agency – to make our money, and take great pride in the suppliers we work with. We trust them, pay them well for their services, and let them do what they do best.

We recently moved some of our higher-traffic sites over to PHP Fog, a new kind of cloud hosting with added Git goodness. Cloud hosting basically means we get a cost-effective, reliable service and can deploy new sites and apps far quicker than usual. It also means we can spend less time managing servers, and more time creating awesome websites and online tools for our clients. Cloud hosting also ensures that whenever the load gets high on our servers, the impact can be spread out, meaning a lower chance of failure.

We also use similar services for our First 65 apps, but specifically Rails-based providers such as Brightbox and Heroku.

However, yesterday our server (hosted with Amazon Web Services) threw an almighty hardware wobbler, and took two of our client sites out of action for the best part of Saturday. Hardware failures of this type are rare (it’s the first time we’ve ever experienced one), but do still happen, and cause even greater disruption on a weekend. After eight hours of engineers working hard to restore service, we were back online and running smoothly.

To a certain extent, there was nothing we could do but wait. We were in constant contact with the engineers and updated any affected clients as and when we had more information.

While it’s difficult to completely protect against things like this happening, we’ll be taking steps to ensure that our servers are monitored more often, and that there will be contingencies in place should something like this happen again.

One option, of course, is to move hosting providers; to simply declare PHP Fog to be worthless and unreliable. But move to whom? The list of hosting providers is endless, and flitting between them like Roman Abramovich in the hope the next one will never let you down is pointless. Much better is to work with suppliers, give honest feedback and help them to provide a cracking service.

So we’ll be sticking with the team at PHP Fog, just as we stuck with 34SP after they experienced a DDoS attack, and Media Temple after some tricky DNS issues on the day Up To The Moon went live.

We’re incredibly sorry to the clients that were affected by the outage, and we’ll get in touch with you individually to explain the measures we’ll be taking, one of which you’ll see below, with the introduction of New Relic monitoring on our PHPFog accounts. It will alert us to errors on our sites, and keep us up-to-date on anything we should be aware of when it comes to site performance.

Does it really matter if the text is #222 and not #000?

Does it really matter if there’s a very slight 1px border to the left of that icon?

Does it really matter if the user clicks here first or there first?

Does it really matter that the second heading line-wraps awkwardly and leaves an orphan?

Does it really matter if there’s a full stop at the end of that list item, but not that one?

Does it really matter that there’s no indication that that link is clickable?

Yes. Of course it matters. It has to matter. If we’re not at least trying to achieve perfection, then perhaps we shouldn’t bother at all.

Thanks for the reminder, 37 Signals.

What’s mildly fascinating is that instead of hitting delete as soon as it arrived I actually clicked one of its links.

Would you have done the same? If so, what link would you have clicked?

Perhaps, like me, you would’ve opted to click on the Up to 70% off link. I mean why the hell would you want a mere 50% off or even a lousy 30% off when you could get a massive 70% off?

I’d love to see the stats for this email to see how many John Lewis customers were convinced to do the same.

The clever marketers at John Lewis (or their respective agency) are influencing our decision by adding inferior choices.

It’s not a new idea, but I am proof that it still works.

You can read more about this kind of thing in Dan Ariely’s brilliant book Predictably Irrational.

My wife is currently working on a rather difficult 1,000-piece puzzle. It’s of a herd of zebra in long grass. It may as well be a 1,000 piece puzzle of static interference, that’s how hard it is.

She relishes the challenge. I hate it. Which utterly baffles her.

This is down to the fact I love problem-solving, but to me puzzles are linear problem-solving and therefore redundant. However you approach the puzzle, it’s the same outcome. Edges first? Same outcome. Pattern organisation and grouping? Same outcome. Bah.

My (rather feverish) appetite for creative problem-solving means I prefer to look for multiple outcomes to solving a problem. Sometimes the thought process may result in arriving at the same outcome, but a lot of the time, sitting down in the studio covering the walls with thoughts and scribbles will mean we’ll arrive at multiple answers to the same problem.

Once we’ve approached the problem two or three times, there’s usually a clear leader (though sometimes refinement is required to give it polish), and that’s what we’ll respond to the client with. Too many responses will result in decision paralysis for the client. We’re here to present clarity, not make matters worse (or just present a tower of fluff).

