Rustic Stone Blog

We were commissioned to make a slate remembrance plaque for a company who well loved boss had passed away. It was made using a faxed image of the logo that needed quite a lot of cleaning to make the image crisp. We don’t usually offer slate plaques as thick as this one but the customer specifically wanted a really thick piece.

To see more of our full range of memorials please visit the main site at Rustic Stone

I was approached by a company the other day called The Online Shopping Town and asked if I would like to advertise. Well, usually I don’t as you simply cannot advertise everywhere, and honestly, most places are not worth the fee.

I liked the look of what they had done though. The site is basically a shopping site featuring some advertisers and some affiliate pages (nothing wrong with that). But the feel of it is quite different. The idea is old but the interface makes it quirky. I hope it works for them. Take a look at the photo and see what you think.

Shelagh,

This is probably the best way to show you the mock up for Blue. You can either reply by email or use the comments facility below.

The size is 315mm x 235mm

You can see more font options here (I know you mentioned Bookman Old Style from memory)

As we are no longer able to guarantee a Christmas delivery for our signs, we are offering a personalised gift certificate to present to the intended gift recipient.

We make the mock up in the usual way and print it onto our certificate along with a personal message if required and either print it onto card email it for you to print yourself.

The gift itself will be made and despatched in the new year. The option remains open for the recipient to change any details such as font or layout (note that selecting a different stone will probably affect the price).

Take a look at a shot of the gift certificate below…

Happy Christmas from Rustic Stone!

After reading what a competitor had written on their site about other companies inflated (in their opinion) prices I recalled a quote from John Ruskin –

“There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man’s lawful prey”.

I think that the quote says it all really. Except that I would also go on to say that companies that sell below market value will probably not be around to honour any guarantees that they may offer in a few years time.

Competitive is good but selling below market value is not only business suicide but a danger to others as whole industries can be tarnished by a wash of inferior service and end product.

I don’t know if that company was talking about my site or another or others in general but I know how much time and labour goes into making a really good product that will last for years. Not only labour on the actual end product but hours and hours of finding top quality stone, transporting that stone, storing that stone. We don’t just use our local garden centre for our stock. We have metaphorically traveled the whole country (and others) in search of the best stone to use for our signs and memorials and continue to do so whenever possible.

Remember: “Cheap and nasty exists and is readily available; cheap quality is probably a figment of your imagination”. Anon.

This is a memorial plaque that we made some time ago that I just loved the look of. The gold text and the beautiful markings of the stone just absolutely set it off a treat.

The customer mounted the bottom of the slate directly into wet cement and braced until dry and then covered the cement with shingle. A simple way to safely fix an upright plaque such as this.

This was the first of this type that we had made and we all loved the way that it turned out. The customer was also pleased enough with it to let us feature it on this page!

The size of the plaque is 600mm x 300mm and the font used was Times New Roman Italic.

This was a picture sent in by one of our customers of the Princess Royal opening a new wing of the Hearing Dogs For The Deaf charity building in Buckinghamshire.

Thanks for sending it in Alice. It’s the best picture of Princess Anne yet! I hope she never gets bored unveiling our presentation plaques. We had quite a run of making slate presentation / unveiling plaques for Princess Royal to unveil.

Interestingly, we found in the process that the royals will not unveil anything with corporate logos on and the royal’s name has to be at least as large if not larger than the biggest text on the plaque! Now you know.

We are pleased to announce a new range of natural stone signs Sandstone House Signs. We have finally found a supplier who is fairly certain that they can supply a reliable stock of this stone (a constant headache for us – we launch a new sign or memnorial and then after a month it’s impossible to get the stone anymore!).

The look of the signs is as striking as the rough slate plaques and sandstone plaques are considerably brighter and will suit lots of house types.

We were commissioned to make some corporate  slate award plaques for Siemens UK.

The logo was quite tricky with its very thin lined design but we were so happy with the way they looked we thought a blog post was in order.

We had to get the turbine logo / cartoon redrawn by a specialist as it was not usable in the way it was supplied.  The awards are still to have the awardee’s names engraved into brass to be fixed under the turbine and above the Siemens logo. We were particularly happy with the clarity of the overall design as sometimes small text and thin design lines are very tricky to work with.

After several months deliberating on the worth of blogging we decided to give it a try on this site.

Having paid a specialist designer to design and then code a custom theme for Wordpress, to closely resemble the rest of the site, we are up and running on two cylinders.  Only two so far as there are still plugins to plug in and widgets to widge etc.

One of the main reasons for adding the blog was so that we could post new products a bit easier (you know, without editing the whole site’s navigation, adding to the sitemap etc, etc). Not only that but it creates a safe platform for our customers to ask questions, leave feedback and generally communicate with us should they want to.

It also means that we can keep anyone that is interested up to date with what we do. Please feel free to register and comment or even register and post should you wish!