I’m a regular at Northern Digitals, an event for like minded people involved in digital creative industries around Manchester, to get together, have a beer, talk about work, techniques or influences, ruminate and make new friends.
The popularity of ND nights prompted Matt Booth and Gavin to host a more formal event, which they called BLAB. Featuring a recognised figure from our online/creative industry, they’d do a talk, we’d all drink beer and everyone would enjoy themselves. Following this format, BLABMini was created, featuring 5–6 speakers, shorter talk times, slightly more informal.
I got an email off Matt asking me to talk at the latest BLABMini, on the 1st December at The Deaf Institute. The subject was on “Things I’ve Seen”, links you’ve been passed on twitter or via blogs, makes you stop and think “wow” or “why didn’t I think of that”. Quite an open-ended subject, so I pinned mine on inspirational things I’ve seen. Read more…
As part of the role for D&AD North Committee, members join together to organise speaking events with interesting creatives.
I lead the charge for the Preston talk, and wanted to bring someone who was involved in a few areas of creativity and marketing, but was also local and contributed to the ongoing development of students in the area. A few phone calls to friends of friends and contact was made with Gary Aspden.
For 12 years Gary was a guiding force for some of adidas’s most influential collaborations. From Peter Saville to Kazuki Kuraishi via A Bathing Ape and Ian Brown, the results of his time at this legendary brand have been diverse to say the least.
With big help from Ed at Creative Lancashire, we sourced a great venue, at The New Continental, organised the event and tickets were completely sold out. I was really pleased with the diversity of attendees, from designers, design and fashion students to Gary’s old tutor and a few of his friends. This was Gary’s first speaking engagement, and everyone was eager to see how he’d fare.
The talk last night was brilliant. Gary’s got a great way of telling a story, and he had many mad, lucky and coincidental stories to tell, of how he graduated from a follower of fashion on the streets of Darwen to a culture spotter and early trend supporter.
With such a good attendance and successful talk, there was immediately more talk of organising more events in Preston and around Lancashire, with Ben Casey from The Chase being vocal in his support. Hopefully this was the start of more good things in the region…
JP74 is looking for a full-time middle/senior weight back-end developer to work on a variety of exciting digital projects for clients willing to work with the latest technologies. You will be working as part of the back-end development team alongside front-end developers and the creative team to produce visually stunning, feature-rich solutions ranging from custom web applications, content management systems and e-commerce sites.
Key Responsibilities
Plan and development of new sites and applications
Enhancements to existing applications and frameworks
Database design and development
Server setup and maintenance
Keeping abreast of emerging technologies and introduction where appropriate
Identification opportunities to improve internal process and procedures
Essential Skills
2+ Years in a commercial digital/web agency
PHP5 (OOP experience in PHP)
MVC framework experience – Zend, Code Ignitor, Cake, Kohana or similar
MySQL Database Design & Creation
Hand-coded HTML and CSS
jQuery/MooTools or similar Javascript Frameworks
AJAX
SVN/Git version control
Basic Linux sys admin
Desirable Skills
Magento
Python with Django
HTML5
Linux, Apache, MySQL server setup and configuration
Cloud Server management
Web optimisation for smartphones
iPhone/Android application development
Salary dependent on experience
Please send your CV and salary expectations to studio@jp74.com
Strictly no agencies. Seriously. Don’t call us. Thank You.
Chris Mills put the call out months ago, asking if I’d like to take part, and could I herd up anyone else to speak. I recommended my fellow skating (albeit inline-blader!) and Fudge front-ender Mike Byrne as he’s a lively character, and certainly knows his shit, and that made four. Chris kicked off, followed, by myself and Typography Online. Read more…
Here’s a quick pic of some of Team jayPee crowded round an iPad, viewing one of our latest projects on it.
This project didn’t need to work on an iPad, but given the client and nature of this web app, we went further and made it behave in a manner you’d expect on an iOS device. Things like this matter to us, and sometimes we’ll put in extra time to make a site, app or widget behave and fulfil a task that might be ignored by a brief, but elevates a job from good to great.
As part of my on-going relationship with D&AD and my commitment to the D&AD North Committee, I was asked to take part in a Student portfolio surgery session at the Leeds College of Art & Design.
Up and at ‘em at silly o’clock, as a few of my Leeds based twitter friends had warned that traffic could be terrible, but I did manage to get there in good time. Yes, Leeds morning traffic is crap.
Slightly nervous as to how the session was going to go, it was great to see James and Stuart from Thoughful, who’d done a session in Newcastle the day before. I admire the amount of get up and go these guys have, and a quick chat with them put me at ease. Read more…
I’d been invited, as last year I was the Foreman on two Student Award Briefs, Interactive Design and Microsite Design, which was a fantastic experience. D&AD invited judges from both Professional and Student awards to the evening to help students understand what we are looking for when we score and assess all the work in front of us, in such a short time.
There was some great insight from Steve and Clem about what makes a great piece of award winning work, and I found Paul West from Form to be a great speaker, who shared his gut feeling belief about a good design and advocated being challenging, to give the judges something to think about.
During this time, about eight students had been selected to disappear into a private area and run through a mock judging session on the Nokia Interactive Design brief… Read more…
An old boss of mine had a well-worn phrase he used to trot out in client meetings. He used to say ‘Anyone can ask a dopey question. The thing is, you have to make sure you only ask it once’. Well, since I joined JP74 just over three months ago I can assure you I’ve asked my fair share of dopey questions.
I’m not going to lie – when I joined first joined the agency I was wondering exactly what I’d let myself in for. A professional lifetime working within traditional offline agencies hadn’t prepared me for my new life in digital – I mean, how could it? But everyone at JP74 has welcomed me and shown incredible patience when I ask the dopey questions – and, do you know what, I’m only asking them once – and I’m asking them less and less.
My job title is Creative Services Manager and my role here is to help projects run smoothly through the agency and ensure we deliver to our client’s timescales. We achieve that by utilising every minute of every day with our internal studio or working with carefully selected external suppliers to deliver what we can’t – such as printers or video production houses.
JP74 is young, vibrant and challenging – we have some great clients and, although it sounds a little clichéd, no two days are the same.
If the first three months are anything to go by, then my digital life is going to be very interesting indeed!
The new product from Google ‘instant’ has been hailed as ‘search at the speed of thought’ and is currently being rolled out across Europe this week.
The new search function allows the search results to change and refresh instantly as you type your query.
This is search at it’s fasted and is sure to be a defining moment in search as we know it. See the demo below.
As an online marketing person, my initial reaction was awe, then, as it sank in what the update would mean, I began to think about the impact this would have on my campaigns, and the online marketing industry, as we know it.
Could this be the death of SEO? How will this affect the sponsored search model – does every impression still get noted even if the ad was shown in a partly typed word, which was not relevant? These are all questions that have yet to be answered.
In the mean time though, we can just marvel at Google’s new toy. This latest update has some what redeemed the last two failed launches, you know the ones.
Last Thursday, I was down in that London to speak at a 