Either way. Puzzles are bad for me, but I do adore a creative problem.

Perfect example of how a serious message can be made memorable with humour.

Start a business.

Start a family.

Start a team, a band, a secret book club, a programming group.

Start learning.

Start teaching.

Start celebrating the things you achieve.

Start quitting the things that don’t bring you joy.

Start caring about what you eat and where it comes from.

Start a blog. Start writing about the things that matter to you. Start telling people about it.

Start running.

Start ignoring the status quo. Better, start disrupting the status quo.

Start scratching your itches.

Start believing in your ideas, your skills and your worth.

Start ignoring all the negative people who enjoy bringing you down because it makes them feel better about themselves.

Start every day with a good, hearty breakfast and a little dance to one of your favourite songs.

Start supporting other people’s great ideas.

Start something every month.

Start something every week.

Every day!

2012 is yours to do whatever you like.

We hope you have a happy, healthy and prosperous 366 days.

Start now.

One of the articles featured the other day was a comparison of the iPad against some of the possible alternatives for children (there’s one above, it’s real, and it’s terrifying). It was a good feature, weighing up the pros and cons of either throwing caution of the wind and splashing out on an iPad, or getting them something that would be a ‘suitable’ substitute.

Surely children won’t know the difference? What do they know?

Believe me, they will.

Think about how many times you’ve been asked to fix a parents’ PC. (I finally managed to stop this from happening by convincing them to move to Apple. I’ve not been asked for help since. This resulted in my first ever self-high-five.)

“Why can’t they fix it? I know how to do it, why don’t they?”

With the introduction of competitively-priced computers in the 80s (Commodore and Atari, in particular) and mass-market home computing in the 90s, children all over the world had access to a brave new world of learning and the application of brain power. By having these devices in our homes, we naturally began to understand how they worked, and how they could benefit our lives.

My parents’ generation had never experienced anything like it, and because of their age-group, were not open to discovering exciting opportunities in a digital realm, they were too busy trying to keep me out of trouble!

Think of it another way. Did you find it particularly amazing that when you were growing up there was a bath in your house? Running water? Colour TV? Electricity? Probably not, but most of these things would have impressed my parents when they were growing up. We just take it as a given. It’s a standard. The norm.

Don’t think of this generation’s digital lifestyle as anything different.

My 18-month-old daughter regularly blows my mind. She can pick up my iPhone, unlock it with a swipe of her little finger, open the ‘Eva’ folder and choose an app to launch (usually Talking Tom or Talking Ben so she can feed them, give them a drink, a tickle and a poke in the eye).

She can also wake up my iMac, open her account and use the webcam to take pictures of herself. She also chose her own desktop background (Small Potatoes, in case you were wondering).

She’ll switch on my PS3 and fetch her Timmy Time disc to watch on it. She’s still not able to form a complete sentence, but she can engage with a digital interface and learn new gestures in seconds.

While this is all very very clever, it doesn’t make her unique or a future genius (though I’m rather optimistic). Chris often has to relinquish his iPad so Bradley, his five-year-old nephew, can play Sonic Racing. To Bradley, tilting the iPad to steer the vehicle is beyond obvious – to us, it’s still a unique feature (and you only have to watch Apple’s ads for the iPad and iPod Touch to see that they do too).

To our kids, this isn’t a digital revolution we’re experiencing – it’s the norm.

I’m not sure what Eva will end up doing when she’s older, and naturally, whatever she wants to be, I’ll support her. But until then, I want her to see and experience the possibilities of this digital world.

And to demonstrate those possibilities, I’ll continue to choose the iPad – a device that’s redefining the possibilities of why, how, where and when we use a computer – and disregarding all the tosh that toy companies roll out to capitalise with second-rate glorified Etch-A-Sketches. (Comparing one of these to an iPad is like jamming a candle into a tumbler and calling it a lightbulb.)

Meanwhile, in the grown-ups world, let us not forget that this device that hadn’t been announced two years ago. Not only that, the marketplace didn’t exist.

While others play catch-up – sometimes unfairly – Apple is thrilling its next generation of customers.

This headline sums it up nicely: consumers don’t want tablets, they want iPads.

