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  "path": "/blog/design-tour-of-the-midlands/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-29T10:51:32.397Z",
  "site": "https://sijobling.com",
  "tags": [
    "New Adventures conference",
    "Simon Collison",
    "the Multipack",
    "dtotm",
    "The Higgs Design Co",
    "Andy Higgs",
    "383 Project",
    "The Site Doctor",
    "One Black Bear",
    "Studio Bonito",
    "fire over a tweet"
  ],
  "textContent": "Bar the fantastic New Adventures conference in Nottingham in January organised by the talented Simon Collison, for some reason, the Midlands often gets overlooked when we talk about the Web industry in the UK. The \"hottest\" places tend to focus around the South (London, Brighton and Bristol) and North (Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle). Rarely do you hear of large scale events occurring in the UK's so-called \"Second City\" of Birmingham. Why this is, we'll never know but as a creative evangelist of the region (co-founding the Multipack), I'm keen to change this and raise the Midlands' digital profile.\n\nThroughout the Summer months, I'll be visiting a variety of design/Web/creative agencies around the West Midlands as part of a **Design Tour of The Midlands** to promote agencies in the region and find out how they work.\n\nThere are several reasons for this tour:\n\n  * raise the profile of local agencies to emphasise the talent in The Midlands\n  * ask the agencies how they compete against the bigger agencies in more popular design regions of the UK\n  * get out of the isolated office to bounce ideas off peers, finding solutions to real-world problems\n\n\n\nAll the visits will be tweeted (with hashtag #dtotm) and summarised in a blog post, promoting the agencies' recent work as well as thoughts on the design problems discussions.\n\nFirst stop will be The Higgs Design Co on **Tuesday 24th May** where I will be meeting Andy Higgs et al, talk about some of their recent work, what's coming up and how to solve an existing design problem I've recently encountered (TBC).\n\nI'm also planning to pop along to some of the region's other agencies including:\n\n  * 383 Project\n  * The Site Doctor\n  * One Black Bear\n  * Studio Bonito\n\n\n\nIf you're another design agency reading this, interested in me visiting your offices, fire over a tweet or send an email to \"simon (dot) jobling (at) gmail (dot) com\" and I'll get in touch to arrange a date.",
  "title": "Design Tour of The Midlands",
  "updatedAt": "2011-05-09T00:00:00.000Z"
}