About. It's who we are.

Artists at Work cataloguesVirtual is a design, copy and project management business established in the mid-1990s by Peter Thody and Carl Waite.

We have worked - both directly and on a project basis for other agencies - for clients in IT/telecoms, B2B, manufacturing, the public sector, health, education and the arts.

While much of our work today is web-related - from design, structuring and content provision to hosting and development - we deliver a full range of 'traditional' services too including literature design, exhibition work, POS and advertising.

Javea Media-Luna property development website Apart from the quality of our work, our clients use us because they like the way we work. Instead of 'middle-man' account managers or executives, it’s just us - the people at the sharp end of the business.

This offers two advantages: [i] lower costs (you're not paying for people to smile and schmooze) and [ii] no misunderstandings (you're talking directly to the people who'll do the job).

We're certainly not claiming that the usual agency structure is wrong (particularly as we're often called upon to partner other agencies' creative teams!), but we do believe that our approach offers real benefits.

The major benefit of our lean, hierarchy-free approach is that we're able to work at rates significantly lower than the majority of other agencies and still show a profit.

More important to you of course is the fact that you get the best of all worlds ... a direct interface with those at the sharp end of the business, the services of a full service agency, and all at a rate that leaves more in your budget for other aspects of your marketing or advertising.

SIS illustrationDeciding what is or isn’t creative is so subjective that we’ll leave it to you to make that call once you’ve had chance to flick through our portfolio pages.

Far more important is whether the work – be it a web page, an image, a copy line or an advertising concept – does the job intended. Success might be achieved by taking a creative approach, but it’s equally possible that a straightforward, hard-hitting message will do the job even more effectively.

Of course, 99% of successful creative work comes somewhere in between ephemeral fashion ads and in-yer-face ‘bloggs beer gets you drunk’ messages; what you’re looking for is a team that will get the balance right.

RCN Nursing Libraries website and content management systemIf you decide that you want to talk to us, we'll happily put you in touch with our existing clients and you'll soon discover that they use us not only for the quality of our work, but also because when we say we'll deliver, we deliver.

Not only that, but it will be right. No primary school misunderstanding of the difference between 'its' and 'it's', and no offering 20% discount to accept a second rate job. Everything is checked and double-checked before it leaves us. And, because no-one's ever completely perfect (not even us), if it's wrong we'll put our hands up and put it right.