2013 was a very busy and challenging year for emc design. With a large volume of work throughout, we really had to continuously provide the level of commitment and skill that our clients expect and that we strive to provide. The year saw many changes, both for us as a company and the industry as a whole. Here are some highlights we would like to share with you from a very productive 12 months!
Our new designers from left to right – Eduardo, Becky, Abi and Jordan
OUR TEAM
During the summer we increased our design team with four excellent new designers after an extensive recruitment drive, including visiting end of year design shows, our four new designers were chosen from almost 500 applicants. Eduardo, Becky, Abi and Jordan have settled in brilliantly and have made a fantastic contribution and impression. As our workload has increased over the year we are continuing to recruit more personnel for our production support and design team for 2014.
If you are interested in joining us take a look at the roles here.
EMC’s front cover designs and page layout for Carlton Books’ latest Premiership titles.
OUR WORK
We’ve been fortunate enough in the past year to see two projects we were involved with nominated for a British Council ELTon Award earlier this year. The nominations are a shining example of the level of design quality our team consistently achieve and it’s always a great reward to see our work recognised in this way. None of the nominated projects we were involved in won unfortunately, but we would like to congratulate those who did!
We’ve been working on quite a few new flagship courses for our ELT clients (published in early 2014)Â which have been a privilege to work on.
We’re also working on more trade publications and this year in particular we have been working closely with the Sports and Children’s team at Carlton Books on some of their Premiership titles. These have been fun projects to have in the studio despite our lead designer Gavin supporting Spurs!
EVENTS
During 2013 emc attended and organised various events in the publishing industry. Sophie showcased emc design’s Bookmahine.me profile at Unplugged, along with some other great guest speakers who also gave talks. We also sponsored the BookMachine Oxford event in May. Be sure to keep an eye out for future BookMachine events next year. We also attended some brilliant talks, seminars and exhibitions throughout the year including the London Book Fair, Media Futures, Pub Expo, Bett, Women in Publishing and Galleycat.
Sophie has become more involved with IATEFL this year, becoming MaWSIG’s event co-ordinator. The first webinar with John Hughes was a great success with approximately 70 attendees from all over the world. Later this month, she will be co-ordinating a one-day conference, New Directions in ELT Materials Writing, which is expected to be a terrific day. Tickets will be drying up as it’s only a few weeks away, so purchase your place now!
Also in November we attended the Society of Young Publishers’ Conference at Oxford Brookes University. It was a great event that began with an inspirational keynote address and was packed with many informative speakers and seminars. You can read our round up here, and hopefully we will see you at next year’s event.
Amy, one of our design managers, has had a baby this year (congratulations!); Mike, our MD, gave a presentation to postgraduate students at Oxford Brookes University, and hopes to do more next year. We have also expanded our client base to the United States and Spain, and are looking forward to exposure in those markets.
INDUSTRY UPDATES
We are keen to keep track of industry trends and news within the publishing industry. One way we do this is by interviewing those involved with our work and getting the opinions of people in the business. We have interviewed various people this year to gain their insight including – Richard Redisch from Grupo Editorial Nacional on the changing role of the publisher; Ben Collison about the Impact of ELT Publishing at a school in China; and Sophie has done several interviews this year for BookMachine, including interviewing Amanda Close of Random House and new ELT tech company Saundz. We will continue to ask many other experts and interested individuals about their views on varying topics; always keeping a keen eye on developments in order to constantly improve our services to publishing!
SHARING OUR EXPERTISE
We’ve been posting useful tips on many different subjects, from tech to design. We find that it’s a great way to share information as well as consolidate our own knowledge. Here are the links to some of our most popular tips this year:
Getting the design right at the start to save time & money
Tips for improving your BookMachine.me profile
4 reasons you should be using GREP if you work with words
Adobe Creative Cloud
And finally a big highlight for us this year was being interviewed by Adobe, as we took the decision to join the Creative Cloud. Watch the video interview and find out what the advantages of Creative Cloud have been for us as a business, as well as a supplier to the industry.
Thanks to everyone for your support, it’s been a fantastic year. We are looking forward to working on some of the exciting projects already lined up and we are keen to collaborate with more people in 2014.
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