Mini Office and Mini Office 2

[This article refers to work I did early in my business career in the late 1980s and early 1990s.]

Mini Office and Mini Office 2 software

Mini Office was one of the very first suites of productivity software, consisting of word processor, database, spreadsheet and graphics.

This was how Mini Office was originally packaged in a cassette box…

…and this A4 colour advert was how the original Mini Office was promoted before I joined Europress…

The above ad was created in the days before desktop publishing and screen grabbing, so it was time consuming and costly to take photos of computer screens in a darkened room, then have then dropped into artwork.

But I felt it was worth the time and money to add screenshots, so this double page spread advert for Mini Office 2 was one of the first things I wrote the copy for at Europress. I came up with a rough sketch for the design and Heather Sheldrick, the art director, did the rest. The ad ran for more than a year in various Europress-owned magazines…

Much later, when I was Managing Director of the software division, I commissioned Wendy Barratt to re-design the packaging…

This is the back of the box I put together for the BBC Micro version…

I created this A4 advert…

I also worked with Wendy on the artwork and copy for the Atari ST version of Mini Office Professional, where each program was sold in a separate box to maximise revenue. I could only find a copy of the artwork for the Communications module on the net…

Here’s the packaging I worked on for Mini Office Professional for the Amstrad PCW8256, 8512 and 9512…

We brought in Steve Leigh, our local photographer, to shoot this photo to commemorate sales of 500,000 units…

Here’s how the story appeared in the News section of Electron User magazine…

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