I’m not often grumpy, but when I am, it’s pretty extraordinary. You should fear the grump.

I could tell you all about the reasons for being in such a mood but that’s not the interesting part (unless you’re really nosey). The interesting part is how I intend to turn that frown upside down, which leads me to sharing with you one of my favourite sites: Action Tracker by We Are What We Do.

If the bright and playful landing page isn’t enough to make you smile I urge you to click on through and explore the wonder within. But be warned: you won’t find the answer to all of life’s troubles available to purchase at the click of a button; there is no money back guarantee if you’re not 100% satisfied.

What you will find is something much more powerful than promises and guarantees – action.

Action Tracker is all about 140 small, simple actions.

Split into 12 different categories these small actions have the ability to make a huge difference and can all be achieved in an instant. Whether it’s an action to change things at the office, recycle more, waste less or look after where you live, Action Tracker has a remarkable way of reducing life’s little qualms into nothing.

To me the simplicity is striking.

My favourite category is Make Someone’s Day, in particular Action #101: Make Someone Smile.

Yesterday Nina Christensen, Chris Waters and Tom Crinson made me smile. The gesture wasn’t elaborate by any means, but whether they know it or not, it certainly made my day. So in an attempt to pay it forward here’s what made me smile…

From Nina (@redhead42) a Loveheart with my alter ego (@lilianlovebug) written on it. Might not seem like much, but to me brought back wonderful memories of times past.

From Tom (@MrJaba) a 5 second clip that I challenge you to not giggle at.

And from Chris (@christhesoul) by far the funniest Advent Calendar I have seen from @theartofdancing.

As they say actions speak louder than words, so when you have a second check out Action Tracker and give one a go.

There it is again.

It sounds … ominous.

It’s a funny old din; it resembles the clanging chimes of doom mixed with the disappointment of a present from the local Shell garage.

Aha, that’s it! It’s the sound of Christmas fast approaching.

And so it’s time to begin the last minute dash for gifts. The postal service becomes a bit of a lottery this close to Christmas, so you’re faced with prospect of heading into town.

Some people love the seasonal hubbub, but if frantic crowds and hearing Santa Claus is Coming to Town for the millionth time isn’t going to fill you to the brim with festive joy, allow us to recommend a way out:

Gift vouchers.

“Wow!” I hear you say, “A gift voucher – now there’s something novel.”

Sarcasm duly noted.

But we’re not talking about your £20 Amazon e-voucher, here. We’re talking about gifts that could genuinely make someone’s day.

Over the past year we have had the pleasure of working with inspiring clients who are passionate about what they do, so we thought we’d point you towards three of them this Christmas.

Food Safari curate field to fork experiences in Suffolk for people who really care about their food. James and Chris have appeared on the telly (BBC2′s Great British Food Revival, no less) taking part in a beef butchery course – just one of the many wonderful courses to choose from. Gift Vouchers are available and can be sent by email, so you’re good for few days yet.

Or for a relaxing stay, why not treat your favourite couple to a relaxing getaway at The Old Rectory? This gorgeous Georgian rectory is tucked away on the Suffolk coast in Campsea Ashe, not far from Woodbridge to the south or Aldeburgh to the north. The lucky recipients of a gift voucher for this boutique bed & breakfast will certainly not be disappointed.

If your a friend or relative has a four-legged companion, a gift voucher from Melrose & Mutt would be a real festive treat. Owners can choose from a range of ethically sourced collars, leads and other such fine canine accessories for every size of hound.

So whether your beloved is a foodie, mum and dad need a well deserved break, or your best friend’s best friend is a pooch, these terrific Suffolk companies could be your saviour this Christmas.

Go on, take a moment, sit back and clickety-click to clear your Christmas gift lift with days to spare.

Edit: We’ve just noticed that Up To The Moon can still deliver before Christmas if you choose Express Delivery. So if you know a child who’d love some traditional wooden toys or fabulous craft kits, go see the Wise Old Moon and tell him we sent you.

Now, before you think I’m being a pretentious wally for picking someone you’ve never heard of – let alone read – let me tell you that you’re wrong.

In fact, the chances are you’ve read one or more of Theodor Geisel’s books. Maybe you own some. You’ve probably seen a film adaption or two, too.

