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This week one of our new artists has been working with us in the Advocate office. Keen to develop her portfolio but wanting some guidance, Victoria Nelson has been in every day, producing some lovely new artwork. Keep updated with her progress by visiting her portfolio here. 
Archive for the ‘Inside Advocate’ Category
New Artist in the office!
Friday, April 13th, 2012V for Vendetta!
Thursday, March 29th, 2012
Check out our new acquisition…
Here at the Vendetta offices we are the proud new owners of a cool but somewhat creepy Vendetta Mask.
From the original DC Comic called ‘V for Vendetta‘ Written by Alan Moore (we are all big fans) through to the feature film based on the same story through to recent protests where the Mask featured predominantly.
The mask has became synonymous with ideas of anarchy and rebellion.
Have a look at the BBC’s interview with Alan Moore to see his thoughts on the symbol he has created.
This is a symbol that resonates deeply with us here at Vendetta were we have purposely set out to resist the mundane, try to do thing differently with our own creative twists and choose to avoid the main stream studios.
So as you can see. We really love our mask!
Software Updates
Friday, March 23rd, 2012To make things run a bit smoother here at Advocate art, we have recently invested £40,000 in software updates for Cumulus and Filemaker (the two databases we use on a daily basis). We are all very excited about the new updates as there are many new benefits which will be useful to us, our artists and clients.
FileMaker Pro is powerful, easy-to-use database software that helps you and your team get any task done faster. Millions of people in business, government, and education use FileMaker Pro to effortlessly manage all their information on Windows, Mac, and the web. – Filemaker website
Filemaker Pro holds all of our contact information for clients and artists, and contains all sales and order details. The benefits of the new system will allow us to generate daily financial reports and make it easier for us to reconcile payments. We will be able to simplify tracking specific artist projects with the ‘project tracker’ and we will also have an ‘artwork due tracker’ which means we can chase any late artwork before it is actually due! The best part of Filemaker Pro 11 is the artist job histories section. This will have details of all projects artists are working on, and the artist them self can log on via a web portal. They will be able to see and manage their own accounts – just like on-line banking! Click here to visit the Filemaker website where you can find out more about the new benefits.
Canto Cumulus helps you quickly and easily develop and manage the workflows you need to remain productive, get to lunch on time, and actually take your vacation. More than 14,000 Cumulus Servers have been sold, and more than 1,000,000 user licenses have been distributed in the product line’s nearly 20-year history. Canto Cumulus helps you manage, control and distribute all your digital assets, such as images, videos, layout files, documents, presentations, or any other file type. - Cumulus website
Cumulus is where we keep and manage all the artwork we get sent. It allows us to view any file type and make collections of images to send to clients. We have various catalogs in Cumulus for different types of licensing; these include greeting cards, art for posters, photography, 0-5, 5-young adult, and older and real styles. All the work is divided into these different categories before being uploaded to the website. The latest software, Cumulus 8.5 offers support for 64bit which means we can now hold more data in memory; this will increase the performance of the system. With an increasing amount of artwork being sent to us, this means we will be able to hold even more artwork and the system will run much quicker. Other benefits of the new system are highlighted below. Click here to visit the Canto website where you can read more about the benefits of Cumulus 8.5.
The Book Portfolios are Printed!
Thursday, March 15th, 2012After working so hard on getting the new children book portfolios ready for the Bologna Children’s book fair, we were all very excited when the finished product turned up at the office today! With a smooth matt finish and smart ring binding they look absolutely fantastic and we can’t wait to start showing them off! Below you can see pictures of Ed, Kate and Lauren opening them when they arrived.
New Book Portfolios for Bologna Children’s Book Fair
Thursday, March 15th, 2012Next week Ed, Kate, Hannah and Caroline are off to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Italy. With a busy week of appointments ahead we have been redoing the book portfolios for them to take; filling them full of fresh and exciting new work from our illustrators‘. We have seven new folios, each with 100 pages. Each page is double sided so there are a total of 200 printed pages per folio. We are printing two sets of folios to take to the shows (like Bologna), this equals a total of 2800 printed pages! As well as this we are printing five sets for our biggest clients . . . phew! The book portfolios will also be available to download as PDF’s from the homepage of the Advocate website. Our artists‘ work is divided up into four categories; Picture book (three folios), Young fiction (two folios), Older and real styles and Boutique; with each one showcasing the best book illustration for each category (see below).
Bologna Children’s Book Fair has been running for 49 years and children’s book publishers and illustration agencies from all around the world meet there every year to showcase new artists, novelties, trends, proposals and cross-cultural creations. This is a fantastic platform to meet with industry professionals and to get our fantastic book illustrators’ seen. The fair runs from the 19th – 22nd March and Advocate art are located at Stand A/159 in Hall 25; we would love to see you if you are attending.
Below you can see Lauren designing the folios – once printed they will be bound with a hard cover, ready to be eagerly thumbed through by publishers and the like at Bologna!
New Advocate leaflet!
Monday, January 30th, 2012As well as sending out our new Advocate Art Heads Up calendar and agency book we have also designed a square fold up leaflet which we are sending out to all of our clients. The leaflet has details of our locations at Paperworld, Spring Fair, Surtex and PGLive, and when folded out it has thumbnail images of our greeting card and children’s book illustrators.
Improvements to the Greeting Card library password system
Thursday, November 24th, 2011At Advocate Art we are always tweaking and re-tweaking to improve the greeting card library. We have recently had written a faster password processing system so users now get a pass straight away rather than waiting for a human to validate it manually. We can still see if you have already registered so we can boot off copycats! Also, you can now change your password into something more memorable – mine is my cats name and my birthday – easy peasy. Now there are no excuses for being locked out when looking for that perfect christmas card design or everyday card range!
Download the Greeting card portfolio from the Advocate website
Monday, November 14th, 2011We have recently added a new feature to the home page of the Advocate Art website. You can now download the greetings card folio from the home page, this PDF document contains over 100 style sheets of all our top greeting card and seasonal designers and illustrators. It is a great commissioning guide and can also help you see the different styles and navigate to specific artists on the main site. The download button is located on the left hand side of the screen (see demonstration below) and there are two examples of what the style sheets look like. We hope this will be a really useful feature allowing you to look at all of Advocate’s wonderful artists at once!
