Soak were asked to hold a workshop at the event which engaged and inspired students on choosing a career in the industry, and informed on the best paths in to it.

We’ll be honest, we were slightly apprehensive about the level of enthusiasm and interest we were going to be greeted with, especially as we’d prepared a compulsory task for them (yes we had braced ourselves for a chorus of groans and “do we have to’s”). Thankfully we were proved entirely wrong and a rather nervous looking Adam, Chris and Emily soon relaxed in front of their most potentially critical audience to date.

With unemployment affecting over one million young people in the UK, we decided it would be apt to give some advice on how to succeed when attempting to find a job. Given that we’re bombarded with CVs from hopeful job seekers throughout the year, we wanted to challenge the students to think about how they can play on their own strengths and create an original online CV, which makes them stand out from an ever growing crowd.

We held two workshops which required groups of students to create digital marketing strategies for an imaginary candidate of a similar age, and with similar experience, to them.

Fuelled by the incentive of HMV vouchers and the chance to win a week’s work experience at Soak, the groups got to work and devised some truly imaginative tactics for promoting the skills and attributes of their chosen candidate to would be employers. Both workshops were a huge success and the teams considered an impressive variety of web strategies, social media channels and digital platforms to gain maximum exposure – with very little help from us we might add!

Well done to the bright sparks from City College Norwich and Great Yarmouth College who won our (probably pretty lame) voucher prizes and who we are very excited about interviewing for our work experience placement.

Hopefully in the future we will see an array of innovate CV’s hit our inbox. Remember…we can sniff out a bulk emailed CV a mile off!!

Here’s a really innovate example!

My second problem is that websites generated by this tool are effectively locked into using it for future updates. I’ve worked on sites created with Dreamweaver and unless the changes are very minor, the only option has been to rebuild the entire site. Businesses using Muse will at some point want to change the design or add functionality that is very difficult (or impossible) to achieve with Muse, at which point they have to re-invest in an entirely new site.

Dreamweaver has long been a joke in web development circles, with its playschool drag-and-drop interface, weaving dreams of shoddy HTML since 1997. Dreamweaver’s legacy has been a plethora of unusable, poorly designed websites using unnecessary, unmaintainable markup. It’s furthered the belief that building websites is something your nephew Jimmy could do blind-fold.

My third problem (I’ll stop soon) is that these sites won’t be accessible, semantic, or SEO friendly. As it stands, computers can’t successfully assign subjective meaning to lines of code, which leads to poor search engine performance, frustration for users with accessibility requirements and a bad user experience for everyone.

To coin a tiresome phrase, you get what you pay for, though with Muse I’m not sure you even get that.

The big issue these services are trying to address, aside from consistent appearance and support across browsers, is font licensing. The legal issues around type has lagged behind the technology somewhat, with a great deal of confusion as to whether or not fonts bought online with a standard licence agreement can be used legally with the @font-face CSS rule (probably not it seems).

The popular Font Squirrel offers a packaging service to create @font-face compliant font files, but they rely on the user being honest and decent (there’s a checkbox for you to agree that your fonts are “legally eligible for web embedding.”)

Another, more closed online service is awesome-fontstacks.com, which lets the user create fontstacks from a list of free and commercially-licensed fonts although they strangely limit your selection based on the site’s preference.

For the paid services, the surest route to being legally squeaky-clean, there are currently two models, a subscription model, like Typekit, and the one-off payment model, like Font-Spring, but both of these offer limitations and difficulties, pageview limits for subscriptions and lack of support for one-offs. With both Fontshop and MyFonts now producing type optimized for use online the race is on to come up with the web standard for us all to use.

Near field communication or NFC, is a short-range wireless communication technology which enables the exchange of data between devices over a short distance (10cm).

Google has already introduced the technology to their latest Smartphone (the Nexus S) and if rumours are true, NFC chips are also going to be installed in the next generation iPad and iPhone devices, which are due to launch later this year.

Apple has previously filed a number of patents concerning NFC-based services, including a mobile payments system that debits money from either a pre-loaded credit card or directly from iTunes, an airline boarding pass app called iTravel, and the Grab & Go app which makes for simple transferring of files between your Apple devices.

Interestingly, patents have also been filed directly for an iPod and games controller as well as business and marketing apps such as the iPay, iBuy and iCoupons.

