Concepts

Concepts began its development in 2005 through the School for Social Entrepreneurs, when James attended a course to create an online portfolio for artists to utilise in the promotion of their artwork and the creativity that is available locally.

At the time the project was known as Concept Art and the gallery that was created was hosted for free by the charity Subliminal Directions. When Subliminal Directions closed, James relocated the gallery to a new server and relaunched the service as Concepts.

The name change provided James with the opportunity to expand the services that were on offer, and develop a range of commercial services without being constrained by the previous name.

With a clear focus, James developed Concepts into a very large project which provided art services, continued support to the FATE project, and offered commercial services in Video Production, Print Media Design, Web Design and Photography to commercial clients.

During the start of the “Credit Crunch”, commercial work began to slow down and this was having an impact on our art services and the recruitment of fresh new talent.

During this period, James was concerned that closure was a possible threat, and was worried that this may destroy the excellent work achieved in supporting artists through FATE and Concepts (ART). Therefore James made the decision to completely redesign all the sites and streamline the services so we can better target and support our end user groups.

A plan was created at the end of 2009 to ensure the continued sustainability of all the art projects and continue to develop commercial services that is easier to market too potential clients.

With forward thinking, we created a separate media project; Focus-Films. Focus-Films was put on a separate domain and contains all our commercial services. This enables us to provide an even higher quality of work and support to our commercial clients.

Focus-Films has been operating outwith the Concepts domain for the past 3 months and we have recruited and engaged with new clients throughout the UK and recently been commissioned by international clients.

The next stage of development was to reduce the amount of services available on Concepts, and so we stripped back the Concepts project to 3 essentials; the art gallery, the FATE project, and the online store. By focusing on these 3 projects we feel we are in a better position to provide more support and a better dedicated service for our current and new members.

We are now at the stage that Focus-Films is growing in recognition and success, and we are in the process of relaunching Concepts, which will hopefully have the same success and popularity as our commercial services.

It is definitely a very promising year for us, our clients and members, and we are glad we have managed to weather the storm. Since 2005 there has been many ups and downs, but we are certainly on the up again, and look forward to what the rest of the year brings and the future development of Concepts and Focus-Films.