You just don’t know him as Theodor Geisel.

You know him as Dr Seuss.

Here’s a small slice of his genius, from the wonderfully odd One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.

We took a look.
We saw a Nook.
On his head
he had a hook.
On his hook
he had a book.
On his book
was “How to Cook.”

We saw him sit
and try to cook.
He took a look
at the book on the hook.

But a Nook can’t read,
so a Nook can’t cook.
SO . . .
what good to a Nook
is a hook cook book?

I love this poem; especially its use of tiny words – not one has more than four letters. How very refreshing.

So here’s a tip: when you’re writing, think a little more like Dr Seuss.

Chop out the big, silly words and use shorter, clearer versions.

Do you really need to say utilise when use does exactly the same job with half the effort? Can it be a mix rather than a composite? Is there ever a need to be anything-oriented?

I’m not requesting we dumb down language. I just ask that that we eradicate the corporate-speak cut the bull.

We were talking about the products of one of our newest clients – Cole’s Traditional Foods. Cole’s make proper, traditional puddings that you can steam or microwave before drowning in custard and wolfing down.

When we were first asked to pitch for the work, we headed to the wonderful Suffolk Food Hall to buy some, and – rather interestingly – found them in the fridge. Now, finding a dessert in the fridge isn’t usually interesting, but it is when half-an-hour ago you’ve been told that this product is ambient and doesn’t need to be chilled.

We raised this anomaly when we pitched for the account.

“Lots of retailers pop them in the fridge,” their MD told us. “Because people think a chilled dessert is a fresher and therefore better product. Which is total nonsense, but that’s the perception. Many retailers report they sell more of them when they put them in the fridge.”

Ah, our good old friend Perception – happily skewing people’s decision making since the year dot.

Of course, this makes you wonder how many products in our supermarkets are chilled for necessity and how many are chilled for the sake of perception. And if the latter is more common, then perhaps you might start to wonder how many supermarket fridges are really fridges at all.

Anyway, when we told this fascinating story to our dear friend, he nodded sagely and said he wasn’t surprised in the slightest.

“A very similar thing happens to me at home. The wife tells me to get a couple of bottles of white wine out of the garage and put them in fridge. And every time she does this, I explain that the garage is cold, so the wine will be cold, so transferring the wine from one cold place to another is a pointless exercise. She disagrees and says it doesn’t create the right impression when we have guests.

“Apparently, the garage just isn’t the right kind of cold.”

No words required, really.

“It’ll save me money,” she argued before stepping into the fabric store. “Wanna bet?” was my response as I smuggly cradled my take-away coffee.

She’s not the first to have the fabric pulled over her eyes. I have also been tricked into this new era of hand-making bloody everything.

First came the baking: if you can’t make a cupcake with a swirly icing hat then you might as well surrender yourself to a lonely, spinster life.

Then it was last year’s Christmas bunting –’it’ll only take a couple hours’ I naively thought. Two days, one tin of Quality Streets & a gallon of mulled wine later and Christmas was almost renamed Christm as I lost the will to sew.

And I almost took up knitting but got distracted by a good episode of Mad Men and haven’t picked up my knitting needles since.

The blame lies squarely with Kirstie Allsopp for this new pressure on my already career-juggling, home-making, cocktail-drinking generation. You make it look so easy – a snip here, a stitch there and ta-da! – a Rudolph with flashing lights that makes tea, all made out of an old bed sheet.

And then there’s the competitive tweeting- ‘I made these beautiful mince pies before I even got up this morning’ <insert mouth watering picture>. Unfollow.

Girls and boys, with just over a week to go until Christmas, I beg you: turn off your sewing machines, step away from the oven (unless Sophie is reading this) and enjoy Christmas as it should be enjoyed – drunk and filled up with food that other people have made.

Oh, and if you’re yet to make/buy/whittle in wood your Christmas cards, give yourself a break and buy our ‘handmade’ cards, they’re for a fabulous charity , I promise you won’t regret it.

The brief was simple. We were each given three well-known movies to watch, and then we were required to design a poster for each that advertised a screening. The execution needed to be ‘creative, cohesive and unified’. Other than a few simple details, there were very few restrictions to the process.

