You’ll soak up new ideas and techniques like a sponge and have a fantastic enthusiasm for all things digital and in print. Weʼre looking for someone whose designs are the end product of great thinking. Someone who can inspire ideas and help us to shape the agency. You’ll be hands on in the studio working as part of the design team and enjoy building relationships with our clients.

Base culture is one of collaboration, so you’ll enjoy sharing your work and ideas with other designers and disciplines. We build personal development plans and team initiatives to share, inspire, nurture and develop our skills. It’s all about the people.

If all this sounds like you then get in touch, send us some links to your work too. Tell us why you want to work here and what youʼll bring to the team. Weʼd love to hear from you.

Oh, you’ll get paid money and be able to work in a nice place with lovely people – but please donʼt hang around. We want to hear from you right now!

Good content sparks conversation

Both Em and I still get these emails every week, we read them separately; me at work and her at home. Then in the evening the new things it suggests often come up in conversation. Except Em would always have learnt a bit more than me. She’d say things like “oh did you see the bit about rotating the toys so they don’t get boring” and I’d offer up a confused face and a shake of the head, assuming I’d been distracted by something shiny.

This happened a few times and I made a mental note to concentrate and not read them too quickly (It can happen, even if they are good). I read the emails from top to bottom but she was regularly learning more from them than I was. And neither of us could understand how I was missing things.

At first I wondered if mum was getting a different email to dad. Which I figured would be a pretty clever way to target the email, and considering how the site had encouraged us to set up our profiles in the first place (‘Why not add your partner? etc’) that seemed plausible. But we looked at both the emails we’d received and they were identical. No such cleverness.

The penny dropped

It took a while, but then one day the penny dropped. Em was talking about the email but meant the website. To her there wasn’t any difference. All she cared about was learning about the subject.

19 months on and I realised that if an email is interesting enough the line between the content of the email and the article it links to is blurred. If you’re absorbed enough and don’t care about the mechanics of it all, you’ll happily switch from one to the other and not even consider the join. I’m guilty of this because thinking through creating the mechanics is our business, but it’s another great reminder to think like the user. And I have a feeling this applies to a lot of different ‘joins’ too. Twitter to article, website to Flickr, etc.

It connected on an emotional level

There’s something strangely reassuring about receiving this email every week. It has connected on an emotional level with a little bit of virtual support when you need it most. So congrats to the guys that came up with the idea. It’s clever, it feels real and despite knowing that they really just want to sell me baby products, I’m actually happy to engage because they give us something very valuable at a time when it’s most needed.

Hats off, sirs.

Passive Twitter (and LinkedIn and Facebook…) users will start to emerge from the shadows, seeking to improve their social standing as the irresistible urge to compete kicks in. The popularity contest that was ‘the number of Facebook friends’ or ‘Twitter followers’ has evolved into what feels like a more sophisticated social pecking order.

I have to admit that I’m already succumbing. I’ve checked my score a couple of times this week, and I’m surprised at myself for doing it. Right now, I’m a ‘Conversationalist’ which Klout describes as…

“You love to connect and always have the inside scoop. Good conversation is not just a skill, it’s an art. You might not know it, but when you are witty, your followers hang on every word.”

As far as I can see a ‘Conversationalist’ is respectable. It’s not in the high numbers score-wise, but I think this is where Klout does things really well. Like a parent to a child, it’s encouraging with its feedback. ‘You are influential to a tightly formed network that is growing larger’. The message is upbeat, and focusing on the positive. For what it’s worth it feels like a relatively accurate description of the way I choose to use the platforms in my daily life.

Perhaps it’ll spark and feed that competitive instinct in all of us. In the Klout dashboard it’s already comparing us to others in our networks to give us a gentle nudge in that direction.

Is it a good thing?

