Find them at: http://www.cobaltlocks.co.uk

Find her website here: http://www.annetteschwalbe.co.uk

Take it away is an Arts Council initiative designed to help more people get involved in learning and playing music. The scheme allows individuals to apply for a loan of up to £2,000 for the purchase of any kind of musical instrument, and pay it back in 10 monthly instalments, completely interest free.

The scheme has helped thousands of people so far and has been successful because it makes obvious sense. Rather than, in my case, paying £1,300 up front for a really quite lovely American Standard Fender Stratocaster guitar (white like Jimi Hendrix’s), which would have required some creative and possibly perilous explanations to my wife, I was able to put down £100 and pay the rest off over the next ten months at £120 a month, which though not to be sniffed at, was a much more acceptable proposition. And likewise with my daughter’s Roland keyboard at £50 a month.

The scheme is great mainly because it doesn’t cost anything to prolong the payments, which reduces the financial pain of the purchase by making it bugetable. And this logic applies to businesses just as much as households. With VAT so high and borrowing undesirable and difficult, schemes like this would make it possible for businesses to keep going with their plans much more easily.

Plans cost money and when times are hard it’s important that essential expenses can be budgeted for affordably. If your business has a comfortable operating budget that’s great but most don’t and for the majority it would make a difference knowing that they didn’t have to stretch in unfeasable directions just to be able to keep their marketing and website programs on course. This is why we have devised our own version of the Take it away scheme.

Our scheme runs over twelve months rather than ten, which makes the monthly payments slightly lower than the Arts Council’s scheme. It is 0% interest free like Take it away and it covers any expenses whatsoever, whether it’s a brand new website, a web marketing or Google advertising campaign, a new brochure, it doesn’t matter: if it’s a service we provide then it’s covered.

Business people I talk to are inured to the fact that they have to always pay high interest rates for credit but for the most part, in the current climate, that simply stops them functioning the way they need to, which isn’t in anybody’s interest. so why not call us today and find out how you can Take it Away?

The Yorke Dance Project is the latest in a long line of Dance Companies we have worked with. We love the approach of this company to their website, which they re-brand and update every year to reflect the current season’s programme. When we update this website the previous year’s production information (and web design) is not lost, so the site also serves a gradually evolving role as an archive tool. Far too few arts organisations archive their work properly or even at all yet the Yorke Dance Project is a great example of how it can be done gradually, with great utility and without costing the earth.

We provide a full service to the Yorke Dance Project and also produce all of their marketing materials: posters, programmes, flyers, sponsorship packages and invitations.

This is one of the reasons I’m so pleased that the website we produced for the Cheese and Grain is undoubtedly one of the best web designs Kilroy James has ever produced – and seeing we’ve made over 300 websites, that is not an easy feat. We tried to get across the diverse and colourful nature of the venue, with a design that suggests festivities, colour and a certain ‘fromeiness’ (as one person put it). The Cheese and Grain has had many congratulations on their new website, which they passed on to us. Of all the things that please me the most about this project though is seeing how appreciative the staff have been, seeing how design can make people more positive about the place where they work, and in a real sense make their work lives more efficient and pleasurable.

Being a charity, the Cheese and Grain is also our most recent Community Client and the work we did for them was done at a very large discount.

We are currently redesigning their website; on the left is the design concept they chose. The large image is a promotions area that we will update for them as they don’t have staff in-house with the requisite graphics skills. Another concept we presented required no ongoing production skills, and so would have allowed them to be entirely self-sufficient.

The original (still current though designed in 2006) web site scooped a Design Firms’ award with such a high mark that it was only three points away from a perfect score.

<p>&nbsp</p><span>Artisan websites</span> from the UK’s oldest web design agency.