Our new Penhouse website…

Well it has been far too long really, but we eventually found some time for ourselves here at Penhouse and our new Penhouse website is live!

Our blog posts will no longer appear here on this blogging site, but instead ou blogging will move to our new website here from now on, so its likely there will be less activity on this Fresh Air Blog.

We hope you had fun with us on this blog and you’ll continue to follow our Fresh Air ramblings & view our latest work projects on our new website at http://www.penhouse.ie.

As always we can be found in lots of social spaces so find your favourite and connect with us there. These 3 are our most popular…

Penhouse on Facebook

Penhouse on Twitter

Penhouse on Pinterest

Look forward to connecting with you…

Gill, Leonie, Gemma and Annette

The Big Egg Hunt for Jack and Jill

What excitement! We’ve been asked to join the select few and decorate a giant egg for the The Big Egg Hunt in Dublin 2013. Time is tight (we only got the egg today), but the heads are buzzing with ideas. Its looks so lovely in the studio as it stands, plain white, like its just been laid, but we won’t get away that lightly…

We’re decorating it for our buddies in Lily O’Brien’s, so we need a bit of their chocolate love in the egg. We’ve also been sourcing materials so that we can create our design to withstand the elements for the big expo. Big thanks to Rob in Subvert who is helping us get the right colour Montana street art paints, looking forward to working with them…

Follow our action on Facebook here, we’ll most likely create an album of pics as we go along…

Have a Rockin’ Christmas

As we celebrate our sweet 16th this year, we made some rock and sweetened up our services. We hope you joined us and had some creative candy too.

Big thank you to all our valued clients and suppliers this year – without you we can’t be so creative, so we thank you most sincerely for allowing us this privilege. You’ve also helped us to sweeten up 2012 quite nicely with a whole host of happy additions to our offering, all of which shape who we are and what we do too. Here’s just 16 of these from 2012…

16 sweet things this year…

1. We celebrated our sweet 16th birthday – Whoop!
2. We won 3 national design awards, 2 new European tenders & a host of new clients!
3. Sweet rebrand for Lily O’Brien’s Chocolates, designed this year (to be unveiled in 2013)
4. (As a result of number 3, our sweet tooth has been happy this year!)
5. We ‘jammed’ at the Electric Picnic in September
6. Two Penhouse players were tag rugby champions 2012 – sweet sports result!
7. Sweet announcement – there’ll be ploughing at the ‘Penhouse farm’ – location of the NPC 2013!
8. Annette made sweet apple juice from the Penhouse orchard
9. We got some sweet praise from our clients – you know who you are – we thank you!
10. Leonie took her holipops over the busiest 2 weeks in Penhouse this year! Sweet (for her!)
11. We designed a suite of jewellery (with Helena Malone) for Culture Night
12. We watched the sweet successes of Ireland at the Olympics
13. Gemma’s enthusiastic bid for the Olympic showjumping team 2016 failed BADLY – bittersweet
14. We volunteered our creative services to sweeten up a range of non-profit businesses
15. Gillian crashed into Gemma’s car (oops!) but now Gemma is sporting a brand new bumper – sweet!
16. We made Penhouse rock! If you missed out, please let us know and we’ll send you some – Penhouse Style.

We’d like to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We will close for 2012 on Friday December 21st and reopen in the New Year on Thursday January 3rd 2013. Enjoy the holidays…

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Here’s some Christmas eye candy…

Have a look at these beauties or make your own one and and upload it too Christmas Gifs

Enjoy some sweet decorating with these virtual gingerbread men and women

Create your very own snowflake using a simple scissors and your creative skills

See where you’ll be celebrating Christmas this year… Ciaran sent this in to us (Thanks CW) – we reckon it works a treat for all you urban heads (but gets a little confused in the lovely outback areas here in Laois)… see if it works for you. Beautifully made (if you like your view it helps too!) Click here

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and of course you can make your own Penhouse Reindeer – always a popular decoration and to-do activity this time of year…

Body Image Survey – DCYA

Just launched… a fun design job for us and a really interesting report to work on. It details the findings from a survey in Ireland with a broad range of young people and their opinions and attitudes to their Body Image. Interesting reading…

We produced a report and a synopsis book, A6 size, with the department and it was launched by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Frances Fitzgerald TD. Read more about it here

Two of our montage illustrations for the Body Image design proved popular among the young people, so much so that we are producing a range of similar illustrations for another project for young people, due to be launched soon – anyone recognise their ‘bits’?

Kildare Arts Plan, 2012-2016

Culture Night 2012 saw the launch of one of our latest publications – Kildare County Arts Development Plan 2012-2016 – (Continue to) Make Inroads.

The design showcases the role of the Arts office in promoting and nurturing Arts Services throughout the county of Kildare. We produced a book with a 6 page cover which highlights the great work produced in conjunction with the Arts office over the last 5 years.

It also houses a dvd in the back and is accompanied by 5 great ‘role’ pins inviting members of the community to wear a pin that you can relate to and play a role to mentor, inspire, curate, respond or broker (we like to wear them all together!)

Sometimes a design starts off well but then as it evolves it turns into something special. We think this design has grown this way. Its always a great pleasure working with the guys in Kildare who were full of great ideas and jumped on board with all our suggestions too resulting in something we are all a little bit proud of.