Only time will tell. I think anything that fuels engagement on top of engagement, may end in burn-out. And if that involves quietly rocking in a corner (we’re all smartphone addicts didn’t you know) then maybe it isn’t. But if it helps to give people a greater understanding of social, through their own, more personal involvement then it may prove to be the catalyst for more people harnessing social media’s obvious benefits. And that can only be a good thing.

Dave and I have trialled it with our boys with varying degrees of success (mine dependant on the brightness of the screen – too bright and Mally wants to eat the phone.)

It kicks off around 6.45pm in the evening, in the run-up to a 7 o’clock bedtime – if bedtime is a little later then it’ll be there waiting in the feed when you’re ready.

As to how it came about; I’ve entered a whole new world of responsibility and I guess this is just a natural blurring of my old life and the new one.

We’ve yet to turn it into a design classic, but the bones are in place and functioning, so we thought we’d share to get feedback. You can follow @Tweetanory here.

No? Well, when I heard the big ‘social platform’ announcement from Google it was one of the first things that crossed my mind (that and the awesome prospect that is Circles). I think it’s the shortest name they’ve given anything so far.

It’s because ultimately Google+ is not a product in the same way that Maps and Gmail are. It’s the very core of what they need to become. As you’ll read pretty much anywhere on the web the biggest threat to Google’s long term survival is Facebook’s command of the way people are increasingly engaging with the web. More and more the search giant, having been the starting point for so many people for so long is quietly being forgotten by the social generation who are now starting and finishing their time online with Facebook.

The new-look Google (designed by Andy Hertzfeld — an original member of the Apple Macintosh team) that arrived along with it’s most recent social network is indication itself that this new ‘product’ is actually a fundamental shift in approach. The level of integration across existing products at this early stage, signals no doubt about the intent.

If the gamble pays off, in time we won’t remember the difference between Google+ and Google; the social integration will omnipresent and they’ll be no need to differentiate. In the same way Facebook lost ‘The’ from its name Google will lose the ‘+’, but with far greater significance.

For the most part, we listen to our friends and the people we surround ourselves with (whether online or in life). And because we’ve already established that we like the same things and made some level of intellectual connection with one another it suggests that we’re more likely to like what they like, than someone we don’t know.

Now the interesting part comes when you’re online, and it’s here that it starts to differentiate itself from real life. Online our behaviour is tracked accurately and the things we do build a pattern of interactions that add weight to what we say we like.

In real life we recommend things all the time, with varying degrees of authority. Online that authority can be measured using our tracked behaviour data and used to decide whether we’re actually in a position to make that recommendation in the first place. Let me give you an example:

Your friend tells you that he went to a great Italian restaurant and that you have to check it out next time you’re in town. You trust your friend and think it sounds like a great recommendation. What you don’t know is that your friend hasn’t been to a lot of Italian restaurants in town, in fact just this one all year. He hasn’t a lot to compare the restaurant too.

Another friend who’s been to three Italian restaurants in the area over the last few months tells you to go to the one just out of town. Because he’s checked in more often and more recently, his recommendation is based on more information and is likely to be the most beneficial to you.

And it was only a matter of time before the community decided it needed to be able to measure and quantify this kind of influence. Sites like Klout and Photorank  are now busy rating and ranking just that. According to Klout it “uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score”. Photorank works in a similar way through the photography you upload. The interactions you have online and the response you get are all contributing to your popularity score.

In many respects, in writing this article I’m taking my own advice from that presentation. In it I said: ‘Be of service without regard and be meaningful to people now.’ And if I’ve articulated myself well enough then maybe, just maybe I’ll end up with some measurable klout.

I thought it might be useful to share with you a response to a client today regarding a query on the implications of the change in EU law regarding cookies on 26th May 2011.

Hi Liz,

Thanks for your query on this. It’s one we’re watching very closely as it’s likely to have a big impact on our day-to-day work. As it stands, the industry is massively unclear as to how to implement the new directive. We were all waiting with baited breath in the run up to 26th May 2011 for a technical interpretation of the law, ie how to comply with the new rules from a practical point of view, and unfortunately it didn’t come.

