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Earlier this year, Apple announced that it would open up the iPhone platform to third party developers so that other programmers could get in on the action and build their own applications.

This was pretty exciting news for us here at do1, given that we are all iPhone junkies! Our developers now have the tools and knowledge behind them to allow us to build iPhone applications for our clients.

If you’ve got a good idea for an iPhone application, or you’ve got an existing web application that you’d like ported across to the iPhone, why not get in touch and have a chat with us about we could do.

I appreciate it must be really difficult to run a company as massive as BT. But I can’t help feeling, after many bad experiences with them, that there’s a lot of room for improvement with the telecoms giant.

This rant comes as a result of my most recent experience with getting them to install a new BT line into our new offices at 1000 Lakside, North Harbour in Portsmouth. The building is IBM’s previous headquarters which was recently sold to Highcross who spent £13M refurbishing it. The purpose-built building was completed in the late 1970’s, so it’s a well established building, and with a footprint of 72,000 square foot it’s not a small building either.

However, BT, in their infinite wisdom, sent out an engineer on four, yes four separate occasions - the first three attempts of which they either “couldn’t find the building” or ended up going to the wrong building.

The sad thing about this is that I was so desperate that BT got this right the first time round that when I initially ordered the line installation, I said to the guy at BT Local Business that I would actually “pick up the engineer and drive him to the site if there was any doubt about where the line was to be installed”. Maybe I was just asking for it by saying that!

Just to add insult to injury, throughout the course of us waiting for BT to install the line (and fail) we saw no less than about half a dozen different BT engineers attend our office building in the meantime that were servicing other companies needs. Having talked to the engineers that were in, it was evident that there was simply no communication or organisation between the people at BT arranging and instructing the engineers, and the actual engineers themselves. I found it mad, not to mention totally inefficient… And I’m not exactly an eco-warrior either but there could’ve been some serious savings on van emissions.

Nonetheless, we did eventually get BT in after about three weeks of faffing and a lot of my time wasted on the phone asking them where their engineers are. I look forward to giving them a fight over the invoice =)

Having graduated this year with a degree in Communication Design from the University of Portsmouth I experienced a big transition from being a design student to a design professional. I felt that I should pass my experiences onto anyone else who is in or going to be in the same situation.

Firstly, I would suggest that having a degree in the field of design is definitely not an essential when it come to finding a job in the design profession. When I started applying for jobs I quickly learnt that a degree doesn’t count for much, an employer will usually assess you by the quality of your portfolio. A good example here is Ben, another Web Designer here at do1. He didn’t go to university but he is still a highly talented designer and an asset to the team.

Having said this, I still don’t regret going to university one bit. My course helped me to develop a strong appreciation and understanding about true graphic design. Any final outcome which I produced came after months of research into my chosen subject area. It made me realise that good design isn’t about simply making something ‘look nice’, but that it has to have a strong concept as its underlying foundation. I spent a lot of time experimenting with different typography and printing techniques such as the letterpress and screen-printing. This helped me to understand the history of graphic design and the expressive, powerful nature of presenting information through graphics.

Once I was approaching the end of my degree, I knew it was important to get some experience before applying for full time jobs. This in itself can be very difficult. Design agencies receive a huge number of applicants for internships. Employers know that having an intern within the company can be very time consuming, as initially, you may require a lot of their time when it comes to making sure that they are doing things correctly. This can be a big strain for small companies as often their time is very limited. I recommend being selective about who you approach. Make a list of the companies that you really like and who you think would suit your design style. When you come to apply, make yourself stand out from everyone else; include clever ways of showing your portfolio and develop self branded business cards, letterheads and a CV, which are presented in such a way that separates you from the norm. This will help to make any potential employer remember you when they have a vacancy.

If you are accepted for work experience then make yourself indispensable. This will make it very hard for the company to get rid of you when your placement comes to an end. Hit the ground running and try to sort things out for yourself so that you don’t become a burden. Make lots of tea, everyone loves a person who is happy to make the tea.

Employing a graduate can also be a big risk for employers. They usually have little or no industry experience and it can sometimes take a long time for graduates to make the transition from student to professional. Personally I believe that taking a year out of my degree between level 2 & 3 would have been a big benefit. Not only would this have increased my overall knowledge of the industry, it would have also made me a far more attractive proposition for potential employers.

However, I was lucky enough to be offered a job at do1 before I had actually completed my degree. As brilliant as this was, I must admit it did make the final stage of my degree challenging. You are left with the thought “do I really need to do this, after all I do already have a job”. Luckily I managed to ignore this thought and continue to complete my degree and achieve the result which I had been chasing for the last 3 years.

When I started at do1, the hardest thing for me was applying my design skills in a way that would meet client briefs. Creating design which adheres to corporate guidelines is a challenge, and sometimes a bitter pill to swallow. However, the beauty of do1 is that there is quite a lot of freedom to produce creative designs, where appropriate. An example of this is the initial concept that Ben produced for R J Winnicott. Although sometimes it can be difficult to judge how open minded the client will be to these experimental and creative designs.

