History

In 2010, our arts and literature program gathered pace with the full launch of our new website. This incorporated the E-zine project, '12 Angry Zines' - a return to our early inspirations but published digitally each month, and featuring brand new commissions of some of the country's most revered writers.

With our reputation now firmly established, we recived commissions of our arts-based work from acclaimed national festivals Abandon Normal Devices, Chester Performs, Liverpool Biennial and the Bluecoat's Chapter & Verse literature festival.

Mercy's Agency made another huge step forward, with a long-term agreement to take on the art direction of Scotland-based lifestyle brand Pedlars. With shops across the UK and a catalogue famed for its charm and family-tested products, it was a huge contract to win and helped us to hire a new member of the team: designer Matt Saint.

This came hot on the heels of our biggest branding job to date: a full graphic and interior contract for Liverpool's new venue, The Shipping Forecast. Our first commercial foray into installation and interior work, we created the overall identity and ensured it was applied throughout the building, online, in print and in its tone of voice. We even painted the toilet doors.

More Agency work of note came from iconic club night Chibuku Shake Shake, and the homeless charity Crisis - for whom we devised and filmed a series of online campaign videos.

As the clocks went back, the Liverpool Biennial rolled into town, and with it our most ambitious series of events began. At its centre was The Cooperative. A 'collective of collectives' -run by us and 6 other of Liverpool's most influential arts organisations- our aim was to establish Liverpool's own arts scene amongst the more internationally-flavoured festival commissions once and for all. Based in a shop venue in the city centre, a rolling program of exhibitions, workshops, lectures and performance kept the venue fresh and well-attended for 8 weeks.

Underneath The Cooperative (in the basement), a late night events strand called Midnight Special featured provocative, daring and exclusive performance commissions - curated by ourselves with support from Diesel.

Digitally, we produced a weekly podcast covering the Biennial which was avidly listend to around the country and picked up on and promoted by Stephen Fry.