The three movies I was assigned were ‘North by Northwest’ (1959), ‘Bullitt’ (1968) and ‘No Country for Old Men’ (2007). Three images immediately flashed in my mind, Cary Grant tumbling around a dusty highway desperately avoiding a dive-bombing biplane, Steve McQueen thrashing a ’69 Mustang through the backstreets of San Francisco and Javier Bardem as Anton Chirgurh – a calculated and solemn contract killer pursuing Josh Brolin between southern american towns. They are easily three of the best chases ever developed onto film.

It was ‘the chase’ – that was the all important link I needed to produce these posters.

What are the most basic ingredients for a chase?:

• There is a hunter.

• There is the prey.

• It starts and ends.

I think the key element is the idea of the beginning and ending, point A to point B, that is essence of every chase, it sets the backdrop and tone of the pursuit and makes it as thrilling and exciting as possible. My brain’s single visual output of this thought process was this:

The concept is the simplest possible representation of the path a chase follows, and gives a basic stage for the characters to run along. The posters would share the same line blending the three together and therefore answer perfectly the ‘unified’ element of the brief. This idea stuck in my head; I did attempt to invent some other concepts but this one was far too strong to ignore.

It would now be appropriate to summarize my sources of inspiration during this project the biggest being life work of Saul Bass. Throughout his career he (and his wife Elaine) produced some of my favorite examples of design across all disciplines, but he will certainly be remembered for film posters. Everything about his work is unique and has been an inspiration to generations of designers since. In particular I love his use of simple shapes and styles in conjunction with perfectly crafted color combinations as well as the way he used simple materials such as paper to maximum effect. My adoration for his work is quite difficult to summarize, perhaps it will become a gushing blog post in the future.

I was also influenced by the slew of super simplistic movie posters that have been produced in recent years in ongoing projects, the ones that most stuck out in my mind were those by Hexagonall. One object on a solid background, that’s the rule they seem to abide by and I think the posters are brilliant in their simplicity. I adopted a similar rule for my own posters.

In the final posters straight line was abandoned for a non-linear path, after all none of the chases are that simple (especially when Hitchcock is involved). I had managed to distill the three movies into a single simple landscape, each showing the iconic settings in the simplest way I could. Bass’ influence is very apparent in the character illustration, while still obeying my own rules in terms of color and simplicity.

I’m pretty proud of the final results, and the fact that they were deemed prize-worthy made me feel that they should sit pride of place at the head of my portfolio.

There’s loads of great data validation tools for forms out there, but nothing that creates a visual validation of a physical object.

We felt this was an important part of the process we’re working on, so we pressed on to making a prototype.

Initially, we started straight in code, using CSS3 skews to create a simple 3D box. When they were static and not adjustable, they looked great! However, as soon as the width of the elements changed, the skew no longer held the same perspective. Back to the drawing board, literally.

Chris and I started thinking outside the box. Not in that hackneyed creative-fluff way, but in how a box is rendered and how the space around the box defines how it appears (Our blog title lends itself to this - how do you carve a horse out of a block of wood? Take away all the bits that don’t look like a horse).

After drawing no end of lines and angles on our lovely whiteboard walls, I fetched the scissors, a sharpie, some tape and a few sheets of A4 paper.

By cutting out the shapes and creating a – rather crude – model, we were able to visualise how the CSS needed to work, and how each element interacted with each other. It took out all the guess work from the coding and gave us a physical object to refer to when coding up a new prototype.

Here’s a quick video of the working model in code.

We now aim to move this further by being able to control the box using form fields. Before that, however, we need to be able to create oblongs by offsetting the x-axis of the vertical line in the box and match the position on the lid, so one edge looks longer than the other.

The key thing we’ve learnt from the exercise is that creating UI designs on paper first extends way past page layouts and into figuring out how complex objects interact with each other. If you’re unsure how something would behave on screen, create it with paper first, then use that as a starting reference point.

Being a mobile-savvy business used to be a bonus – now it feels imperative.

Whether your business sector receives hundreds of thousands of searches a day or fewer than a hundred, you can almost guarantee there’s someone out there searching on a mobile device.

With smartphone usage soaring, search via mobile devices has gone from strength to strength. Businesses now have the power to create a first-class search experience on the go.