For me, the best part of this industry is that no two days are the same. Every day I have a new task to complete. Having not worked at any other design firms i do not know what the normal working environment is. However, I can tell that here at do1 the atmosphere is brilliant. Working alongside talented co-workers really pushes you to continually improve in everything you do. Overall, I am pleased with the path I followed and would thoroughly recommend it to anyone else considering a future in design.

If you’re a skilled designer or developer, with or without a degree, why not apply to us on our jobs page.

It’s really funny, up until about a couple of months ago I always thought our website was fine! People would comment on the good content and nice design on there, even though we made no real effort to keep it updated with our latest work or even just on general company matters (such as moving office!).

It wasn’t until my mate Dave who runs his own boat valeting business said to me “Ed, sort out your website, it’s not ’sale-sy’ enough and it’s not search engine optimised! How can you claim to be the experts in websites when the ones you build for your clients are way better than your own?”

He had a point. When pitching, I’d find myself subconsciously steering away from directing people to our website as it was out of date, the design and content of the Home page was weak, and there was no dedicated Portfolio page. I would instead rely on my people-facing skills and demonstrating recently completed websites when sat with a potential client.

Producing content for your own website can actually be harder than you think, and I’ve found a lot of times when working with a client that needs a new website, the biggest stumbling block is actually deciding what to write in the first place, and then of course actually writing it! It takes a lot of time, thought and effort if you want to get it right, and finding myself in the same situation that my clients are normally in was certainly a case of the boot being on the other foot!

Rather than simply making the Home page pretty and doing an SEO job on the existing content, I decided to rewrite the vast majority of the content on our do1 website. Having taken on many more new clients this year than ever before, including many transatlantic contract wins, I’d found I’d naturally found a sales patter that I was comfortable with after dealing with so many people in a relatively short space of time. Certain key things I would say would come out that I could tell were striking a chord with customers, such as how we get things done, how well organised we are, the fact we offer a very proactive service. So each page in this site started life as a list of key words and phrases which I wanted to cover, and then from there I formed the full prose around those keywords.

Probably the most radical thing on the new do1 website as a result of this is how we pitch our web hosting. When writing about our web hosting offering on the web and in print, I’ve been happy to just state “web hosting” which simply puts us in the same category as everyone else. But in reality, when talking with clients I would explain how we’re the exclusive reseller of Fubra, and then harp on about their amazing websites such as PetrolPrices.com and OurProperty.co.uk, and the advanced infrastructure they’ve built that supports them, and how they can share this unique hosting platform with Fubra through us.

Obviously, when it comes to your own website, everyone’s got their own way of getting across the message you want your company to say. I think our new do1 website is a really good online interpretation of who we are, how we get things done, and what it’s like to work with us, and it’ll be interesting to see what kind of feedback we get.

do1 recently completed the website of Rowlands Castle-based construction firm, R J Winnicott. The company, founded in 1904, is a family run business that continues to be a main player in the Portsmouth area. In light of this, they thought it was time to update their online presence.

R J Winnicott instructed do1 to produce a unique, creative design for their website. Excited by the proposition of a blank canvas, we began to let the creative juices flow. Taking inspiration from contemporary visual styles, Ben, one of our designers, created a tactile and image-led design.

Unfortunately, this was a bit too left-of-the-field for R J Winnicott. One of the main pitfalls of translating brief to concept is understanding what the customer/end-users want and need. The client was looking for something that looked more clean and corporate, but still being creative and with an element of uniqueness. Most of the time an initial conversation and small brief is enough to pinpoint exactly what the client is after, and it’s not often that we miss the mark on the initial concept design. However, on this occasion we found that our understanding was indeed a little off the mark!

With renewed knowledge in hand we created a second concept that hit the nail on the head (no pun intended). Knowing the background of the company, their customers and their likes and dislikes completely streamlined the production process. R J Winnicott’s desire for something creative and different gave our designers and developers a chance to test their skills and create something unique. This came in the form of a horizontally scrolling portfolio bar on the homepage, which took real dedication and time to perfect. Utilising Javascript, HTML, CSS and PHP it was important to get it looking identical across all major browsers. As standard, we ensure compatibility with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 2 and 3, and Apple Safari. However, this wasn’t the only task, as it was vitally important (as with all our work) that the website validated to xHTML 1.0 strict standards - http://www.w3.org

The important thing was to learn from our mistakes. How could we help avoid a similar situation of delivering a concept design that’s rejected by our client? We’d seen the benefits of 100% clarity and wanted to carry this through to all of our projects. We’ve since produced a client questionnaire which we now get all new clients to complete in order to get a full overview of the project. It’s vital to keep your clients happy, after all, this project was a result of a referral through our continued working relationship with Jeffries Estate Agents in Portsmouth.

Check out the new R J Winnicott website and let us know what you think:
http://www.winnicott.co.uk/