Obviously the technology has to have an outlet and it has just been announced that T-mobile and Orange customers will be among the first to benefit, after Everything Everywhere, the parent company, announced a new partnership with Barclaycard.

The companies will be launching the UK’s first commercial contactless mobile payments service, which will be rolled out by early summer 2011. The new service will offer consumers much greater convenience and control with over 40,000 stores ready and waiting to accept contactless payments.





Practical Uses for NFC:

• Contactless Payments
• Public Transport (E-Ticketing)
• Healthcare (Treatment Advice,
• Social Media (Foursquare)
• Smartobjects (Posters, Sculptures, Historic Buildings, Pubs)

With such heavyweight backing, NFC looks like it’s here and here to stay. It will likely take a year or two before the technology has an impact on our everyday lives, but I for one am looking forward to ditching my wallet!

Users are becoming used to the convenience of having their digital essentials on one device. Mobile phones have been capable of browsing the web for a few years now, but as more people browse on the go, a slick mobile site has become a must-have within digital marketing. A reported 61.6 million smart-phones were sold according to Q2 2010 figures and The Coda Research Consultancy predicts global smartphone sales of some 2.5 billion over the 2010-2015 period, suggesting that mobile internet use via smartphones will increase fifty-fold by the end of this period.

Previously as with all trends at the beginning it makes little difference if you follow the trend as some of them never seem to take off, such as Google Wave that didn’t really “change the web” as so many people predicted. But knowing which trends to implement can make a huge difference as a business.

Just like in the early 1990s when the internet was in its infancy the business who did not adopt the “website” trend soon started to struggle as their competitors began to dominate the digital market. Today, the internet is so widely adopted that if you don’t have an online presence for many businesses this means customers will not find you, especially if your target demographic is a younger audience.

Something similar could happen with mobile versions of sites. Let’s say you have a website and your digital marketing is superb meaning users can find you, if when they arrive at your site on a smart-phone and certain elements are not supported or it takes too long to load, users can soon get frustrated and leave, possibly finding a competitor who has taken the time to produce a mobile specific version of the site with these users in mind. Please bear in mind that Morgan Stanley Research estimates sales of smartphones will exceed those of PCs in 2012.

Although phones like the Galaxy S and iPhone 4 have sophisticated browsers capable of rendering a full website in miniature as you would see it on a standard computer this does not mean you should not consider streamlining your approach for mobile devices, often the page weight of a standard website is pushing the limits of the smart-phone and may lead to slower than expected loading times, there are also a number of features that are not supported on smart-phones. For example Flash is not currently supported on the iPhone 4 meaning unless you have a good alternative your users will not get a rich brand experience.

Another feature that is unknowingly not supported on most mobile browsers is the ability to hover over an item. An example of this being problematic is a website where the navigation requires the user to hover their cursor over the item to see sub-navigation options. For this reason if you know your users are using hand held devices why not streamline your content and information to make it even easier for them to navigate increasing traffic conversion rates.

In summary, Mobile browsing is moving forwards at an extraordinary rate and it won’t be long before users expect to see mobile versions of their favourite website. It’s a trend that has been successful and will only grow. If you decide not to create mobile alternatives you need to be prepared for user frustration and the possibility that they may go elsewhere.

After a break Julian Hurst talked about the importance of designers working with clients not just to solve problems, but to identify the problem in the first place. Before lunch Dr. John Dodd, formerly a neuroscience looking at face perception, now founder of bunnyfoot, extolled the wisdom of David Oglivy, the original ad-man, particularly the importance of telling a story.

The tricky after-lunch slot went to Graham McAllister who talked about the biometrics technology his company Vertical Slice use to chart the emotions of players during video games. Jeroen van Geel, of Johnnyholland fame, argued for more emotion in UX design and the importance of creating a personality through the tone-of-voice, look and feel and user interaction. Next Claire Rowland brought some heavy psychology into the room and explained how people have tried to encourage creativity for different personality types and some tips to enhance our own.

With the day drawing to a close the second-to-last speakers were from the principle sponsor of UX Brighton, webnographer, who talked about the importance of context in user testing and how people will perform very differently in different environments. Last, and by no means least was Rory Sutherland, a renowned speaker and Vice Chairman of Oglivy Group UK. His hilarious and insightful performance had everyone first in stitches and then nodding in agreement as he discussed the quirks of human psychology that make designing for users so difficult and so rewarding.

