Accent Design

Accent Design Creative Digital Solutions

Software & Web Development – Established in 1990 Please do drop us an email or give us a call to discuss your business needs.
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Established in 1990, Accent is a web and software development company residing at The Enterprise Centre, part of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. We design and build bespoke business software and web-based systems for clients across multiple sectors, including manufacturing and engineering, event organisation, franchise networks and tour operators. We are a multi-disciplinary team including creatives, UX/UI experts, data analysts, developers, programmers, project managers and technical wizards, who collaborate directly with you on every detail of the project.

There's something special about watching pages roll off the press. A few weeks ago I stood by a huge Heidelberg litho pr...
01/10/2026

There's something special about watching pages roll off the press. A few weeks ago I stood by a huge Heidelberg litho press and watched the new Greentours brochure come to life, and it was a genuine joy.

Inside you'll find a world of natural history holidays: wildflower meadows, rare orchids, butterflies, birds and mammals in some of the most beautiful and remote corners of the planet. It's the kind of brochure you sit down with, a cup of tea in hand, and start dreaming about where you'll go next.

Greentours is Accent's oldest client, and we've been working together since the early 1990s. We've built them a brilliant website where travellers can explore and book holidays online, yet this brochure is proof that print is very much alive. A beautifully produced printed piece still has the power to inspire. It was printed locally here in Norwich, on FSC®-certified papers, by a carbon-neutral printer. Fitting for a company whose holidays celebrate the natural world.

A huge thank you to Ian & Fiona for over three decades of trust, collaboration and inspiring work. Here's to the next chapter.

Anthropic has given its AI agents a feature called dreaming. Strip away the borrowed poetry and you find something every...
08/09/2026

Anthropic has given its AI agents a feature called dreaming. Strip away the borrowed poetry and you find something every developer knows: housekeeping.

Our MD Dave has spent 27 years watching documentation rot in every organisation, on every stack. Wikis that were accurate in 2019. READMEs describing build steps removed two refactors ago. Warnings in config files nobody dares delete.

So a system that automatically reconciles an AI agent's accumulated notes is genuinely interesting. But there is a catch worth understanding: clean memory and correct memory are not the same thing. If your project's notes contain a confident, repeated, wrong belief, consolidation will not fix it. It will promote it.

For a marketing site with a two-year life, that hardly matters. For bespoke software we will still be maintaining in 2031, it matters a great deal.
Read the full piece, including why the secondary coverage of this feature badly needs the same treatment it describes. https://accentdesign.co.uk/articles/do-androids-dream-of-tidy-memory-files

Building an app inside someone else's platform is like extending a house you don't own. The foundations come free, but y...
26/08/2026

Building an app inside someone else's platform is like extending a house you don't own. The foundations come free, but you can't move a supporting wall.

We put Agency Express's SignMaster board management directly inside Reapit, so estate agents can order, change and collect For Sale and To Let boards without ever leaving their CRM. A React app on Reapit Elements, a .NET service listening for property events, and boards that quietly keep up as a property moves along.

The wiring wasn't the hard part. The lessons were:
→ Treat platform webhooks as at-least-once and out-of-order. Recompute state, don't replay instructions. → Sales was tidy. Lettings led a double life: one status carrying both tenancy stage and marketing availability. An already-tenanted property has no journey to follow at all. → When automation and a real person reach for the same board, decide on day one who wins. (We let the human win.) → Half the rollout wasn't code. It was formalising the process with the agencies who actually use the boards.

Craig, our Lead Programmer, has written up the honest version: the architecture, the code we're proud of, and the parts that made us earn it.

https://accentdesign.co.uk/articles/building-apps-that-live-inside-someone-elses-software

We are delighted to welcome Hethersett Electrical & Air Conditioning Ltd to the Accent family!Hethersett Electrical & Ai...
19/08/2026

We are delighted to welcome Hethersett Electrical & Air Conditioning Ltd to the Accent family!

Hethersett Electrical & Air Conditioning is a local, family-run business providing trusted electrical and air conditioning services to homes and businesses across Norwich, Wymondham, Attleborough and the wider South Norfolk area; and in this part of the world, we certainly need air conditioning! Registered, F-Gas certified and fully insured, they've built a well-earned reputation through careful workmanship, clear pricing and looking after their customers properly.

There is a brand-new website on the way, but in the meantime we had a great time capturing Scott at work to refresh his online imagery. A little sneak peek of what is to come.

Watch this space!

My dad laid bricks in Norwich until ankylosing spondylitis ended it in his late twenties. So he bought a Commodore 64 an...
12/08/2026

My dad laid bricks in Norwich until ankylosing spondylitis ended it in his late twenties. So he bought a Commodore 64 and wrote games so my mum and I had something to play on a Tuesday night.

He went on to teach C++ at adult education and build insurance software that is still running today. He has never once called himself a programmer.

I went to art school for sculpture and ended up running a software company. I don't want the word either.

When we hire at Accent, I'm not looking at the degree. Curious, ambitious, interested. That's the entry requirement, and it's the one thing a qualification can't tell you about a person.

The walls are still standing.

Dave.

https://accentdesign.co.uk/articles/the-man-who-wouldnt-call-himself-a-programmer

"Serif for print, sans serif for screen." It's repeated everywhere, and it's largely a myth. Our new article unpacks wha...
05/08/2026

"Serif for print, sans serif for screen." It's repeated everywhere, and it's largely a myth. Our new article unpacks what serif and sans serif fonts really say about your brand, when to use each, and why the medium still matters, just for subtler reasons than you've been told. https://accentdesign.co.uk/articles/serif-vs-sans-serif

Can AI be creative? Wrong question.It can execute almost anything. It still can't decide what's worth making, judge whet...
24/07/2026

Can AI be creative? Wrong question.

It can execute almost anything. It still can't decide what's worth making, judge whether it works, or be accountable when it doesn't.

In this week's article https://accentdesign.co.uk/articles/what-ai-actually-means-for-creativity-ideas-and-the-future-of-web-design we discuss provenance, why there's no copyright in machine-generated ideas, why "the tool generated it" is no defence on accessibility, and where creative value is really moving in web design.

The agencies that struggle will use AI to make more of the same, faster. The ones that thrive will use the time saved to think harder about what should exist at all.

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The Enterprise Centre, University Of East Anglia
Norwich
NR47TJ

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Tuesday 9am - 5:30pm
Wednesday 9am - 5:30pm
Thursday 9am - 5:30pm
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