For example, The Old Rectory is a modern country house B&B in Suffolk, competing for search space amongst the likes of laterooms.com and booking.com. Against such widely-recognised advertisers with substantial on and offline budgets, it is essential The Old Rectory delivers superb search results tailored to the consumer.

Take the below-left screenshot of a search for ‘suffolk hotel’ on Google via an iPhone.

The Old Rectory features first in the sponsored search listings. A number of ad components have been adapted to appeal to consumers searching on a mobile device for a hotel in Suffolk. Besides using punctuation to stand out amongst the more generic headlines of other advertisers the emphasis of the ad is on the call to action, quite literally.

The description lines flow from the headline, encouraging consumers to simply ‘Call Us today and find out more’. We’ve made use of Google’s Call Extensions feature to empower the consumer by allowing them to call directly through to The Old Rectory without having to visit the site.

For those who are phone-shy or simply not ready to book the ad has two further options. They can click through to the homepage, as normal, but also have the option to follow a Sitelink (another of Google’s ad extensions) straight to the Rooms & Rates page (above right).

In short the ad allows consumers to access the information they need, faster.

Over the past three months traffic volume via a mobile device for The Old Rectory has accounted for 4% of the total clicks recorded. Furthermore 18% of these clicks were via an ad extension (e.g. sitelinks, click to call, location extensions). Not a huge number in terms of actual visits, but that’s not the goal – the real objective is to deliver a search experience that works for the consumer.

For those who are interested in reading more about mobile search, here’s a link to Google’s December Adventure: Mobile Tips Recap.

So if you want to have a viral success, please do me one favour: please be quiet and forget about it. You’re not going to have a viral success.

First – you’re focused on the result you want, and not the thing you want to create. That’s the wrong way to go about it. Springsteen doesn’t try to write hit records, he tries to write great songs. Pratchett didn’t try to write bestsellers, he just wrote books that made people belly laugh. And I can’t imagine The Wachowski Brothers were desperate to have a box office smash and kinda stumbled upon the idea for The Matrix.

It’s unlikely your creation is going to go viral anyway, so you may as well make something worthwhile.

Second – the numbers are against you. There are hundreds of millions of videos on YouTube. Millions of Facebook pages. Billions (trillions?) of tweets passing through our periphery.

Do you really think the world is going to stop and listen to what you have to say? I doubt it.

Third – you’re not a pop star. The fact of the matter is that the videos shared the most are music videos.

Fourth – your brand can’t handle it. Here’s why:

You know those horrible corporate away days when everybody gets together and gets right to the heart of the company’s values? And then you invariably end up with the same old babble on a flipboard: ‘modern’, ‘professional’, ‘approachable’, ‘transparent’? Well, guess what – modern, professional, approachable and transparent aren’t interesting.

The real out-of-nowhere viral successes (i.e. the ones that aren’t music videos) are shocking, hilarious, absurd or involve cats. Your company’s values are none of these things. And unless your corporate away day saw these descriptors hitting the flipboard, you’re going to need a bloody brave MD or marketing manager to sign off something that has the potential to go viral.

(If, on the other hand, your mission statement does involve being shocking, hilarious, absurd and cats, we’d bloody love to work with you.)

But – please ignore everything I’ve just said and prove me wrong by doing something brave, daring and utterly remarkable. I look forward to seeing and sharing it.

I can’t be the only one who finds such advice bloody infuriating.

Perhaps it’s because such a solution doesn’t really explain the cause of the problem. (I was one of those annoying children who always asked “why?”, and I’ve never really kicked the habit.)

Switching it off and on again is, in my mind, an admission of failure; it feels so hopeless, so absurd, so … so … so very Windows 95.

And yet it works.

Time after time, calling it quits, hitting reboot, making a cup of tea and starting again seems to do the trick. Whether it be computers, phones, routers or Sky boxes, the faithful switch-it-off-and-on-again routine makes the dark technology clouds blow over.

But it’s not just technology that gets stuck in a process and stops responding.

Sometimes our brains do the very same thing.

Perhaps a piece of code just won’t perform as you expect it to, the words just won’t come, or those logo ideas just don’t inspire any joy. And you can’t fathom out why.

That’s when we need a brain reset.

Our current solution in the studio is to pick some weapons, get dropped somewhere in the world, and the try to shoot, knife or grenade the living daylights out of each other.

