Overview:
We met up with Nathan, and Charlie from Mosaic Board Print to discuss the need for their new website, the process of this project and our ongoing collaboration.
Sam Sayer 0:00
Yes, right. We are joined today by
Nathan Houghton 0:04
Nathan from Mosaic
Sam Sayer 0:06
and
Charlie-Mae Taylor 0:06
Charlie from Mosaic
Sam Sayer 0:08
and I’m Sam and
Amber Shoyer 0:10
Amber
Sam Sayer 0:10
So we worked on your site earlier in the year. It’s all been live for a while now. We’ve done loads of stuff since, which has been amazing. So we wanted to get together to talk about how collaboration worked, how the process was, from before, during, afterwards, and then we’ll probably go off some weird tangents.
Nathan Houghton 0:33
As always.
Sam Sayer 0:36
oops, not this. Trash the joint. So I think let’s start with what was the initial need. So when you came to us.
Nathan Houghton 0:47
I don’t know what Charlie thinks, but for me, when I started at Mosaic as their marketing manager, and sort of getting my foot under the door, I thought the current website they had was it felt I didn’t think it felt like it represented what Mosaic were trying to be as a company. You know, it was okay. It did a job. But in the industry we were in with all these fancy like craft ales and snazzy breweries. I thought we could be a bit more outlandish and a bit braver with our website. And I reckon we achieved it, yeah. So there’s nothing wrong with the nothing wrong with the website. I just thought it needed freshening up. Yeah?
Charlie-Mae Taylor 1:28
And a bit a bit more funky
Nathan Houghton 1:30
yeah, yeah.
Sam Sayer 1:31
I think, you know, web does change so rapidly, yeah, things just get, can get outdated. You know, our website is of our ideas, and there’s still some pages that are older and I’m like, I hate them. There’s nothing wrong with them. They’re just not who we are anymore.
Nathan Houghton 1:45
And I guess mosaic, we’re kind of lucky, because I’d come in fresh. So I think it’s quite easy just to like, Oh, it’s okay. It’s doing a job, or let’s crack on with our actual work. But bringing me in sort of made me I guess it was like a new set of eyes on it. I guess we just wanted to be a bit more ballsy with it.
Sam Sayer 2:08
Definitely. So yeah. I think from our early conversations, I could tell thevibe and energy, yeah, you need it, yeah, which I love. And I think this is one of our, you know, watch pointers. We want to work with people who can, like, will you make a difference with.
Nathan Houghton 2:22
But that’s what I loved about meeting you, Sam, actually, because you got it straight away. That’s what I loved working with DeType and Sam the like, I would throw stupid ideas at you, and you made them better, as opposed to going, No, that’s not, that’s, you know, like, you didn’t rein me in as much as, yeah, yeah. There was a few times that we went a bit crazy, but you got what we were trying to achieve very, very quickly, yeah, and enhanced ideas that Charlie and I had for the website without being, like, almost on our side, like, I’ve worked with designers and stuff. I’ve been a designer, and I’ve worked with designers and stuff, and I always find, I don’t know what you think, but I think sometimes designers can get a bit blinkered and be like, Well, I’m the designer. I’m gonna do this, yeah. Whereas what I loved about you guys was we threw stuff together, like I said, sometimes we went a bit crazy, and you reined it in a little bit, but you got, you got the brand very, very quickly. In fact, absolutely nailed it. And it’s been and it’s been fun as well. We’ve had some proper funny times doing this.
Sam Sayer 3:28
It has yeah, and, you know, I’ll be honest, I was a little bit nervous at first, because I knew your designer could, could this be awkward? Because, you know, yeah, will be clash on things like that. But, you know, we both been doing this for a long time, a long time. Yeah, you learn to set your ego at the door, yeah. What’s right for it? What’s me the right approach? Yeah, right, yeah. And actually bouncing some ideas around you come with a better result.
Nathan Houghton 3:52
100% Yeah. And yeah, like I said, we, I thought we worked brilliantly together. And you, yeah, you nailed it. And then that’s gone on to doing all the other the other crazy stuff that we’ve done together.
Sam Sayer 4:05
I mean, yeah, I really got your vibe of just doing things a little bit differently, very different, yeah
Nathan Houghton 4:12
But I think that work, I think does probably not for everything, but I think for like, our little corner of the print market, be a bit different, be a bit crazy, because yeah. And all like, our the social media side, I always find the stuff where we’re like, not so serious, dicking around Yeah, does much better than buy beermats. Yeah. People know what we do, yeah. So let’s have a bit of fun with it.
Sam Sayer 4:39
Yeah, I did, like, I’m gonna drop this in on the old site. There’s one of the slides that said, for that larger quantity, yeah? Like, that could be really powerful, in a certain way! But I kind of think, you know, this is what we can do. You know, these things, right? Yeah? You know, it be. Braver with it?
