Latest Dot News

BOURNEMOUTH DEFER SOCIAL HOUSING POLICY….. MAYBE!

Although there has been no official press release as of yet, rumours of the social housing policy being deferred until at least Spring are starting to filter out of the town hall. Whether this is a reaction to the staggering amount of applications Bournemouth Planning have received leading up to the deadline, or just that the amount of additional work would swamp the newly stream lined department, no one knows. But as it stands at the moment, the new policy of one for one and 40% is not going any where.

This now means that we all have an extra couple of months to get applications in, or we run the risk of being the guinea pigs on which the newly equated contributions scale will be based.

Please fell free to get in touch and we will endeavour to advise as to your next steps on any of your sites in Bournemouth. It may not be as bad as you think.

BOURNEMOUTH CHANGE IN POLICY HAS US ALL ON THE CANVAS!!!

We are not easily surprised here at Dot. Towers, but Bournemouth Borough Council have knocked us for six with their latest press release.

As from the 23rd of November, the social housing threshold for any development will be taken away entirely. In layman’s terms this means that any form of development in the area will seek up to 40% contribution of affordable homes based on the schemes viability.

Here at Dot. we have had numerous conversations with the council to ascertain how this will affect development in the area, and we are now happy that working alongside the council, progress can continue without too much of a hit to all concerned.

Please feel free to get in touch, and we can advise as to your next step on any of your sites in Bournemouth, its not as bad as you may think!

Check out the press release at http://www.bournemouth.gov.uk/News/press_office/Press_Releases/October_2009/Change_in_policy.asp

Wow!

DOT. AT THE BOURNEMOUTH AIR FESTIVAL 2009

Its that time of year again and Dot. are off to the Bournemouth Air Festival for four days of aeriel fun and frolics….

Check out http://bournemouthair.blogspot.com to keep up to date with the comings and goings of the event, with a full itinerary and constant news over the weekend.

“The More Bus Bournemouth Air Festival is shaping up to be bigger and better than 2008. With more aircraft, more on the ground attractions and more awesome ‘Night Air’ evening entertainment it promises to be a must-see 4-days of breath-taking aviation action!Watch out for an incredible line-up of civilian aircraft including: the world’s only formation wing walking team – Team Guinot, Yakovlevs Aerobatic Team, The Blades Aerobatic Display Team, The Matadors, Spitfire, Mustang, Sally-B, Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, Eurofighter Typhoon and three displays by the Red Arrows.”

Rest assured, normal service will be resumed next week with the publication of our feature advert in Bournemouth’s Homes magazine.
Dot produced images to follow………

THE LIFE CYCLE OF A DOT. LOGO!

As many of you now know, we not only have an architectural department, we also have a graphics side to dot, that has seen a really exciting growth. Websites, branding, logos, marketing literature are all encompassed under the dot. graphics banner. We thought it would be nice to show the design process behind one of our recent logos, showing you how the creative bods think and work!

So this logo was for Dwiko Arie Photography. A contemporary and very exciting photographer based in London. Dwiko offers a really exciting service, working on a variety of projects, from Music concerts to weddings, and we were approached to design a brand logo that would take that into account. We got to work on brainstorming over a few cups of tea and some biscuits to see where best to take this brand.
We loved the name, we looked at a variety of cool ways to incorporate the idea of photography into the logo, colours, shapes, even an actual camera, but we kept getting pulled back to this unusual but really funky name, could we incorporate the two? We focused on the initials – D and A and worked on a variety of ways to have two letters work as an individual logo.

After muchos sketching we got to work on the computer, we use a variety of Illustrator and photoshop to turn our scrawls into something more presentable.

This part is really where we see how the client want to push their brand, and after a few discussions we all agreed on keeping it very simple with the close text and the linked letters o and a. This was great for a brand, but we needed a logo, something less obvious than pure text, so we went back to the calera inspiration and took some from the most important part of the device, the lens.

We used the linked o and a taken from the text to create a separate entity, but by amending slightly, we could create a d and a which mirrors the look of a camera lens.

Back to the computer to vector the whole thing and get back to client for colour specs and final comments then.

So here is the final product, we went for a variety of greys and whites on the dwiko text, to offer flexibility on chosen background – needless to say the dot team are very happy
with the final product, and a big thanks goes out to Dwiko arie and there open approach to some of our silly ideas. See their work at www.dwikoarie.com