Like most agencies seemingly; due to an increased workload, plans for expansion and all those things, we’re looking to grow our design capabilities with the addition of a new member of staff.
We’re looking for a Senior Designer.
Here’s what we’d like
5+ years experience and comfortable in an agency environment ie. things move fast, clients change their minds, briefs come think and fast. We work in a very agile manner. We sketch, comp things up, brainstorm round a boiling kettle and scribble on white boards. You must be comfortable taking these ideas and making them real by grounding them in solid design thinking and extending an idea beyond the obvious.
You should understand the web, have a deep knowledge of user-centred design and can make an online brand presence sing with personality. Above all we want great creative flair, a close attention to detail and the ability to tackle a problem from many angles.
It goes without say that you must have all the usual skills including proficiency in Photoshop and Illustrator and a sprinkling of InDesign maybe. A good grasp of HTML (this isn’t a coding role) and AJAXyness never goes wanting.
In exchange for this we’ll pay you for doing something you love, let you have access to the Wii and the 6ft. beer fridge and maybe even give you a say over what radio station we play in the studio.
If this is you and you’re looking to join a rapidly expanding agency, get in touch.
James ‘fastest thumb in SE1′ Prebble was in action over the weekend in the world marble championships.
Despite a strong showing and an easy win in the first round, the Germans, beach towels in hand, were victorious on the day and took the coveted title.
Commenting on the experience, Jimmi was heard to say
“Some people say Marbles is a game of luck. I say rubbish! It takes skill, the right attitude and years of dedication to reach world standard.”
Jimmi is, as I type, back down the gym training for next year’s event. Our local hero can bee seen in the YouTube clip below. Watch out for him 42 seconds in, clapping his hands whilst donning a fetching green and yellow wig. Don’t say it wasn’t taken seriously!
Here at Pancentric we have been doing some work on how the Semantic Web can help our clients and add value to their online propositions. These typically range from the potential to be more “findable” through to understanding how corporate knowledge can be better known and used. Taking in along the way the usefulness of self describing data and the democracy of tagging. I would bore on about this, but…. it is nice to see some of the mainstream media starting to pick up on some aspects of this vis http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3532832.ece . Not sure about the headline though, I guess that’s why I don’t work for big media.
Launched last night, www.millbayplymouth.com is the culmination of 12 weeks work by the team.
The Millbay area of Plymouth is undergoing a radical, and what looks to be a stunning, redevlopment over the next couple of years. Already underway, the redeveloped coastal quarter will incorporate a mix of new homes with commercial, retail and leisure space and cement Plymouth’s position as one of Europe’s finest waterfront cities by reclaiming a partly redundant harbourside area close to the city centre.
To supply the imagery on the site we used a local photographer who takes pictures of Plymouth and the surrounding area in his spare time. Contacted through flickr, Jason was more than happy to contribute some of his best images for use in marketing this great new development in his home town.
To get a feel for the scope of the development it’s probably best to take a loot at the ‘Explore‘ section or even watch the flythrough - produced in partnership with another agency.
The first phase of the site is primarily focussed on marketing the development at the world’s premier property conference, MIPIM in Cannes, France.
To accompany the site there is a kiosk version which has been modelled specifically for use on the marketing stand at MIPIM. This will be developed further for future use in the on-site marketing suite at Millbay.
There are huge plans for the coming months not least expanding the site as more details of the development are realised as well as some very exciting community features - more of which we can reveal at a later date.
A very interesting article was published on ReadWriteWeb.Com regarding a discussion between Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia Search, Jason Calacanis from Mahalo.com and Marissa Meyer, Google’s VP of Search.
Jimmy and Jason each gave a brief overview of their human powered search engines.
The discussion then follows on how search engine results are irrelevant and filled with spam and weird stuff. Jason railed on Google and other big engines, saying algorithms have failed to control spam and SEO gaming, and that humans must be involved to get good results.
Jason was more circumspect, and spent most of his time arguing that large numbers of people will be willing to spend time helping Wikia Search develop good results.
As a member of these sites like Wikia Search and Mahalo, the results you achieve are significantly better because we’re incorporating human intelligence into the mix.
Wikia Search will have another social angle. Users will be able to find other contributors to work on the search engine with them, behind the scenes from the masses who just want results.
Mahalo, an evolving human-powered Web guide primarily uses paid staffers to create its topic pages. A new “Mahalo Follow” feature lets users easily recommend sites to the engine– a more cost-effective way to quickly build a library of human-approved links.
Shane Richmond, communities editor at the Telegraph.co.uk, today announced on his blog that the Telegraph would be adopting OpenID by the end of February.
This is very exciting because not only are they accepting OpenIDs, they will be providing them for users also. As his post says, they are the first newspaper in the world and the first British media company to be doing this.
In brief, Open ID is a decentralised sign-on system allowing users to log on to multiple sites with a single ID hosted by any of the participating sites without having to remember multiple usernames and passwords.