Nathan Houghton 5:00
Yeah, I think so. And just it was a bit like, I would say the old website was too safe for who we are.
Sam Sayer 5:07
Yeah, yeah
Nathan Houghton 5:08
Yeah, that, if, yeah, if I had to sort of sum it up in one sentence, it was okay, it was a bit safe, cool. And we’ve gone unsafe.
Sam Sayer 5:16
Unsafe, I like that. That’s the sort of the look and feel of this last bit. Aspect, which, you know, let’s face it, that is the first thing you see. And then it’s functionality. So maybe, Charlie, let’s talk about what we did in terms of functionality. Over to you, in terms of what we briefed and driving the
Charlie-Mae Taylor 5:37
Yeah. So the main thing we wanted was for the building your own beer mat to be as smooth as possible, because you had a lot of issues with that on the old site, and it’s just working a lot more easy now. Now it’s all of it’s just you know what bits you’ve got to go to. You can find where your information is for help contact names and things just flows a lot better than the old one did.
Nathan Houghton 6:03
Yeah. Sorry, just to jump in. No, I was just gonna jump on what? But I thought, like with the beer Map Builder, I think that became its own thing as well. So it was literally just like a portal for checking your artwork at Yeah, whereas now, yeah, we’ve got a Beer Mat Builder. You can start with an image I can Yeah, much much cooler, much more funky, much more ballser, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I jumped on your question there. Sorry, mate.
Sam Sayer 6:35
And we are talking about other things in terms of automating things? So like, CSV downloads, in terms of, like, how do we then save you more time? Yeah? So I think this is what we look at a lot more now. It’s just we have forward function. Is our approach, right? It’s got to look beautiful, but it’s got to work with that you’ve lost, yeah? So definitely
Amber Shoyer 6:57
On time as well. The website is like another person.
Charlie-Mae Taylor 7:01
Definitely saves the phone calls asking.
Sam Sayer 7:04
Yeah, I think, you know, we talk a lot about resources. We’re talking just now about, like, if you get stuck with the beer mat builder for example, yeah, let’s build some content around that.
Nathan Houghton 7:15
Yeah, that’s probably next deal mission will go on. But we, I love it. I like, I like the fact that the people like, I like the fact people refer to it as the beer mat builder, like, that’s kind of become its own thing. And then Josh in the studio, he was, he was looking at the beer mat Builder, and I hadn’t looked she looked at the logo for a long time. When I saw it again, I was like, I nearly swore then sorry, Sam, that is really cool. It’s got its own it’s kind of its own thing.
Sam Sayer 7:44
We’ve got an adult audience here.
Nathan Houghton 7:46
Oh no, but my mum will tell me off.
Sam Sayer 7:46
Fair do’s. Okay cool so another thing which we spearheaded with this as well was that was battle of the beer mats. another wicked kind of that’s almost its own little entity as well. So tell us about that.
Nathan Houghton 8:04
Another one of my weird ideas that popped into my head. It was actually I, I saw a battle of the bands poster, and I think Charlie and I were trying to come up with, like, like, a way of promoting beer mats to the smaller kind of like Joe Public sort of thing. This battle of the band was in my head, and I thought, Well, why don’t we do battle of the beer mats? Just pick four of our favourites every month, yeah, and get them to vote for the winner. And then there’s a big final in December, and that properly kicked on, like, but the beauty of it, it’s a lovely thing because you’re showing off the four best designs of that month. So from a visual point of view, it’s wicked. From an actual like marketing, clever point of view, that absolute brilliant you’ve got four unknown people getting their followers to come to your Instagram page. So the the analytics for the like the people that don’t follow you is outweighs the your followers that are looking and we have that every month. So you’re getting people walking past, like your shop window, yeah, new people every month, by the hundreds. Yeah. So it works on so many levels. It works visually, because you’re showing off that look what we printed, but from an audience, grabbing point of view, absolutely, wicked and, yeah, I love it.
Sam Sayer 9:28
I mean, yeah, the idea of collaboration is will come that bit later. We’ve built, we’ll show us walk through this on the video. We’ve built a builder on the site, not builder. It’s like a framework to accelerate on the site, yeah? So we’ve done it. So again, individual people can share their month. Yes, you can look at everything, yeah. And that all comes whizzing over to Amber.
Nathan Houghton 9:50
But that’s, that’s the other beauty, like and the way that you styled that on the website, Amber, I love how clean it was. You’ve got the. Four pictures. It’s like a grid. I love that. It’s almost like, like a digital archive of our best stuff. The Battle of the beer mats, will get better the more years it goes on, because it’s almost like our running portfolio, yeah, which, which, I absolutely love.
Sam Sayer 10:18
Well we can soon do best of the best of the years, best of five years. Battle of the decades!
