“We’re a digital agency… and there's two Jakes…”
Last night, I spoke at the latest Opera back standards>next gig, hosted at MadLab in Manchester. 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.
As part of my on-going relationship with D&AD and my commitment to the D&AD North Committee, I was asked to take part in a Student portfolio surgery session at the Leeds College of Art & Design. 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 ...
Last Thursday, I was down in that London to speak at a D&AD Student Awards Sharp’ner session at the Vibe Bar on Brick Lane. 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 ...
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…
This hilarious video is in fact one of the directors at JP74 - complete FAIL! Go Jake! [youtube zuMiGMevbBU]
This year I had the great honour of being a Foreman and juror at the D&AD Student Awards 2010, which was held down in Olympia, London. For those of you who don't know, a D&AD award comes in the shape of a pencil. As a creative, a Yellow Pencil is one of the highest honours bestowed upon you by your peers. It's career defining, and can only be bettered by a Black Pencil… However, I only had a hand in awarding "Baby Pencils", a slightly vertically challenged version of the full professional award, but nonetheless, the honour of being asked to take part ...
We're rather pleased to announce that our Interactive Director, Jake Smith, has been asked to be a foreman for the D&AD Student Awards 2010, participating in the Digital Design and Interactive Design briefs. The occasion will involve a long day at the London Olympia venue, pouring over entries and imparting words of wisdom… we hope.
I'm really pleased to say that the whole Liverpool session of Speak The Web went down really well. I managed to get through 30 minutes without committing social hari kari or making too bigger tit of myself. Pat Lauke was in full on Opera and HTML5 brainwash form, but energetic and interesting enough to be different from Chris Mill's session at Leeds. The coup de grâce was obviously Simon Collison of Erskine Design, with his In the Pursuit of Magic presentation, and fair play to him for being drugged up but persevering and putting on a really thoughtful and inspiring presentation.
We're happy to say that Jake's first article on dev.opera.com has gone live. The article is a technical piece covering sIFR, a flash-based technology for swapping fonts in titles and headers for your own custom fonts that the end-user won't have installed on their machine. It makes good reading for anyone new to sIFR or struggling understanding the principles. Jake's no stranger to being published though, having had a regular column in .net magazine, and chapters in many Friends of ED books in the past. To be honest, he's the office spell-checker and grammar overlord. Visit dev.opera and read the article