Give Us Work . Riga

We’re glad to announce that we’ve successfully and rather smoothly moved to a new location just through the weekend which might come as a surprise to some people. Our new home at Andrejsala seems inspiring enough and we’re sure gonna keep reporting about it once all the boxes are packed out and we are less busy.

A couple more images on this Flickr set.

Arturs is counting girls he still has to date in Riga.

It couldn’t get any more official, now could it?

We had the honour to do a light projection show during the light festival "Staro Rīga" . More info and video materials comming soon on our website…

© Foto: foto.delfi.lv/user/Alusiki/

There’s something going on in the Old Town. A few more pics here. More info once the project is done and ready.

We’ve been extremely busy during the past three or so weeks with some very interesting stuff. Hope to update you on some of that soon.

Work, work, work!

In a harsh competition we’ve chosen the Give Us Work employee of the month for September 15/October 15. The lady in the picture is called Rowenta. She is a top notch expert in heating solutions and her direct responsibilities are to make sure the production pipeline runs as smooth as possible. The best part of Ms. Rowenta is she only charges 10 santims (20 cents) an hour while sometimes working up to 24 hours a day. Meet hot Ms. Rowenta in her full glory:

Rowenta in action:

Autumn has arrived with a few new office images on our Flickr account.

Here’s a chart to show you how the regular supply of coffee has been managed in the Give Us Work office during the past couple of months (i.e., who buys it):

And here’s how the coffee is being enjoyed in the office:

Where did the clients come from during the first 3 months of Give Us Work Riga in action? Here we’ve made a small chart:

So far the best clients we’ve had are those that we have known for at least a couple of years, which, of course, might just mean that they know what they want from us.

Turned out that the most disappointing are the cases where people find us on the net and then visit for their design assignments. One such project turned out really great or, at least, hopefully, so it will end, we’ll know that tomorrow — when the printer’s job is finished. But mostly people who find us via internet receive their first design sketches just to run around the internet scouting for other agencies offers and don’t return phone calls for weeks. Shame on them.

Currently we’re working on 5-10 smaller projects (website redesigns, booklets etc.) and 2 larger projects (one of them interior design and the other one — exterior design related). Both of those are not just big but also offer us great graphic freedom and we couldn’t be more happy about that. We’ve also finished a couple of advertising projects under the names of bigger agencies and probably will get back to that field by the end of the autumn.

The most steady income still comes from the girlfriends.

What’s happend in the Give Us Work office during the past couple of weeks? As you can see here — not much.

Here Reinis is trying to take a picture of something:

We’ve discovered that some roofs have funny shapes:

Arturs likes the office covered with yellow posters:

Our neighbors occasionally have a cigarette up there on the balcony. The smoke sometimes hit the Give Us Work office:

A window and a Mac:

There must be a waste container somewhere:

A huge field of sand:

We decided that this, together with a spray-paint can, could be a nice gift to our clients:

The office of Rīgas Laiks magazine. You can sometimes spot some well known Latvian intellectuals running seemingly confused around the bikes in front of the door:

What a nice canvas for some motion design:

A lonely tree overseeing the corner of Tērbatas and Lācplēša street:

Not all of us are born photographers:

Stay tuned for more!

A nice illustration on the cover of today’s issue of Sporta Avīze.

Well, the first attempted photo session of the official Positivus festival t-shirts (designed by us) failed. The shirts need some washing, ironing, the cut sleeves don’t make a serious impression, too, and it seems we’re going to need to get back the shirts given to our friends, so that we have more designs and more colors to shoot. That in the next couple of days. So far enjoy the pictures of Dagnis and Arturs in the one Positivus t-shirt we still had in the office.

Enough is enough. After a couple of days of exposure Dinamo Riga wallpapers have now been moved to here: http://giveuswork.net/works/sports/dinamo-riga-09/

We are preparing to bring the agency launch campaign to the streets (at last!). Testing the mediums, yet.

We made this font while considering typefaces for our own logo. Inspired by a drawing in the lecture notebook by our dear friend Jāzeps Baško who’s currently studying IT in Taiwan.