Nathan Houghton 10:25
Well the guy that, the guy that won it last year, Daniel the egg man, we call him, so, yeah, but what? What I love about because he’s a lovely guy, but, like, he was on BBC news the other like, the other week, because they featured him. He’s really kicking off. He’s got, like, hundreds of fathers all down to winning. And I like to think, I mean, he might disagree. Maybe we’ll watch this. But what I like is he was just, I said, just an artist. He was just a bloke that painted eggs, yeah, and then Just a guy who paints eggs. He will rinse me for that. But, but, and he won it because he properly embraced it. He’s a really cool guy. And, like, I mean, his artwork stunning. And in fact, we’ve just, we’ve just done some for him again, because his local, I think it’s like a venue for bands is struggling, yes, so he’s going to hold like a, like a an art exhibition in that, I think it’s called the Dorothy packs. I think it was called and raise some money for them. He’s doing, like, signed beer mats that are going to be, like, really rare.
Sam Sayer 11:25
I got in a real rabbit hole exploring that the other day
Nathan Houghton 11:29
Ye’s cool guy. And he and, like, I think, when we FaceTimed him to tell him he’d won, he genuinely seen, like, proper chuffed, like he probably got it and nice. But we’ve become, you know, he checks in with us every so often and stuff, and that’s through Battle at the BMO. So, yeah, just cool. I just, yeah, we’ve got one more heat round next week, and then it’s the final. So game on. But yeah, back to the seriousness. Amber, I loved how you’ve laid it out. It’s just stunning, yeah, just wicked, just dead easy to navigate.
Sam Sayer 12:06
It was quite a technical challenge. Like, how do we make it so it’s easy to view them all? Yeah, we want to share that month easily.
Nathan Houghton 12:11
Well, potentially, I think as the years go on, the way you’ve done it, it’s very easy to go, well, let’s have a look at 2022, 2023 23 four. And it’s so it’s almost like a library I loved it, yeah? Really cool, really nice.
Sam Sayer 12:24
So on the spirit of collaboration, then this kicks out a load of things we’ve done. Yeah? So first one is, why there’s some kind of special brew in the afternoon. Yeah, why, in the summer did someone spot mepouring a glass of special brew down the kitchen sink. So we, you’ve been hounding me for ages. Do some beer mats. It took me forever to them, but now we’ve got them some more ideas. Okay, right? So we did the journey of the beer mat. Nathan Houghton 12:57 Yeah, from start to finish, I feel like I’m talking loads though. So do you want to jump in?
Charlie-Mae Taylor 13:02
Oh god.
Nathan Houghton 13:05
People will be like bored with my boring voice. We just while we did a little video that from start to finish, really, wasn’t it. So Sam screen recorded designing the DeType beer mats. Filmed it on press you high five in Martin, when you signed it off press pass, personal stage. And then, yeah, the coordinating with you drinking a can of special brew at your desk, yeah?
Sam Sayer 13:34
And that was also a kind of cross between so Xylo brew, who one of our clients, yeah, that was their five year anniversary as well. So all tied in me nicely.
Nathan Houghton 13:43
That was, that was the start of what I would say, that I knew that we would be working with DeType on more stuff for the future. Sam is really off the same page as us.
Sam Sayer 13:55
And then I kind of feel like we’ve got the some crazy ideas, but yeah, then rationalising what’s gonna work and having the team to implement it as well, that’s the key.
Nathan Houghton 14:07
That kind of goes back to when we first met you. I thought straight away, like, like, we said, oh, Sam’s cool, yeah. And then, and then, like, I think you said it once, like you knew that we would say, yes. I think you phoned us up to do something. I can’t remember which, which one of the things we’ve done, but you thought, Nathan, Charlie, you’d be up for that. Yeah, that’s what I like. Well,
Sam Sayer 14:33
Yeah, so that was what video is that?
Nathan Houghton 14:36
I can’t remember, but I remember it like you were like, I knew you’d be up for it.
Sam Sayer 14:41
So the Blair web comes out a minute, yeah, yeah. So I told I you said yes before know what it was, because obviously we’ve done a couple now. So I think, yeah, some good notebook of people who like, yeah i’m in what are we doing we’re doing, why wouldn’t we these? Believe exactly so Blair Webb, then that came out quite recently that I thought, Oh, I think it will only take half an hour to film it. 3 hours later
Nathan Houghton 15:09
Yeah. What a laugh was, yeah.
