It’s been a busy few weeks at 383 and we’re pleased to announce a number of new faces who’ve joined the team. We’ve added to both the production, and client services, sides of the studio after a number of soon to be announced account wins fell in to place. There’s also a new 383 site in the pipeline over the next couple of months – stick with us during the transition, it’ll be worth the wait!

Laurie and Nick

Two new faces in client services are Laurie and Nick. Laurie has joined as our new account manager and will be working with our key retail accounts. Laurie’s previous experience includes time spent in Paris working for a worldwide magazine publisher, so she’s a great fit for fashion! Nick has come on board as our new project manager and will be handling a number of one off projects which come through the studio.

Morgan and Sam

Morgan and Sam have joined our creative team to both increase our capacity on pitch work and service existing clients. Between them the pair add a host of extra talent in to the studio, ranging from iPhone app design to motion graphics and video work.

Tom, Leon and Steve

Last, but certainly not least, are our three new developers Tom, Leon and Steve. With a growing number of large scale projects about to hit the studio the addition of three new developers in preparation has been a big help.

We also wanted to thank everyone who applied for the various positions in the past few months. We had a lot of great CVs in and were delighted there was so much interest. We expect to have a few more vacancies later in the year and so will publish these on the site as soon as details are confirmed.

For now though, that’s your lot!

Working as part of our existing development team, you must have a proven background in back end development working on both open source platforms such as Wordpress, and building applications from scratch. You will have an aptitude for translating designs into code and producing XHTML/CSS templates from PSDs. You will also be responsible for testing, debugging and troubleshooting digital work on various browsers & platforms.

Most of our websites are built upon the Wordpress CMS, using a combination of bespoke and third-party plugins to achieve the extended functionality required by our clients. As such, a good working knowledge of WordPress is imperative, with further examples of work a bonus.

Required experience:

• Expert knowledge of LAMP. Expert knowledge of (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript (particularly the jQuery library).
• Prior experience of developing for WordPress (themes and plugins)
• Experience with other server-side languages and web frameworks.
• A working knowledge of Photoshop & Flash Actionscript is a bonus.

• Development of natural search strategies for new and existing client base
• Technical analysis of websites for SEO including dynamic sites
• Technical implementation of SEO
• In –depth analysis of website data
• Creation and management of effective global link building campaigns
• Monitoring and ongoing management of global SEO campaigns
• To maintain ongoing knowledge of latest developments in global SEO
• SEO Account management
• Management of PPC campaigns
• Management and development of conversion strategies
• Skills & Achievements

Candidate requirements:

• At least 2 years experience in SEO technical implementation gained either at agency level or as part of an in-house team.
• Keen interest in ongoing professional development related to multilingual SEO.
• Proven track record demonstrating exceptional results.
• Current knowledge of Html, CSS, PHP, XML, Javascript, CMS and other web technologies which impact on search
• Significant experience in development of link-building.

[Must be from a agency background]

Here’s a little infographic we’ve produced for Mudlark/4iP as part of their Such Tweet Sorrow project. For those who don’t know, Such Tweet Sorrow was a real time version of Romeo and Juliet played out entirely over Twitter. The project ran for 5 weeks and 383 have been doing a bit of behind the scenes monitoring to help establish the reach and impact of the performance. This infographic presents some of the main analytics in a digestible way. We captured over 3k tweets and ran them through some in-house filters we’ve been building to help enrich the basic twitter stream. It’s best viewed at full size, so give it a click to take a proper look.

A break in radio silence on the blog to tell everyone why we’ve been so busy. We’ve just launched a lovely new site we’re particularly proud of for Bullring’s Art Project ‘Life Feels Better‘. The premise of Life Feels Better is simple – to encourage video, photo and audio submissions from members of the public on the theme of ‘optimism’.

The site is a gallery space for all the submissions people send through, as well as a place to find out about all the events and activities happening at Bullring this year. Since it launched last month there have been some lovely submissions which you can browse here.

To promote the project we also shot a summery video with Ed Moore which featured a few of the artists already involved. The idea we came up with for the promo was to shoot time lapse shots of the centre to to provide a backdrop to the featured work. Fortunately we picked a nice sunny day as you can see here:

From now on this is the ONLY way that people should communicate in design studios.

This is all kinds of awesome. Brilliant stuff.

We’re delighted to announce that 383 has been appointed as the new retained digital agency for Bullring.  It’s a partnership we’re really excited about and we’ll be sure to keep the blog updated as projects progress.

So far we’ve relaunched Browse: Bullring, a customer loyalty site for the centre and have more work currently in the studio. Having worked with Bullring on some more ambient below-the-line projects earlier this year we were awarded all further digital work earlier this month on an ongoing basis.  Bullring represents a really flagship addition to our growing retail portfolio and we’re excited about taking the lead on a number of digital projects planned for 2010/11.

You can read the formal release here and check out the new Browse: Bullring site in our portfolio.

Interactive Infographics.

This panel gave examples from some leading agencies producing infographics. Infographics involve the presentation of complex data in smart and beautiful ways.

The main concept I took from the panel was that effective visualisation is not about trying to tell a story around the data. It’s about allowing the data to tell it’s story.

Casey Capalowe of GOOD did a great talk running us through some of the fantastic data visualisations on the site. There’s a nice example above of some infographics produced for the Haiti relief effort, but the site is well worth a visit for full enjoyment.

Ben Fry used a great example to illustrate how effectively mapped data can really tell a story. The graphic above illustrated how water consumption trends were shaped during the Canadian olympic hockey final. Not the most beautiful, but certainly one of the most interesting examples of data telling it’s own story. There’s more here.

Ben also showed us this great example of how infographics can clearly illustrate a complex set of data when displayed correctly. The example above shows the entire growth of Darwin’s Origin of the Species from 150,000 words to 190,000. Using clear colour coding and some clever rendering, you can see establish in a few seconds where the revisions came in and in what order.

Next up was Shan Carter, part of the New York Times infographics department. They’ve done some fantastic work, but in particular I enjoyed the geo-mapping they’d done on the archived Twitter conversations during the recent superbowl. This tells a clear story of the game by displaying trends and themes and applying a weighting to volume of conversation. Again, this works best in it’s interactive guise, so head over to the site and click play.

Last on the panel was Eric Rodenbeck from Stamen who had about fifty things I’d like to put in to this blog! One really interesting example was some of the experiments they’d been doing mapping real time twitter trends using imagery to denote popularity. This gives an excellent insight in to chatter and seems a much more engaging way of displaying the data than some of the other tag cloud/wordle based systems I’ve seen on other sites. As well as the example above I highly recommend check out their site and blog for more.