If any public demand will reach us, we might consider putting the font up on our website for free usage. It still needs a lot of tweaks before that can be done, tho. Let us know!

For unknown reasons (or money, perhaps, which is basically the same) we’ve just stepped into doing advertising for pitches. Obviously that means working through the night. Coffee? Something stronger?

3 AM has arrived in the Give Us Work office while the city is long asleep. So do the brains at one point. Thank God for the invention of computers. You can’t hold a pencil (or anything else, for that matter) in your hand steady after 18 hours of work. Computers, on the other hand, they stand brave and courageous on their own, quietly laughing about the inevitable loss of your humanish strengths and saying: “Well, here I am. See? I’m an iMac. A technological icon. I’m not tired at all. Work on me you slobby parody of a being.”
…

Our long time friends — Positivus Festival — together with the Latvian Art Directors Club just hold a contest to find the best official festival t-shirt designs. Today we happily found out our designs were victorious. The brief was to create 2 color A4 sized designs that would directly refer to the elements used in the Positivus Festival identity.

The winning designs were the simpliest and those that sticked to the festival’s existing identity the best without introducing new lines of fire. A wise decision by the jury, if you ask us, since the festival’s new identity hasn’t been around for that long and now more than ever needs a strong hand and less goofing around to help the new image develop in the chosen direction.

Here are the winners, click to zoom in or buy here:

The rest of our entry:

How are we designing? Tell us: tellus [at] giveuswork [dot] net

On hollidays the parking place behind the office windows is not at all crowded:

We finally received our business cards. They came in boxes like these. You can get a free sample of our cards if you happen to meet us. They are yellow on one side and gray on the other.

Artūrs is always telling everybody that a well known Latvian ice-hockey player once offered one thousand euros for this monochrome cap.

Reinis’ computer looks serious. So does the napkin.

We have started to receive questions what is graphic design and what is that that we do. Books? Web-design? Can we do business cards? Not to get into an unpleasant conversation, here’s what we do in short:

- Yes, books, booklets, brochures, everything of the kind, with pleasure. We will do the design, put it all together, manage the printing, deliver you a finished product.
- Oh, yes, logos, identities, cards, indeed. Whatever your company’s profile is. Plan to held a rock-festival? We’ll do the identity, city billboards, business cards, flyers, web-site, web-banners, bangles, tickets, stage design, apparel, merchandising, everything graphic you might come across on the event.
- Relieve your secretary from doing your sport club’s jersey designs. We have a lot more experience and talent at that.
- Album covers, posters — nothing sounds sweeter to a design agency.
- Web design? Yes, of course.
- Video? Sure!
- Copy-writing! Crazy about copy-writing!
- We’ll design your car’s exterior, recolor the wall of your building or build a giant yellow sail in your home garden if you are eager to finance such extravaganzas.
- Not sure how your brand’s developing? We’ll do the research of the present and provide visual solutions for the future that work with your target audience and turns your product or company into a very special one. Give us work!

We’ve spent a couple of weeks preparing. But now it’s inevitable. The agency has to be brought to the public. So what have we got so far?

This is our favorite room of the work inspired, full-of-people bureau:

A nice view outside the windows:

An inspiring weather forecast:

The first brainstorm in the agency was about the problems of waste management. Now a couple of days later it seems we’re going to need another brainstorm:

One of our designers stole this fax machine from the apartment he’s renting. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to respond to electricity ever since it was brought to the office. We’re out of fax-reach for now:

Some frequent guests sun-bathing behind the office palm:

Some visiting girlfriends:

This is how fast we are when we are brainstorming. Cameras don’t catch us:

Methods of self-inspiring, the dates mentioned are under a question but we hope to bring this poster to the streets by this summer:

A nice 25 euro lamp from the store a couple of blocks down the street:

Security. No one should ever think about stealing our designers:

A ridiculously expensive Apple router:

A couple of walls that keep the burglars away from the expensive router, however foolishly, the wires show them where the router is hidden:

This is what we do to Laura’s desk as soon as she’s out of the office for a couple of hours:

Our very first office library, looks more impressive and less portable in reality:

The first works are arriving quick. A little more about that once we get some of them done.