Thursday, July 29th, 2010
Getting your own blog is as easy as pie these days. There are so many platforms to choose from: Blogger, Posterous, WordPress, Tumblr to name but a few. But once you’ve set it up, what can you do to improve website traffic and earn your rights as a respected blogger? My introductory guide will show you a few tips and tricks to get you started…
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
Last week saw the start of a two part series of posts entitled “An Introduction to Digital Marketing” whereby we began talking through some of the slides that we presented at the University of Huddersfield Barnsley Campus a few weeks ago. Part 1: Social Networking discussed various social media platforms and what they can be useful for, as well as going into detail on how to get your work seen by as many people as possible.
As we mentioned last week, this series is designed to educate newcomers to Web about the easiest ways to market themselves online, and probably won’t tell all you hardcore Internet geeks anything you don’t already know…
This week we will be talking about the benefits of blogging, and how sometimes, if done correctly, it can be even more effective than using the likes of Facebook and Twitter to draw attention to your creative output.
Tuesday, April 20th, 2010
A few weeks ago we were asked to visit the University of Huddersfield Barnsley Campus to give a talk on digital marketing. The group that we presented to were a mix of creatives from a range of backgrounds, but none of whom had much experience in trying to sell themselves online. There were jewellers, potters, fine artists, photographers, graphic designers; basically everyone except web designers / developers.
We had a three hour slot that was split into two halves: ‘Social Media’ and ‘Online Portfolios’ - but we covered far too much to fit into one blog post so we have decided to split it between two articles over the next couple of weeks… Seeing as though we recently wrote a post on Online Portfolios we aren’t going to bother with that, and instead split Social Media in half: ‘Social Networking’ and ‘Blogging’. In these articles we will be showing a selection of the slides that we used for the presentation, along with some expanded slide notes to elaborate on each point.
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
All creatives, be it web designers, illustrators, photographers, fashion designers, artists, and all the rest, need to be able to get the things that they create out into the big bad world, or Internet as the case may be. For some of us (namely web designers / developers) it’s a little easier than others, because it’s our job. But no matter who you are or what your profession, we could all do with a little help to make life a bit easier.
In this post I’m going to talk about 4 of the best new and up-and-coming websites designed to help us creatives get our content out there. Some of them are so new in fact, that they are still in BETA testing, but they are definitely ones to watch out for…
Flavors.me has been publicly available for one or two months now, and it’s a great way to collate all (or most) of your social networking information. It’s fantastic for someone who is active all over the web, but doesn’t have, or is struggling to get a solid online portfolio together.
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Christmas is over and its a New Year! What better way to start 2010 than an inspirational vist to ‘Decode’, the brand new exhibition at the Victoria Albert Museum.
The exhibition is a collaboration between the V&A and onedotzero, a contemporary arts organisation operating internationally with a remit to promote innovation across all forms of moving image and interactive a. It explores digital technology though artwork and installation pieces. These are separated into three current digital design themes; Code, Interactivity, and Network.
Code shows how computer code, whether bespoke and tailored, or hacked and shared, has become a new design tool; Interactivity presents works that respond to our physical presence; Network charts or reworks the traces we leave behind.
We visited Decode on a trip to London and on first impressions we were very impressed. The exhibition was a little smaller than expected, however, all in all there are some excellent pieces. Physical computing is a passion of ours and last year we produced the Twitter installation ‘Status 2.0′. We left the exhibition feeling very inspired and looking forward to hopefully developing more interactive installations this year.
Below are a selection of our favourite pieces from Decode:
Dandelion (2009)
Interactive art installation which features a hairdryer, adaptive and meditative sound collages and a 3D rendered dandelion.
