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!

I was recently asked by a fellow developer if there was a way to detect if a HTML object contains a certain element and alter the CSS styles depending on the element it contains.

The Scenario:
“You want to target all anchor elements containing a link to a pdf BUT if the link to the pdf contains an image you don’t want the same styling to apply:”

As CSS is cascading, it’s difficult to go back up the DOM tree; after some thought and playing around I discovered a workaround.

You would normally reference element like “A > IMG” to target an element but would rarely have to do “A > IMG <” so a little thinking outside the box was required.

Here’s the code:

HTML
<p><a href=”some.pdf”>text link</a></p>
<p><a href=”some.pdf”><img src=”img-link.png” width=”200″ height=”20″ /></a></p>

CSS
a[href$=".pdf"] {
background: red;
border:20px solid green;
}

a[href$=".pdf"]:first-child:not([src]) {
background: blue;
border:20px solid orange;
}

Explanation
OK so the first CSS statement tells the browser to apply the style to any link where the HREF attribute contains a .pdf. This means both links have this applied (including the one with the image)

As mentioned we want to target the links differently, so we now have a second style which applies only to links with NO image inside. Note that we are not targeting the link with an image but links with no image so the standard style is inherited for the image only. The CSS here is first detecting all links with a href attribute containing “.pdf” where the first child element in the anchor tag has NOT got an attribute of “src” (therefore not an image).

Summary
Admitted its a bit complex but seems to work OK. Obviously IE 8- will struggle with this but it was required on an Admin area where the standard browser used is Firefox4. We will conduct some browser tests and look to include some known browser support moving forwards.

Feel free to follow me @cssguy http://twitter.com/cssguy

We’ve been messing around with Google maps for a while now and we’ve put these skills to good use on this little project to let visitors to the site add their own dream Christmas to our map quickly and simply, and instantly updating to show where they’ve placed their marker.

For the design style we took a lot of visual cues from the golden age of advertising, the 1950s, when Christmas was very much a family affair and not yet tainted with the frenzy of commercialism that creeps in today (usually starting around October). We really went to town, adding in lots of hidden extras which hopefully repeat visitors will pick up on, such as the message that is visible only on really wide monitors.

In fact I’m so pleased with it that I’ve made the background from the site into some wallpapers for any of you wanting to put a little Christmas cheer onto their computer.

Download 1280 x 1026

Download 1024 x 821

Merry Christmas, everyone

Then came the ubiquitous company update, which turned more into an open debate about Soak, the digital economy and our ideas for the future. It was fantastic to see everyone so fired up and enthusiastic about the business, and lots of good ideas were put forward, some of which we’re going to develop over the coming months.

After a hearty curry (all you can eat, so I did, a move which came back to haunt me later on), we had a go at archery which was considerably more technically challenging than the shooting. I think we all managed to at least hit the target but it was Jake posing as Robin Hood who proved the most accurate even winning a small plastic medal!

All in all a great day out and a nice break from the computer screens. Big thanks to Soak’s own James Reeve for organising it and Potters for hosting and making sure we didn’t shoot ourselves in the foot!

The task we set was to design, from scratch, a website for his football team, St. Andrews Youth Under 16s. With only light supervision he’s been able to turn around a pretty decent concept in just two weeks, in fact we’re so impressed we’re going to build it and put the site live for his team to use!

As a bit of a break from that, we all know how frustrating when you’re stuck on one bit of work for too long, we asked Harley to come up with some logo concepts in response to the whole GAP fiasco of the previous month. Again he really impressed for someone still in school, producing a load of sketches and two concepts that could easily be developed further into successful brands.

We ended the week with a discussion on career options for an aspiring designer. Although there are many more different routes into the industry compared to twenty years ago, there’s also a hell of a lot more competition. Dedication and passion are two key values for a successful designer to possess, and Harley has certainly shown he’s got the potential for both.

Re-branding yourself is often acknowledged as one of the hardest tasks designer’s can undertake and so it proved with us. The biggest challenge was bringing a clean modern style to the brand, without losing the fluid, organic quality that had inspired the original design.

Early on the decision was made to use a smooth vector output for the logo rather than the hand-drawn quality we had used before. However all designing begins off screen, as shown by these initial (very rough) sketches.

The scamps soon became three iterations, each with their own good and bad points, but at this stage there was a clear favourite. This version, based on the font Tartine, had a nice smooth, organic feel to it, whilst offering a sort of retro charm that is very in vogue at the moment.

It still lacked a real sense of identity though and so we set about reshaping the letter-forms. We extended the ‘k’ to form a wave shape and drawing inspiration from the original Soak splat we introduced two dots above. A tricky re-working of the ‘a’ and we were almost there.

Of course the logo is just the central pivot of the brand, but from developing it we were able to identify the values we wanted to express the rest of the site; clean and modern, but with a slight quirkiness, aspirations we think we’ve just about managed to capture.