Soak blog

Get the lowdown on what we love, what we hate and everything in-between.

Soak on Minecraft

14.10.2010 By: ronansprake Under: Uncategorized Comments: none

ronansprake

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Terms of use for Social Media logos

12.10.2010 By: alanofford Under: Creative, Technical Comments: none

alanofford

Everyone these days is into social media. Gone are the days when clients would um and ah about whether or not it was just another trendy marketing buzz-word. Now we often get requests from clients, sometimes half-way through a project, asking where we can position their Twitter feed. In fact, the term ‘social media’ may be coming close to jumping the shark, with developers like Ryan Waggoner washing their hands of developing apps for Facebook, and Twitter introducing a new site which aggregates the information from the third party apps that helped make Twitter so ubiquitous.

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Soak attend UX Brighton 2010

16.09.2010 By: alanofford Under: Creative, Industry News Comments: none

alanofford

On Monday some of the Soak team attended the first UX Brighton conference, a day-long set of speakers grown out of the monthly meetings held by Brighton’s very active web-design community. The line-up promised an inspiring day of interesting and varied talks and it certainly delivered.

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Everyone’s talking about UX

06.09.2010 By: alanofford Under: Creative, Technical Comments: none

alanofford

User Experience, or UX, has become a real buzzword amongst internet professionals in the last few years, with every digital agency seeming to have added it to their list of available services, alongside the usual suspects like SEO, E-marketing and design. Everyone’s offering UX but what’s less clear is what this actually means.

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The war on Info-graphics

11.08.2010 By: alanofford Under: Creative Comments: none

alanofford

This week saw one of those rare moments when a graphic designer appeared in a mainstream tv show. In this case the heavy-weight Newsnight programme played host to not one, but two designers, one of which was (presenter Kirsty Wark’s words) “the legendary” Neville Brody. He faced off against David McCandless, a well known journalist/designer who specializes in info-graphics.

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Summer = Degree shows

12.07.2010 By: alanofford Under: Creative Comments: none

alanofford

For some, the brief summer sun means escaping to the beach or investing in a new pair of short shorts, but for me the summer means graduate degree shows. Every year since I left university I’ve made a point of going along to as many as possible, not just to make myself feel jealous about all the talented young designers out there, but to remind myself just what true creative freedom is, unfettered by time constraints or client demands.

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PHP pages on 1&1 without the file extension (friendly URLs)

28.06.2010 By: ronansprake Under: Technical Comments: 1

ronansprake

I recently stumbled across an odd problem with 1&1′s mod_rewrite, while enabling friendly URLs for PHP files. Searching for solutions made it apparent this is a very common problem specifically with this host’s packages.

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The 2010 Budget and what it means for the design and digital industries

25.06.2010 By: alanofford Under: Industry News Comments: none

alanofford

The recent emergency budget announced by the UK’s new coalition government has been given a good dissecting on the facebook discussion board of the Design Council, with particular focus on the public sector, predictable given the heavy cuts this area faces.

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HTML5 apps for mobile (iphone, android, and the rest)

17.06.2010 By: ronansprake Under: Uncategorized Comments: none

ronansprake

As demand for iphone and Android apps grows, the Soak team have been getting aquainted with the tools necessary for building mobile applications that run on multiple platforms. Rather than building separate apps for each mobile platform, we can write a single HTML5 application which can take advantage of the latest iphone hardware capabilities, without being limited to the Apple App Store.

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Anticipating the digital Olympics

02.06.2010 By: alanofford Under: Creative, Industry News Comments: none

alanofford

Ever since the 2012 Olympics logo was revealed in 2007, the graphic identity for the London games has been dogged by controversy. When Wolf Olins first unveiled the much criticised and in my opinion highly underrated brand, the public feeling was largely negative (although the reaction from the design community was much more thoughtful), and the video that accompanied the launch was even blamed for causing seizures.

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