Octane adds a second string to the business bow of graphic and print design agencies, helping them hit the same target twice or more. So working alongside agencies has become a bit of a theme for Octane, and it’s helped remind me of how I started out, decades ago.
Before there was an Octane, I worked in Leeds, and the one thing that I enjoyed the most was the variation in the work I did. I was lifted out of college and chosen to head up a nascent new media department to build websites and create interactive CD and DVDs. Because I was studying design at the time, it allowed me to learn on the job and become a graphic designer by experience more than it did from qualification.
A good number of agencies in and around Leeds were attempting to branch out into new media (as it was known then), and for good reason — their clients were asking for websites and portable interactive presentations (the Internet was slow at the time, so CDs and then DVDs for a short while were a dominant format).
For the big agencies, hiring in tallent was the route forward, but a lot of agencies didn’t — and still don’t — have the resources to do the same, forcing them to miss out of possible work. So this is where Octane comes in, becoming that virtual department:
“We’ve got to move from HubSpot to Zoho and wondered if you knew anyone who could do it?”
“We need a plugin [integration] to connect our Slack team to [an internal or external service]…”
“[A service provider] has changed their pricing and we have to migrate everything to…” At least once, I’ve built an alternative and it still worked out more cost effective than paying a license fee.
And then sometimes:
“We need a few changes making to our website, but the lad who built has packed in!”
“We’ve got this brochure [containing a lot of tabulated data] that we need putting on our website.” In these instances, knowing if it’s a one-time thing or something that’s going to happen again and again has a dramatic effect on cost in the long term.
If these are the sort of questions you’ve been asked and had to pass on or let go, then let’s talk.