Modern Warfare 3 – the latest in the super-successful Call of Duty series – is our brain reset. A multiplayer deathmatch consists of ten minutes of unadulterated virtual violence. And it’s brilliant fun.

What’s even cooler is that the studio Playstation is hooked up to the projector, so we’re playing it on a screen that’s around 100 inches corner to corner.

I’ve worked at plenty of companies who have talked the talk about the importance of breaks and time away from your desk. But not one has ever provided the means to do so. (Often, the fun stuff was removed in favour of more desk space.)

I’m thrilled that the company I’ve helped to build has a very different approach.

So if you visit our studio and find us whooping at a headshot, you can rest assured that we’re simply taking the necessary steps to solve a problem.

To perform at her best she prefers specific and detailed instruction before starting a task. She may underestimate herself and either takes anything she does well for granted, or regards it with no great achievement at all.

Although she is quite ingenious and idea-oriented, she is rather modest about her finer qualities.

Work, for her, is the process of striving towards something that matters deeply to her and is consistent with her values.

It is her need to be of service to others than can occasionally prevent her from relaxing. She may worry too much, and as a result may exhibit indecision.

So when Chris said “write a blog post” it is no wonder Sophie came unstuck.

With a world of words at the tips of her fingers, Sophie developed decision paralysis about which ones to use.

Her first draft was poor, her second draft wasn’t much better, by the third she hated every word.

I suppose that’s why it remains unfinished. And I suppose that’s why – until now – I have ended up writing in the third person. The words seem to come easier.

But whilst I may be reticent about putting pen to paper (or keystroke to screen), I am tenacious and persistent.

And really, what’s the worst that could happen? It’s only a blog post. Come on, Sophie. Write it, finish it, accept it, and move on to the next one.

You may not enjoy reading it. So what? There’s an unfathomable load of content out there to read if you don’t. If you do, terrific.

I will write about the things that matter to me – or if I’m stuck, simply write something interesting. Either way, I’ll articulate my thoughts as best I can.

For now, it’s a pleasure meeting you.

Whether you admire or abhor Jobs, there’s no denying his unwavering vision on simplicity and purity of function is incredible.

I’ve now reached the stage in the book that is of most interest to me: Apple’s revival, the return of Steve Jobs as CEO and the relationship with Jony Ive.

On my way into the studio this morning I avidly listened to a chapter on design principles, in particular Ive’s belief in the design philosophy of Dieter Rams.

Most people will happily reel off the ‘less is more’ mantra when discussing design. It’s a start, but it doesn’t really answer how or why less is more. What you should be doing is asking how to make something less, but better.

You have to understand the existing intricacies of the problem you are trying to solve – just taking elements away will not make it better; you must completely understand the function of each piece – whether it’s a computer, a mobile phone, an ad campaign, or a user interface.

A great deal more work is required to create less. On the first pass of trying to streamline a process or design, you may only remove a small element of what can be taken out to make it better. More passes are required to distill a process down to its purest form, and that’s a never-ending task.

Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

Less requires bravery. Removing elements that are ingrained in common understanding of how something should function will cause outcry among some. “No CD drive on a MacBook Air?! No Flash on an iPhone?! An operating system that’s download only?!”

But hey, when was the last time you missed a 3.5″ floppy disc drive?

Steve Jobs was quoted as saying “… people only know what they want when you show it to them”, maybe the opposite is also true. People only know what they don’t need when you take it away from them.

I am academic, he is creative.

You cannot be both. The academic aren’t creative and the creative aren’t academic. You are one or the other – or at least that is what I have always been led to believe. I don’t think I’m the only one brought up with this mindset.

Which one are you?

I have always happily ticked the academic box – until only very recently when I decided that I wanted to move from a career of spreadsheets and targets to a more creative environment where the edge of the academic / creative boxes are blurred.

Only when I joined Condiment and The First 65, it seemed they’d discarded the idea of being academic or creative altogether.

Our art director, despite arguably being one of the most creative people I know, astounds me with his academic interests and abilities. Our copywriter researches science, history, facts and figures to develop and inspire creative ideas. And our lead developer – traditionally a very academic role – creatively uses new technology to find the best solution.

