Recharging the creative batteries

In times of so much doom and gloom on the news, and the gleeful negativity of the presenters – everyone needs to recharge their enthusiasm and positive energy – that is what the summer is for.

For me recharging the creative batteries is also vital and is a constant process. It is a combination of keeping up with their current creative trends, being inspired by other designers and the approaches, meeting up with friends. This is the day-to-day stuff and is what any good designer does.

Every designer also has their own personal inspiration, personally, it has always been music and live music. The complete immersion in the sound, the light, the energy of the performers and the energy of the crowd for me is truly inspirational.

This summer I have once again been to The Galtres Festival, North Yorkshire, with my daughter. Three days of music, mixing with like-minded festival-goers and being part of a collective crowd sourced enthusiasm. A festival is a way of seeing bands you have never seen or heard before, meeting and making new friends and allowing your soul to be inspired.

For me the inspiration is all this music and the smile on my daughter’s face and knowing she has got the same bug! 

  

The Rise of the Indie

Over the last year there has been a huge increase in Indie publishing, authors who want to publish themselves for the commercial market. Here at 2h Design we have been apply our years of experience in mainstream publishing to Indie projects.

The old adage of never judge a book by its cover was obviously coined by someone who has no idea how publishing works. 

Readers used to only browse for books in shops, now they can scroll through hundreds of books online and the preview of the cover now has to work not only at the size of a printed book - but also in a thumbnail the size of a postage stamp. The importance of the professionalism of the cover and indeed the entire book is vital because for an Indie publisher to compete with the mainstream publishers they must be as good or better.

2h Design not only has over 25 years of experience working in publishing, we also work with other industry professionals, from editors to printers, proof readers to publishing PR. We are now doing a lot of work where we help Indie publishers project manage every element of the process of taking their project to publication date.

We also work on the principle - if we can't help, we usually have a contact who can.