Personally I’m not sure the ICO has an answer yet, and so has given everyone 12 months ‘to get your house in order’ starting 26th May 2011.

In lay terms anyone who wants to comply isn’t being told what practical steps can be taken for compliance. While the ICO work this out, they’ve ‘given’ the industry additional time (I’m sure to indirectly help them come up with the solutions). Very few have chosen to act without the practical guidance as the solutions that have been suggested thus far within the industry can’t be implemented without some degree of negative impact in either the user experience or statistical tracking data.

Whilst the new directive is essentially a step in the right direction for our privacy it does appear on the face of it very blanket in terms of it’s view of cookies. Personal feeling on the subject is that there may be some back tracking on the use of cookies for collecting non-personal statistical data, ie Google Analytics. And in which case your site wouldn’t need to change, as this is all we use cookies for. Time will tell.

The ICO is required to investigate any claims (even within the 12 months additional timeframe), and in this event you are required to state what you are doing to become compliant. In response, by saying that you are watching developments closely and are in consultation with your website development agency to implement the new rules whilst reducing the impact on your site’s user experience, you will demonstrate that you are aware of the rules and have started to consider making changes towards compliance. As far as I understand, this is all that is needed at this stage.

In reality I think the likelihood of a complaint as a result of non-compliance is virtually nil within that time, but always best to be on the safe side.

If there is any movement from the ICO in the meantime, in terms of a practical way to implement the directive, we will be in touch with next steps.

Hope that helps. Any other queries, feel free to give me a shout.
All the best. Tom

An all-round nice guy by the name of Siti at the ill-fated Deepend took me through the ‘Save for web’ options in Photoshop and explained the massive impact you can make on a site’s delivery to the screen, with virtually no noticeable reduction in quality.

Since then not a lot has changed in the world of image compression in site design. We still use the jpeg format for photographic images and either png or gif for more linear based images. png is the only format of those that will allow you truly useful transparency (gifs do it badly, and jpegs don’t do it at all).

But it looks like this may be yet another thing being challenged by Google. Following the addition of page load speed into their search ranking algorithm it certainly seems fitting that they’ve set about working to improve the image compression formats available. With the introduction of the WebP format developers at Google are making inroads in improving the compression algorithms.  And from the account of the work on the Chromium blog it appears likely that they may well succeed at combining this work with increased support for transparency.

As one commenter on the blog states “[it] would be the best thing ever.” As someone who’s worked with the constraints for a while, I’m inclined to agree.

It has been six weeks now since Google waded into the browser market with what was being hailed as one of the company’s most important product launches ever.

Some saw it as the start of a software product launch that will end in the almighty search giant releasing an operating system that will reinvent how the desktop interacts with the internet.

But if this is to be the case they’ll need to address a few fundamentals of the new browser, at least as far as search engine marketing folk are concerned.

After reviewing Google Chrome alongside the majority of the web development community we were as impressed as most. But as soon as we installed it we tried to customise the interface. As Firefox users we automatically went after the developer tools that we hoped might be built in. Not there, so we went to download Chris Pederick’s brilliant Web Developer toolbar but found it wasn’t compatible. Ok, so no geek tools but at least Google’s toolbar will already be an integral part of the new product. We just need to know how to turn it on. Again nothing – and this time we turned to the omnibox to help us explain how to use our newly adopted Google product.

But nothing, and still, six weeks later there is no Google toolbar – at least we can’t find it! – for Chrome. Now you’d think that Google’s new product would automatically build in features that are present in it’s browser plugin application?! The Google Toolbar houses some pretty major information for search engine marketing specialists including most importantly Google’s Page Rank indicator bar, telling users a site’s importance in the Google scheme of things.

Now it may not really be a nightmare but until this is added to Google Chrome we’ll just have to keep Firefox on the go.