Our NEXT R&A
We’ve been working with Seabird Explorations for a number of years now on their Annual Report and Quarterlies. We were therefore delighted when one of their team, who had left, got in touch to ask for our help with the latest 70 page R&A for their new company, NEXT Biometrics.
A really interesting company who have developed advanced fingerprint sensor technology for various devices. The brief was to help their accounts team by designing and producing the more creative and technical pages in InDesign and set up a word template for them to use to create the more straight forward pages. The two finished documents were then output as PDFs and combined in Acrobat Pro. This approach helped them keep the costs down and the split workload meant the job was done super quick. Another satisfied client during lockdown.
Will old established brands make it through this Covid-19 pandemic?
Our MD Simon found an interesting website during his weekend trawl through LinkedIn – www.visualcapitalist.com – featuring data and infographics covering, among many things, our best-loved brands, how we are consuming media during Covid by generation and even a record of the oldest companies in the world that have survived. It got him thinking – will established big brands make it through this Covid-19 Pandemic? He shares his views on his LinkedIn article here.
The video conferencing systems we’ve been using and some help with using them
With a new normality thrust upon us, we have quicky needed to adapt to a whole new way of communicating with one another. Now more then ever we are relying on video conferencing applications to stay in touch, but with so many on the market and different companies favouring different methods, it can be overwhelming getting your head around them. Below are three tutorials for the three most used applications here at tothepoint.Google Hangouts
Zoom
Microsoft Teams
Screen crazy – people need people, not screens
This is how empty the M25 was a week ago during our MD’s exercise ride that took him over it – he could have gone on it! So it looks like we are still observing lockdown but there are people out and about walking, cycling and running – it helps keep us sane and healthy before we all go screen crazy.
All good we think, as long as social and physical distancing is maintained. Being out and enjoying the open spaces, if we have them close by, highlights how much we all need real ‘face-to-face’ interaction – even just saying ‘Hi!’ to someone we don’t know makes us feel more human. This could start to change this coming weekend with the expected relaxation of lockdown but with it will come new rules that may make human interaction more difficult. Hopefully, we can move on from the very successful messages that stirred ‘feelings of guilt’ that got nearly all of us to ’stay home’, but we now need to invest in apps and technology to help us ‘go out’… safely. We need apps to help with timed visits to open spaces, supermarkets, travel so that we don’t have mass turn-ups at some times and empty aisles and spaces at others. And when we do finally get back to work and the new normal, it’s going to be a very different workplace and a very different world, but anyone saying this is the death of travel, conferences, events and social gatherings may need to think again: People need people, not screens.
The Great Realisation
This ‘bedtime’ story, that looks back after Covid, is refreshingly simple and hopeful. It seems to be going viral, so let’s hope he’s right, we make the right choices and do prefer the new world we’ll find.