I came across a really interesting article the other day which spoke about the Google's failure (so far) to setup some kind of social platform. Obviously it's not like they have not tried. Systems such as buzz and wave were all dips into the arena, but as the article discusses it is the fact that they are trying to do something that has been done before.
What it has brought for me to think about is two things:
- Does a scatter gun approach to development work?
- Will Google be 2nd in a few years to facebook?
ARTICLE
http://memeburn.com/2011/05/why-cant-google-win-at-social/
I actually watched Eurovision. I know the shame. But for me the thing that I will remember is the Ukrainian song. Not because of the song but because of the sand artist.
Prototyping made simple from thinkpublic on Vimeo.
As some of you may know myself and allie and the rest of thinkARK are going to be holding a games festival which will take place at the start of October and will take place during the 2011 Cardiff Design Festival. The festival will cover a conference and also some playing of games both on and offline (and everything in between). In the lead up to the festival we will be testing games to see how things work etc. Two weekends ago we did our first games testing day. We didn't have very long to put the game together but we were pretty sure how it was going to play and how people would react. One word... WRONG!!!
Things that had seemed insignificant became big issues, and things that had not really been planned were a great success. So to this point and think about our own practice and brand strategy. There is a huge amount of information to be learnt to trying things out first. We would call it prototyping and there is a great video above from Designers Front and thinkpublic who describe the strengths of prototyping. The thing therefore that we do is to apply a design process to the project that standardises how a project is produced yet allows for the the unique brand to steer the outcome.
We have a 10 week GO placement for a front-end website developer to work on the development of a Drupal theme for a large bilingual information resource. The developer will be required to hand-code both CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and XHTML to W3C standards, whilst being efficient and competent to replicate designs already visualised in Photoshop. Knowledge of Photoshop and PHP would be useful but not essential as some training will be provided to aid understanding of the Drupal CMS system. The outcome from the placement will be a fully functioning bilingual information resource that complies to the Disability Discrimination Act and W3C standards. With the candidates role being to support our development team with the project they will gain knowledge of the Drupal open source CMS system whilst working with us.
Essential Requirements :
Studying towards or a Degree in Interactive Design, Digital Design, Graphic Design, HTML, XHTML, CSS
Desired Requirements :
Knowledge of Photoshop and PHP would be useful but not essential. lt is also desirable to have a knowledge of Javascript (Jquery) and of W3C standards.
If you think you fit this description please apply through the Go Wales website here:
http://www.gowales.co.uk/en/Graduate/placements/Details/210420