All in all, a really fascinating, if slightly overwhelming day, with buckets of interesting ideas to think about for the future. It certainly sparked a lot of debate between us at Soak and we’re already looking forward to next year’s conference!

With the axe poised to fall across key services, it’s a definite concern that there’ll be a collective tightening of belts in terms design and marketing spend. This blog from the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones warns that the government is now looking to shut down “up to 75% of government websites” in a bid to save costs. However I think that the public sector should be looking to turn this into an opportunity to invite in new ideas, rather than just cut services in such a knee-jerk manner.

The drop in Corporation tax will be of help to small businesses, like us here at Soak, who seem to be the big winners of the budget. Hopefully this will drive a more open and competitive design market with companies (and the afore mentioned public sector bosses) looking for alternatives to the big London-based agencies to meet their needs.

According to a report by the DCMS (Department for Culture, Media and Sport),

“The UK has the largest creative sector in the EU, and relative to
GDP probably the largest in the world.“

Coupled with the previous government’s pledges to create ‘Digital Britain’, a commitment which will hopefully be honoured by the new administration, means that there is plenty to be positive about, even if we as consumers can expect some tough times ahead.

The discussion that inspired this article can be found in full on here or the Design Council have rather handily posted a summary on their site here.

But it did succeed in getting the whole country talking about the Olympics, and again splitting opinion seemed to be the aim with the recent introduction of the Olympic and Paralympic mascots by design agency Iris, which seemed to get their own post on just about every design blog around (so I’m not going to post anymore pictures of them), with several comparisons being drawn between the two amorphous shapes and the timely partnering of Clegg and Cameron. The two mascots seem to be the next step in 2012 embracing the digital space with their own microsite and individual twitter feeds and facebook fanpages. Early feedback seems to be adults don’t like them, but kids (ie. their target audience) love them.

Hopefully this is setting the tone for the way the Olympics will be appearing online, not as polarising daft-punk-inspired blobs, but as a multi-channel, all encompassing digital strategy. The 2012 website already boasts in impressive array of features, including webcams of some of the venues (mostly shots of steel frames covered in tarpaulin at the moment), a timelined map of events, photos and information from all sites around the UK, as well as images, videos and blogs.

As the Games approaches I’d like to see the Olympic team continuing to feed this online hype and build momentum. The biggest danger is that people will simply get bored if 2012 is continually being shoved in their faces. It’s already been confirmed that YouTube will stream highlights of the Games around the world. We’ll have to wait and see how the organisers plan to capitalise on all the online media to make 2012 a bench-mark for the Olympics in the digital age.

The new Google Font Directory hosts a collection of Web fonts that can be used in your pages, effectively the same service Typekit offers, in conjunction with the Google Font API.

Last year, I trialled Typekit and posted a brief summary of its strengths and weaknesses as compared to existing stop-gap font replacement technologies sIFR and Cufon. The Google Font API shares some of the cons I listed in that article, with the crucial exception that all fonts within the Font Directory are entirely free to use.

It’s nice to see Typekit co-operating in the venture, though I do wonder how they plan to differentiate their pay-for service from Google’s free one, once the directory has matured and a few bugs I experienced while testing IE8 are ironed out. The API is incredibly easy to use, and the five-minute tutorial is well worth following.

I’m sticking with Cufon for now, but it’s massively encouraging to see Google putting their considerable weight behind this technology.

There’s also some new tools for helping people develop IPhone apps in Flash, a feature that was pre-empted by Apple’s announcement a couple of weeks ago that they were banning the use of Flash for developing it’s apps, which could lead to an outright war between the two companies that designer’s across the world rely on most.
We’re less impressed with the features so far announced for Illustrator CS5, variable width strokes seem like a bit of a gimmick. Of more interest is that they’ve added functionality for reordering art boards, making Illustrator a much more viable program for layout design.

Fireworks CS5 however might be the answer to our prayers, with Adobe promising 900+ bug fixes on the notoriously patchy CS4. We can only hope they’ve also put some effort into integrating it properly into the rest of the Creative Suite.
So will we at Soak be switching over to CS5? Well not immediately, as it’s always best to wait a few months while any issues are ironed out and it’s going to be expensive, $1,400 for the Creative Suite. But we’re definitely anticipating designers and developers putting CS5 through it’s paces in the weeks ahead and looking forward to pushing the boundaries of what we can do when we decide to upgrade.

Remember creatives, CS5 is still just a tool, albeit a really, really powerful one.