Sam Sayer 15:13
And that was really a part of our ideas. You know, we’ve been breaking out the mould more this year. We look at theme Amber’s been put together as a content schedules for us. Yeah, tell us about why, where that came about? Well,
Amber Shoyer 15:26
Well, I think it was your idea. But we always have these Wednesday marketing meetings just come up with all these ideas, and we thought it’s been tied in quite well with one of the things a lot of people struggle with with the website is the process. So it puts a lot of people off, like they don’t have a time, they don’t understand any of it. So the thought process was, well, let’s explain the process and all the scary things, but how we can help, which somehow turned into the Blair Web project
Sam Sayer 15:57
I think we have a bit of a quarantine session. Alright, let’s get the ideas down right, yeah. Is it relevant first, or is it what? Yeah. Is it relevant? Is it worth doing? Can we do have we got time? I think, yeah. So we’ve got a lot in our sort of maybe one day folder, yeah, yeah.
Nathan Houghton 16:16
It’s making me laugh, actually, thinking about like I was thinking about who walked into the hedge tree thing downstairs. Was it me or you? Yeah,
Sam Sayer 16:27
We’ve got the bloopers reel too.
Nathan Houghton 16:29
I got home and was asked so what were you doing. I said I had to go film a video with Sam at DeType. I was like chasing Charlie around an old school building in the dark. But the thing is, she’s got so used to it now. Oh, right, okay,
Sam Sayer 16:31
Well my wife Sarah, who’s kind of stars in it, and she just, like, just rolled her eyes, like, yeah, yeah, funny, but yeah, I think there’s definitely more on the horizon on that. Yeah, we look in our next campaign, high performance. We kind of talk about it anyway. I’ve gotsome ideas that involve the grey hoodie, actually. But yeah, I think we really love the process. I think one of the main things, you know, we do have regular catch ups. You’re on our service plans. You can always ask questions, support ideas like that.
Nathan Houghton 16:46
So that’s, yeah, that’s the great thing you guys do, because we’re, we’re a bit to let things roll, really, but you’re very eager, like, Oh, you’ve got, like, you said when we got, you’ve got some hours in the bank. Why don’t you do something? Use your hours, yeah, come up with something. And, yeah, you’re sort of, yeah, helping us out. Yeah, in that sense as well.
Sam Sayer 17:47
You know, for so long, people Yeah, the websites done. I could put your picture on the wall. Yeah? No, no, that’s the start of it. Yeah. What’s, you know,
Nathan Houghton 17:53
Yes, I like that, sort of pushing us along a bit.
Sam Sayer 17:57
I think, you know, because you are so active on social media as well, yeah, you know, it’s, it all feeds back into it,
Nathan Houghton 18:03
Yeah, but the almost of the website, like, I guess my job with all the socials is to draw stuff to the website. So yeah, if, if the website is looking as sharp as it is,
Charlie-Mae Taylor 18:13
Got to be worth going to to keep people engaged.
Sam Sayer 18:14
Yeah, sure, this is what I did to thinking a lot about is social media obviously need to be on there because that’s what people are, yeah. But also you’re gonna be also you’re limited to that how they do things, yeah? The algorithms like that. Once you get people to your website, you can communicate more. It’s you, I think, yeah, totally. And it’s and it’s you. This is what I really try and distil your website is representing you. Yeah? That,
Nathan Houghton 18:39
I guess, yeah, kind of gone full circle. Yeah, I didn’t think the old website was representing mosaic. But I do think it is now. I think we’ve got that feel. We’ve got. I thought that the other day, actually, when we’ve changed the logo to be a bit more Christmassy, yeah, Josh was tinkering with it, and I actually looked at that because you helped what you helped with that. Didn’t you help with that, didn’t you? You helped with the rebranding as well. It wasn’t just the website. There’s new logo and stuff. And Josh was like tinkering with it. And I actually felt we’ve got a brand now. I think that cyan and the magenta, that symbol on the tops and stuff, I think, yeah, I think we’ve got a full, proper brand. Yeah, because I forgot we worked
Sam Sayer 19:21
All sorts of ideas on that
Nathan Houghton 19:22
Yeah, god.
Sam Sayer 19:26
I’ve got to say I’m still quite fond of your. Clarendon sans, sorry.
Nathan Houghton 19:34
You love that. Yeah, I remember you saying that at the time. Yeah.
Sam Sayer 19:42
Cool. Thanks guys. Yeah, love to chat with you as always. Get more stuff in the pipeline.
Nathan Houghton 19:48
We will get you guys in for the Friday throw, I think excellent. If so, get practising throw some beer mats across here You can be show us all. Yeah, you can get us home early on Friday.
Sam Sayer 19:58
I think we’ll need to see whose idea is going to get vetoed by the other party first.
Nathan Houghton 20:04
Well, I reckon we’re in whatever you’re going to do
Charlie-Mae Taylor 20:06
Oh no
Nathan Houghton 20:10
Charlie is shaking her head
Sam Sayer 20:11
Well me and you then. Wicked. Thanks, folks. Cheers, thanks. All right. Cheers.
