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

Salary dependent on experience

Please send your CV and salary expectations to studio@jp74.com
Strictly no agencies. Seriously. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Thanks.

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.

I also narrowed it down to be things I’ve seen on Vimeo, as most of the really cool/wow stuff I see is on there, and I hammer that “Later” button. Pretty sure I have more content on there than on my Tivo!

Anyway, it was my first time at the venue, it’s like an old school house or something, and hardly touched inside. It’s great! I met with the other speakers before it kicked off, @katiemoffat @katiemaymanc @VariousArtists & @JeffreyBowman. We decided on a running order, and said I didn’t mind being last.

The content from the speakers varied wildly, from 9/11 memorials, via brown bananas and spoof chef videos to keeping sane in a city. I showed three videos from Vimeo, a piece on calligraphy, an intro to a skateboarding video and a rock video. All talks were very well received, the audience were attentive and appreciative, and knowing the kind of crowd that goes to ND nights, it was a good feeling knowing where to pitch the talk.

Thanks to Matt & Gav, all the speakers and the audience. I really enjoyed myself.

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…

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.

Next up, Opera’s own Patrick Lauke talked (and talked) about media queries and viewports, which is very topical to work we’ve been doing this last week. Finally, Mike rocked up and went balls deep with CSS3 animations and transforms, loads to learn.

So, as promised, here’s my slides, and here’s some of the example code… enjoy.

Example type effects with CSS3 code

• 3D text 1
• 3D text 2
• 3D text 3
• Retro 3D
• Inset 1
• Inset 2
• Neon
• Stroke (webkit)
• Stroke and glow (webkit)

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.

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.

Personally, I like to get involved with design students and help where I can, because I was one too. Me and my mates through college did some pretty hair-brained things, tried out some ridiculous ideas… and all seemed to get good jobs from it!

I’ve also been on the other side, recruiting students. Seeing their work, their attitude, from the nervous to the cock-sure and trying to help them get things in order to impress.

So doing the portfolio surgeries wasn’t a massive leap from this. In a nutshell, the students presented their work, talked me through it, I asked what they wanted to do next, graphic design? media? What was strong in their portfolio, how to put it the work in order and feel confident talking about it, how to present their work, and how to be themselves.

I think it’s massively important to let your personality shine through in an interview situation. If you’re going to work in a studio, you’re gonna spend more waking hours with your colleagues than you do with your partner! In which case, you’d better be up for having some fun, able to discuss the most random and mundane crap, pitch in and help, and be an all round superstar junior. Make yourself indispensable.

I’d rather take someone whose work was solid, with streaks of inspiration but consistent and a get-along attitude to everything, than some knock-out designer/programmer whose work was awesome but they were above their station. A bit of humbleness and a very willing attitude goes a long way…

Having said that, all the students I spoke to were excellent. Motivated, talented, eager to talk about what they’ve done and ideas of where they’re going. Some of them, I couldn’t even give pointers to how to present their work better. It was quality, it looked “finished” with that extra 5% of work (a skill a lot learn in the trade, not in education), in which case I was there to urge them to think about how to get in front of Mr. Creative Director, deflect negativity and make it hard to turn them down.

Good luck to you all!

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…

Next up on stage was Paul Kemp-Robertson from Contagious and myself. I’m not going to lie to you, I can hardly remember anything Paul or myself said, so I’m looking forward to the D&AD video that’ll be online shortly, to see what the hell I was going on about! I chose a piece of winning work from the Microsite Brief, the BBC iPlayer backed one, and spoke about why it appealed to me, and us judges as a group, and we tried to convey some of the atmosphere that happens when judging is in progress on the big day.

The student judges then came out, and revealed their judgement for the Nokia brief. At this point, Paul and I were getting a little concerned about remembering all the reasons we selected some work and knocked some back, arguing the toss and backing up our groups choices, should our winner not be picked. Fortunately, the students chose this piece by Matt Turnbull as their unanimous winner, just like our group of Judges did. Phew!

Matt Turnbull was also at the event, and got up to say a bit about how his life has changed thanks to winning the award and a six month internship at Nokia. An absolutely brilliant chance, Matt seems to be on his feet and enjoying himself.

Afterwards, a few students said hello and thanks, and pressed a few questions, which is always great, then it was off to Jack The Ripper’s pub, The Ten Bells for some beers with the D&AD crew.

My last month can be summed up by the digitised voice in the old Mega Drive game, ESWAT.

In a moment of desperate bad luck, I fell in the street and broke my left arm. As ever, it wasn’t quite that simple…

I’d been invited down to the .net awards on the 18th November, held in London. A lot of my friends and industry piers were going and I took our contact James from the D&AD. I met up with Phil Sherry at his hotel, had a beer, met his boss Mikey, then proceeded to meet Colly, Dan Donald, AlunR et al at a pub close to the venue, which all happened without incident.

We went to the awards, hosted by Zeldman (shorter in real-life), had a few free beers, met fellow front-ender and VW camper van nut Ian Lloyd for the first time and a lot more lovely people. The actual awards were a bit of a non-surprise, to be brutal. End of the night, get our coats and head back to the hotels. At 11.30pm.

Mine and Phil’s hotels were in walking distance of the venue, so we set off to have a final beer at his hotel as Phil and Mikey were catch an 8.30am train back to the North East.

The drama happened as we were running to cross over a junction before the lights turned red. Stumble, fall, hand out… and I knew straight away I’d broken my arm. It really was as simple – and as stupid – as that.

So what did they do?

As you can see from the x-ray, they’ve plated the radius with six screws, and pushed a wire through the middle of the ulna bone, and basically threaded the broken bits of bone onto it. According to someone who knows how this is done, it’s not a delicate manouvre, and it’s a good job I was out like a light for it. It would also explain the marks I have on my upper arm that look like it’s been in a vice. The doctor pointed out that the wire is left long, so that they can pull it out again…

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!