Having multiple log ins for loads of different sites has been a constant tyranny when using multiple services across different machines at home and work. Open ID is a great step towards solving this problem. Having organisations such as the Telegraph adopting these standards will only help nurture adoption and accelerate its path into the mainstream.
Just found a great new (5 weeks old) podcast from Jon Hicks and John Oxton. The Rissington Podcast is pitched as ‘a web-geek version of Gardeners Question Time’. John Hicks found fame a few years ago with his design of the Firefox and Thunderbird logos and John Oxton specialises in semantic mark up and CSS.
Anyway, based out of an old RAF base with music and voice over to match, the podcast is a very witty and entertaining look at the world of web design and coding; including listeners’ questions, interviews and typeface of the week. They have a great format, long may it continue.
OK, so we’re three days in. But that still means 363 days to go (it’s a leap year don’t forget) in which all sorts of things can happen, and launch, and get bought.
I’m not going to do an exhaustive run down of all the things I think might happen this year. You’ve probably read loads of those types of posts already. What I want to look at is how attitudes might evolve, specifically in the corporate sector.
We all know about the rampant rise of social networks over the past 18 months. What’s going to happen over the next 12 months is anyone guess. What I believe we’ll see is more and more big corporates starting to adopt the common toolsets that are evident in all these sites and services.
It may have taken some time for many parties to realise, but a lot of corporate organisations, through their intranets and various extranets have large communities of employees, contacts and suppliers already in place. I know of one site inparticular which exhibits 40,000+ registered users all sharing a very specific professional interest area. Imagine the power of applying tools such as Port 80-safe instant messaging (think Twitter), a way of finding people by specific interest and location (think LinkedIn), a mechanism to create special interest groups (think Facebook Groups), a way to share images and videos for discussion (think Flickr or YouTube) and a way or distributing content throughout the network without clogging inboxes (think DropSend or similar).
By utilising these tried and tested tools we can increase loyalty and participation amongst the community as well as encourage adoption by parties who might otherwise see no discernible value in joining if it were a ‘vanilla’ one-to-many model.
My next prediction for 2008, though to be honest more of a wish, would be the widespread adoption by large organisations of lightweight platforms and technologies. I’ve had my time of requirements gathering and interface design for multi-million dollar, 18 month SAP implementations. Now, these things will always have their place. When tracking manufacturing output of a 35,000 strong workforce you will need some pretty beefy reporting tools. However, surely a wiki or blog or IM tool for a special interest group of 300 people within the organisation can be built in a lightweight, agile manner? I’m not a developer, but I have seen some pretty punchy pieces of functionality built in days and now in use by thousands on a day-to-day basis. There must be some merit in these ways of working for the appropriate projects.
Hopefully we will begin to see a new dawn in 2008 so we can begin to create some truly powerful communities for specific uses which take the online community and social media beyond glorified dating services.
In the very best of blog traditions the end of December marks the point at which we look back and soberly (if that’s possible at this time of year) digest the events, products and advancements made in our digital world in the last 12 months.
One of, if not the, biggest events of 2007 was the opening up of the Facebook walled garden to anyone who wished to register. What this did, in simple terms, was introduce millions of people to social networking and associated tools such as RSS, content aggregation, photo and video sharing, perpetual contact and all the other tools now used on a daily basis by the 60 million or so registered users.
From a technology perspective the iPhone has shifted the usability of mobile devices forward in a giant seismic leap, where all the other vendors were just shuffling forward in an apologetic manner by adding little more than memory and increasing complexity. The inclusion of a proper browser, not a rubbish cut down version, seamless integration with mac desktop applications as well as a host of third party appsalreadyreleased, not to mention the iTunes and YouTube stuff this is the first truly integrated pocket device that people actually want to use.
Services such as Twitter and Tumblr gained momentum and grew their user base and I think will see wider adoption next year, though 2008 predictions are for a later post. Jaiku was bought by Google.
RSS adoption gained pace through 2007. Google Reader came out as most used feed reader.
There were a few big headlines in the digital music world in 2007. Radiohead revolutionised the music industry (and God, doesn’t it need it) with their ‘pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth’ sales model for their album ‘In Rainbows’. What their actual revenue from sales was, the band will not say. However, what they did say was that it made more than all of their other albums put together when measured on downloads alone. Some sources put it as high as £5 per album while others as low as £2.90.
Video went mental. Joost came out of beta, the BBC’s iPlayer launched and project Kangaroo was announced which will aggregate BBC, iTV and Channel 4 content into one player in 2008. Even the Queen, 50 years after her first televised Christmas Day address to the nation, has a YouTube channel.
That’s a tiny snapshot of what’s gone on this year. In a post to be published soon I’ll be looking at what excitement 2008 has to offer. As a starter for 10, video is going to be bigger than ever and the big corporates are going to get all social.