Client Comments:

“Can you please pass on our most heartfelt thanks to all of the staff in Penhouse who went above and beyond in helping us realise the new arts plan. The document really helps to highlight the work we are doing here. The feedback from people at the launch was excellent and we can’t wait to circulate the plan.”
Eoghan Doyle
Assistant County Arts Officer

“Hi gals, back in the office today and got the rather delicious arts plan alongside the badges. We are thrilled and delighted with it all. We’ve had lots of lovely feedback from people, including the Arts Council.  It is felt that it was very clear, crisp and well laid out.  The people who confessed to only flicking through and not actually reading the text (gasp !!) felt that they had a good sense of the emphasis of the plan too !  The badges went down a treat also. Thanks a mill.”
Lucina Russell
Arts Officer,  Kildare County Council

Heritage Week 2012

Heritage Week 2012 has begun! Look out for their logo, designed by us here at Penhouse, at an event near you! We designed this brand identity for National Heritage Week with the Heritage Council 3 years ago and its one of our favourites. Each year we vary the colour palette a little for a slightly different look. 2012 sees a more rustic palette carried across all the marketing material, the website and now a great new app too, where you can easily find and view their events.Heritage Week is growing each year with a huge variety of different events for all the family. One of our favourite new local ones in Laois this year is the film-making summer camp but when you go online you can find other great events in every county all over the country. Log on and find one what’s happening near you… a lovely way to round of the summer holidays!

Chocolate Packaging

So we are delighted to have recently won the prestigious rebranding design contract for Lily O’Brien’s chocolates. We were selected as the winners from design companies across Ireland and the United Kingdom.

According to Mary Ann O’Brien, company founder, we more than proved ourselves against stiff competition and she was delighted to be awarding us the contract, bringing it back to Ireland and close to home.

We are absolutely thrilled with this win. As chocolate lovers with some creative ideas, we’re hoping to have some fun with this one! A contract of this calibre is a great achievement for a company of any size, and we are delighted that our small company won this one. Our branding and packaging designs are being well received by the Lily’s team to date and we look forward to seeing the new designs rolled out and on the shelves in 2013.

Visitors to our Facebook page may have seen that we took a visit (most of us) to the Lily’s factory just before Easter. We tasted some of their brand new recipe chocs (so delicious), met the team there, got a tour of the marketing room, the wrapping and packing area and the chocolate kitchen where the magic happens.

Mary Ann herself showed us how it’s done as we followed her lead (Blue Peter style) and made our own chocolate bowls. We each blew up a balloon, dipped it in 40 degree milk chocolate, decorated it by dripping white chocolate around it and then allowed to cool. While we awaited their completion we made some Lily O’Brien Easter eggs – totally spoiled and loved it!!

Fiona’s bowl shown here won first prize and with it lots of extra goodies. We left a very happy bunch. A lovely way to start our working relationship. Now we need to plan a trip for the Lily team here… Maybe we’ll give them turns driving the combine at harvest time?

Make a Reindeer this Christmas, from Penhouse

This Christmas we are sending our Christmas wishes digitally, so we’re sending you a Penhouse Reindeer which can be downloaded on our website. We’re inviting you to print it and make it, pop it in a good position and if you like…. sure why not send us a picture too? We’ll display the herd we receive on our Facebook page, with your very own reindeer looking good!! Have fun…

We’d like to thank all our clients and friends, through more difficult times who have chosen us for their design and marketing services and helped us make this year a special one. 2011 gave us a great range of different projects as we celebrated our 15th year in the design business, from exciting web designs & open exhibitions, to brochures & brand identities with lots of social media and inventive marketing fun thrown in too.

We were delighted to win another IDI award this year, some new national tenders and celebrate more published logos. We also had two Penhouse babies which was our favourite news of all!

Read more here and see some of our most recent work produced here

We look forward to starting all over again in 2012. The studio will close up this year on Thursday of Christmas week, December 22nd and return on Wednesday January 4th. We’d like to wish you a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from all of us here, Gill leonie, Fiona, Gemma and Annette 🙂

Culture Night 2011 in Laois

Crop Marks – The Ratheniska Project exhibition opened in full for Culture Night 2011 and will remain on display until October 21st in Dunamaise Arts Centre, Portlaoise, in the upstairs ‘Drawing Room’ gallery.

Thanks to the brilliant contributions by the Ratheniska National School children, we had a diverse and fun range of 15 themed pieces from each class, making it a really enjoyable interactive exhibition for children and adults alike.

The pieces included a film (from junior infants and 6th class) shown on the big screen; future portraits from senior infants; a collection of favourite things from 1st; 15 favourite movies from 2nd; random 15 inspired creations from 3rd; ‘Step Back in Time’ history project from 4th and a group illustrated ’15’ poem from 5th.

The ‘junior’ collection is a follow up to the original expo, organised earlier this year by Penhouse (and made special by the many creative contributions) marking our 15 years in the design business.

15 goes junior… creatively

This year (as you may know) Penhouse celebrates 15 years as a professional graphic design studio and we already ran an online exhibit earlier this year inviting entries from far and near, which was great fun. Thanks to all who took part, we really enjoyed your interactions and brilliant creations. Now we are expanding on this and talking to our younger fans…

We have enrolled the creative talents of the children from our local school here in Ratheniska to create a collection for Culture night 2011. The exhibition will feature a range of creative pieces developed by the full spectrum of students in Ratheniska N.S. in association with their teachers. The theme remains the same: “What does 15 mean to you?” but we think it will have a different feel when embraced creatively by these young artists.

The exhibition will run for a month on display in the children’s gallery (The Drawing Room) at Dunamaise Arts Centre, Portlaoise who have kindly come on board to help facilitate our project.

We’re getting excited now and looking forward to seeing the results! We’ll most likely post the creativity progress on our Facebook and Twitter feeds (without giving too much away before Culture night opening) so follow the story there to see how it develops…