Diego Durán is a founding partner of www.pecesgordos.es, a communication, image and new technologies company, awarded by the Cáceres Chamber of Commerce for its contribution to the creation of the province’s business network. Meet in this interview the importance of corporate identity, tools to optimize work and communication strategies to reach more customers.
How were the beginnings of Peces Gordos?
Peces Gordos Estudio started in the living room of my current partner Juan Antonio at the end of 2015. We met when I worked at a company in the area. After long conversations, we decided to get together as a designer and web developer.
Our first project was the development of a tourist App for a local administration which allowed us to self-finance from zero. From here, Peces Gordos was growing. At the beginning we worked for the clients to whom we had already done some work and little by little, these were becoming our own commercials by recommending us to their acquaintances. Our philosophy of offering solutions to the needs of each and our clear commitment to design went little to become our hallmark.
At the beginning of 2017, the room was too small for us and we moved to a larger room. Finally, we had a “fish tank” where we met with clients, with a classroom for training, a common workspace and an impressive marine mural painted by one of the most cutting-edge urban artists of the moment: Misterpiro.
“We work for national and international companies and for numerous local and regional administrations”
Today we are four people on the team and a freelance network for specific jobs. We have recently received an award from the Cáceres Chamber of Commerce for our work and for contributing to the creation of the business fabric in the province.
In these two years and peak of life, Peces Gordos has gone from a ramshackle hall to work for national and international companies and for numerous local and regional administrations.
What problems do you solve your clients?
We mainly solve image problems, that is, we create and improve brands. We approach each project from a global perspective that starts from a solid and well-designed brand on which all the company’s growth will be based: web development, packaging, signage, shop concept, SEO, digital marketing, online reputation, corporate identity …
Our ideal project is to complete the 360 campaigns, offering the best solution from the beginning to the consolidation of the brand.
What benefits do you bring?
At Peces Gordos we have a fairly complete team capable of offering solutions in all aspects of corporate identity. For the client, it means concentrating all communication actions. We control and take care of the whole process from the beginning to the end, which guarantees homogeneity and brand coherence.
Our work is based on a deep knowledge of our customers, their needs, and objectives, to reach solutions that really mean a change or improvement in companies.
We have solutions for everything and if we do not have them, we invent them!
You have a peculiar brand name. What does it symbolize?
It is often said that a “Big Fish” is an important person, very reputable and rich enough. With the brand Big Fish, we want to attract “big fish” and become “big fish”.
A different project like ours needed a different name. I am creative, young, modern and serious (hence the logo-shaped fish tie) but we have a cool, carefree and fun point that defines our philosophy and us very well.
One of your services is to work on the corporate identity of companies. What role does it play for a company?
Corporate identity is the basis from which all business projects should start. The brand is the image of the company, the first impression that a customer has of us is our logo, our web or our packaging and no one doubts that the first impression is what counts.
If a brand is well developed, it will accompany us for many years and will help us to create trust among our clients and to differentiate ourselves from the competition. In short, the corporate identity is everything in an environment where we buy and decide by sight.
In the day to day of a company, there are many difficulties and challenges that may arise. You offer tools to facilitate the management of all these aspects and optimize time. Could you tell me about the main ones?
Among our tools to optimize resources and speed up preferred production times would be these five:
1. Holded. It is an ERP like SaaS (Software as a Service) to perform administration tasks, cash flow management, project task management, submit taxes, integrate online stores, etc. The main advantage of this software is the unification of all the tools and the portability to use it in numerous devices.
2. G Suite. The Google Suite brings numerous advantages to companies such as storage and sharing of documents in the cloud, corporate emails, calendars, and note or task management among other tools. Very useful.
3. Monday (before Dapulse). It is perhaps one of the most cutting-edge tools when it comes to managing projects and tasks related to them as a team. You can customize most parameters to make the management of projects more intuitive.
4. Slack. It is the favorite tool of Silicon Valley workers. It is a collaborative tool with chat “rooms” for “rooms” for each project. When projects are carried out where several people are involved, and most of them are collaborators or freelances, it is essential to have a fluid and fast communication so that the project can be developed quickly.
5. HootSuite. The main tool for managing social networks: it is one of the best for its ability to search, program, manage and prepare reports on content, saving a lot of time.
The phrase of Godfried Boogaard “in the past you were what you had, now you are what you share” comes perfectly to describe the tsunami that is being lived in social networks. What communication and marketing strategies do you advise to reach more customers?
At this point, I refer to a phrase that the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said: “less is more”. For good communication we must first be very aware of who we want to address, the messages we want to convey and what we want to achieve with them.
We help clients to define these parameters to achieve good communication because one of the most common mistakes is to address a professional in the food industry in the same way as a young student.
Without communication channels and adequate market niches, communication and marketing strategies may fail, so the analysis and prior design of the entire process is very important.
What are the latest trends in web design?
The main trend in web design is “Mobile First”, that is, make a full responsive web design that adapts to the screen width of the device at all times. It is proven that the mobile phone is increasingly the place from which we access the internet. It is comfortable and we always have it at hand, so achieving good navigation in this format is key to the success of our website.
We also consider the bandwidth used, the loading speed and the portability of the code to other platforms important in web design.
Do you recommend any reading or book to delve into some of these topics?
With respect to web design, apps or user interfaces, I would recommend the book “100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People”. This book offers basic concepts of psychology, perception, neuroscience, and research on the brain applied to the design making it “smart” to be successful.
With regard to web development, although it seems incredible I do not recommend any book to deepen, the reason is none other than the constant updating of all the technologies that exist today as well as different development frameworks and methodologies so that the development as such is what agiler as possible. A clear example we have it with the Angular framework, which every 6 months release a new version.
However, to begin with, I would recommend the HTML & CSS books: Design and Build Web Sites and JavaScript and JQuery: Interactive Front-End Web Development both by author Jon Duckett. These books go deep from the basics of introducing practical examples in each explanation.
I also recommend numerous blogs or profiles on networks of designers and experienced developers who always learn interesting things.
