The Royal Mail has revealed a set of six portrait stamps in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s Coronation.

The stamps, designed by Atelier Works, feature a newly commissioned painting which will be gifted by the Royal Mail to the Royal collection.

Ian Chilvers, partner at Atelier Works, says they turned to Nicky Philipps, whose style would complement the other paintings Atelier Works had selected ;

“There are so many different types of painting of the Queen. We could have used Warhol, Freud and Mortimer – and obviously we tried – but they all looked disparate and didn’t work as a set.”

The other five stamps feature: study for The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II by Terence Cuneo, 1953; Portrait by Andrew Festing, 1999; Portrait by Pietro Annigoni, 1955; Portrait by Sergei Pavlenko, 2000 and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II by Richard Stone, 1992. Keen collectors will be pleased to hear the stamps are available from today.

Iconic London event the Chelsea Flower Show celebrates its centenary year in 2013.

Chelsea in Bloom in association with the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) is Chelsea’s alternative flower show, and  features floral festivities and bloomin’ marvellous banquettes as the streets of Chelsea are filled with flowers.  This year’s design theme, for the third year delivered by underscore, is ‘The Decades’.

This plays on the centenary concept, focusing on iconic ‘floral’ moments throughout the past hundred years.

Chelsea’s retailers will use iconic periods in British floral history as inspiration for their floral designs. For example in the 1940’s fabric patterns were often floral and have now become the popular vintage fashion styles of today, whilst in the 1960’s the hippie subculture used flowers as symbols of peace, and the daisy came to represent ‘Flower Power’ at its most iconic.

As with previous years, the floral theme has been kept at the core of the visual identity and campaign, although we have taken great care to ensure our ‘Decades’ concept can support but not overpower the overall competition message, and  some of the retailers competing this year include Mary Quant, Hackett, HSBC, Partridges, Links, Massimo Dutti and  many more!

Collateral created by underscore for this year’s event includes the brand identity, branded rickshaws, information stands, uniforms, flyers, event pocket guides and a dedicated event website through which visitors can use social media to recommend and vote for their favourite display.

The event launches today and runs until the the 25th May, so why not take a trip to Chelsea this week and join in the floral fun?!

These days you never know where your next client or customer will come from.

Although ‘content marketing’ is the current buzz word of choice for digital marketing, we at underscore are still strong advocates of a balanced strategy that starts with a best practise .

You may be put-off by hearing the term ‘SEO’, but great content alone will not get you there, and it should be in the interest of any company to invest in their website’s discovery potential.

Positioning yourself to be found online can make a huge difference, so here are a few starters for ten:

  •  Site Architecture & Accessibility; make it logical, simple, ensuring easy navigation and a great experience for users
  • Website content; get your key words and phrases in your text/titles etc – remember its not quantity that counts here, but clever placement.
  • Ongoing content; create fresh new content; be it blogging, RSS feeds, news, insights.
  • XML Sitemap: Have one! Google can find and read all your pages of your site for indexing.
  • Promoting your site; inbound links from other sites can help drive your rankings.

There is no denying the need for SEO, but if you are thinking “If everyone utilises SEO – how can you make it to the top search?” well, fear not; Google is all about providing users with correct information, and like anything that adapts, you can update your SEO to reveal in different searches. Algorithms are always changing, it’s just a matter of keeping pace. SEO should not be a one-time-fix, but an ongoing monitoring and updating process.

So if your search results on google could be better, then perhaps it’s time to speak to underscore about your SEO.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of WordPress, our key platform for development, and we couldn’t be happier that it’s still up and running; although we are not surprised.

WordPress started as a blogging platform like tumblr and Blogspot, but has grown into a the most widely used content management system powering 17% of all websites on the internet. If you don’t know much about WordPress, here’s a basic feature list:

  • Simplicity
  • Flexibility
  • User management
  • Built in comments
  • Search engine optimised
  • Multilingual
  • Media Management
  • Extensible with the use of plugins

The real list is a lot longer and can be seen here. A quirk of WordPress is that most versions are named after jazz musicians, with the latest being Elvin Jones, and the first being the immortalised Miles Davis. WordPress has one of the largest developer communities on the planet, with user groups up and down the country and across the globe, as well as an annual WordCamp event.

As part of the celebrations, WordPress have released special edition tshirts and has invited its community to hold their own get togethers and celebrate, with any event held with more than 50 people there may be stickers and buttons sent there for everyone to enjoy. Remember save the date, 27th May, and find a meetup near you to join in the celebrations, I know we will.