I can’t deny that I am still more comfortable with a spreadsheet than a paintbrush but I think I am slowly becoming more creative.

Maybe one day I’ll become a creative academic.

Why?

Mostly it was because we thought it sounded good, and that’s how the brilliant Wieden + Kennedy described themselves. (Noel Gallagher’s retort to somebody who questioned whether Oasis were merely copying The Beatles was simply “why wouldn’t you try to replicate the very best?”)

But also because nothing else really fitted. What were our other options?

A design agency? Nope. Certainly not. That would’ve completely shattered our USP (and made me redundant). No no – we were a copywriter and art director team in Suffolk. And anyway, design is genuinely only a part of what we do.

A digital agency? Nope. We (and by “we”, I mean James) know far too much about the print process, and care far too much about the power of print to ever turn our back on the papery goodness.

An advertising agency? It sounds good … in all its 60s Madison Avenue, Mad Men, Ogilvy, At 60 Miles An Hour The Loudest Thing In This New Rolls-Royce Is The Electric Clock splendor. But the brutal truth is there isn’t that much advertising business around in Suffolk. Many businesses no longer have the inclination or budget to spend that much on print media. Sadly, when they do, it’s too often wasted on iStock-heavy, fruitless quarter-page ads.

An integrated agency? Nope. What does that actually mean? You think about more than one thing? Your ideas span different media? You do print and digital? I really don’t know. I’ve heard of integrated dishwashers.

The only other option was the M word.

But calling ourselves a marketing agency seemed like a bad idea. After all, everybody – other than marketing departments – seemed to sneer at marketing.

Perhaps it’s because there are some really bad marketers out there, consistently buying and inserting terrible ads into terrible publications, producing horrible sales brochures, and insisting on another round of cringe-worthy radio ads because that’s what they’ve always done.

Or maybe it’s because everybody who works in the boring accounts or HR department really would prefer to be working in marketing, and thus the sneers are merely ones of jealousy.

Whatever the reason, announcing Condiment as marketing agency just felt like a bad idea back in March 2010.

But now 2011 is drawing to a close, we’ve got a portfolio we’re proud of and a big list of very happy clients. So what we call ourselves doesn’t feel quite as important; we’re quite happy to let our work and our clients do the talking.

And when we look at much of our work, it’s just well-thought-out marketing.

Let’s take Travel With Jules as an example. Her identity and website were primitive, to be kind, yet her knowledge and experience is remarkable. Jules wanted to get visitors and enquiries through organic Google search, so we built her a beautiful, fully content-managed website that would give her the option to create as many pages as she wished, showing off her expertise.

It worked: Jules wrote a page about Route 66 Self-Drive Holidays, just at the time Billy Connolly was doing a TV show about it. It jumped to page one on Google, and very quickly the enquiries started to roll in. Many of them read “we found you on Google and loved your website” or similar. And, for us, that’s a real thrill – to see that our work is having a very real and positive effect on somebody’s business.

Maybe that’s the point: it’s not important how we describe what we do, what matters is the work we do.

Anyway. Enough rambling. We shall deny it no longer: we’re a marketing agency.

We’ll whisper it proudly.

My first three months with Condiment and The First 65 have been great. Going from the prospect of wading into a fairly bleak job market to sitting in a studio full of creative juices was surprising, exciting and fun. I still can’t quite believe my luck.

Before I left university I had an image of the studio I’d like to work in. I wanted it to be small (no battling with focus groups), brave enough to experiment and go crazy with interesting concepts, shelves that aren’t full of pretentious design awards and strong ideals that keep the output fresh and the clients happy. In those respects Condiment was a perfect candidate; imagine my surprise when I was approached by them ‘for a chat’.

Since then I’ve been cutting my baby teeth on some great ‘real’ projects. Being trusted with all the creative control I could need was a huge relief, and made the transition from open-ended hypothetical uni projects to client work easy and fun. On top of that I’ve learnt a huge amount of practical skills from the team, whether it be setting up complex print-ready files or new web languages.

All of this has helped me make a great start to my career. Becoming one of the team has been easy, I couldn’t have been made to feel more comfortable in my first studio environment and I hope to carry on doing all the things I love about my work for as long as possible (interspersed with sporadic Call of Duty death-matches, of course).