About us.

Over the last 10 years, Something Interesting has built websites and apps for some of the biggest names in the UK. With a keen eye for userbility and interface design, we are progressively building our client base and reputation.

We are now looking for a talented and passionate designer to come on board and help grow on the great foundations we have built.

What we do.

We build websites, web apps and iOS / Mac apps both for our clients and also ourselves. Some of our clients include The Co-operative Financial Services and Planefinder.net amongst others. Our own apps include TrackRecord & DropIn.

We operate from a small, friendly office in Southsea, Portsmouth.

All the normal software is used and we are a completely Mac based office.

About you.

We need a designer with passion and proven ability, someone who can really push their beliefs and passions. And who will ensure that everything we put out, from full web apps to the smallest icons, is of the best possible quality.

You will also be able to work as the lead designer in a team of developers, you will need to be flexible but strong.

Key skills.

• Strong understanding of usability and UI/UX principles for web & mobile apps.
• Comfortable leading the design side of a project from brief to completion.
• Passion for great design and ability to push for excellent design standards in everything you produce.
• Some basic understanding of HTML, CSS etc would be useful.
• Experienced of working with developers to get the best results.

What we can offer you.

• A friendly, lively place to work where communication between the team is key.
• Involvement in new and interesting projects, some in-house, some client-based.
• Relaxed dress code.
• Occasional hack days and time allocated to your own projects or ideas.
• A competitive salary with bonuses

To apply for this role please send your CV and some examples of your previous work to us.

Photography students from Portsmouth University will be holding an exhibition of their work at the Round Tower in Old Portsmouth on 7th and 8th of December. Something Interesting is happy to be helping sponsor the event.

2nd year Photography students at the University of Portsmouth have been exploring the concept of ‘Territory’ and a group of us will be exhibiting our work at the historic Round Tower in Old Portsmouth.

As part of a 3 year Honours Degree course, this group of 10 students, calling themselves “10 Degrees South”, has come together from around Europe to show their wide-ranging interpretations of this exciting concept – from local landscapes to military campaigns, from nature reserves to wine bars to football supporters.

You can find out more on their website.

Portsmouth University Photography Exhibition

Since 2001 we have been designing and building websites for a wide range of clients including The Co-operative Financial Services, Planefinder.net and Coverbox. Working from a close-knit lively studio in Southsea (near Portsmouth), we take a highly collaborative approach to our work, with everyone getting involved throughout the whole research, design and build process.

Recently we have started taking on new, exciting projects and we now need a talented PHP developer to come along and get involved with our current and future clients.

What we need from you

• Previous commercial experience in website development.
• A pragmatic candidate capable of seeing a project from specification through to deployment. Someone who values code standards and takes pride in every aspect of development.
• You will be expected to have extensive knowledge of  PHP, MySQL and XML webservices. As well as being comfortable in the following front-end technologies:  XHTML, CSS, JS.
• We like personalities! You will be dealing with our clients from day one so we need someone who can eloquently explain their reasons for doing things.
• We use a lot of different technologies, all in a Mac based office. You will need to be able to throw your hand at different languages over time.

What we can offer you

• A friendly, lively place to work where communication between the team is key.
• Involvement in new and interesting projects, some in-house, some client-based.
• Relaxed dress code.
• Occasional hack days and time allocated to your own projects or ideas.

Application

Please send you CV through to us (previous work examples preferred) and tell us why you think you’d be perfect for the role.

We’ve had a busy six months, working on some very large and complex sites. Although this has been good, the team have all been working on different projects individually with little overlap.

The time had come for us to do something different and get our teeth in to a project we can all work on. So, today we started on our first ever hack day.

What is a hack day

In essence, a Hack Day is where a team of developers get together and all work on a project for one or two days. Ideally at the end you should have a working product.

Each of the developers within Something Interesting has their own section of the project to work on with everything (hopefully) coming together at the end of the day.

What are we working on?

Yesterday we did the setup work, buying a domain name, setting up hosting and SVN etc.

We also came up with the concept and discussed how it would work and any potential pitfalls. The concept is quite complex with a lot of unknowns which we will need to get past.

Right now we are working on the database set up, writing code to do the caching of responses and configuring the connection to the Last.fm API.

Update – 11:30

Logo Concept Agreed

After a few different variants we’ve come up with a concept for the logo which we are going to use.

This will be refined later in the day.

Update – 15:51

Just over an hour to go and its starting to look like this is going to be a bigger challenge that we first thought. So far we have:

Written scripts to create images on the fly.
Hooked in to the Last.fm API and retrieved and cached data successfully.
Built the database.
Created design for simple, functional homepage (below).
Coded up front end functionality.
Changed our minds on the logo concept we agreed on 3 hours ago.

Front end dev

Update – 17:30

Close, so very close, but not good enough to release just yet. We’ve got all the functionality working and most of the hard work done. Just couldn’t quite get it to a polished enough state to be released.

We have learnt some good lessons though, especially that swift and agile development is easy if everyone involved knows what they are doing and has an equal distribution of work. Ultimately on a project like this, you can only go as fast as the slowest wheel. And some of the parts of this project just took too much time to complete by one person and couldn’t be easily shared to another person.

If you run a web agency and haven’t tried this before I would recommend it. It teaches you a lot and gives you a great insight in to how the team work. It also gives your team something interesting to work on… which, lets face it, everyone needs sometimes.

We will send an update when we launch it on Twitter . Would love to know your thoughts and feedback.

Steve

We have just put up the latest two pieces of artwork for the office – hope you like it.

Thank you JP.

We’ve been busy prettifying our meeting area. Much better for our clients when they stop by for a cuppa and a chat.

Our pretty new meeting area

New additions include:

• Our supersized logo, printed and framed again by our friends at Southsea Gallery
• Wall graphics to frame the whole piece
• Vibrant new meeting chairs, no corporate reception chairs for us!

We hope you agree that it looks like a fun and inviting area for our clients both new and old.

At Something Interesting we love designing and building cool websites and apps.

Working from a close-knit lively studio in Southsea, Hampshire, we all get together and work on all projects together. Since launching our new app and taking on some lovely new accounts, we are now looking for a junior developer to join the team and get immersed in what we do.

What we need from you

• You may not have had ‘commercial experience’ that is not a problem. What we are looking for is a thirst and desire to build stuff you love.
• You need to be flexible, approachable, interesting, full of ideas but understand that a lot of time you will be dealing with a team.
• We like personalities! You will be dealing with our clients from day one so we need someone who can eloquently explain their reasons for doing things.
• We use a lot of different technologies, all in a Mac based office. You will need to be able to throw your hand at different languages over time.
• We need experience in the usual XHTML, CSS, LAMP (XML would be nice). We are a Mac based office.

What we can offer you

• A friendly, lively place to work where communication between the team is key.
• Involvement in new and interesting project, some in-house, some client based.
• Exposure to new a different technologies to keep you entertained.
• Relaxed dress code.

Interviews start 13th August

This is a great opportunity for someone who has little or no commercial experience but wants to get in to web and app development as a career. To get started please send your CV to jobs@somethinginteresting.co.uk

We’ve been using Basecamp to manage our projects for the last few years. We love Basecamp and we especially love the way we track the time for everything we do with it.

However, we have always found the applications that allow you to time against your projects don’t really do everything we needed them to do – which is why we have been developing our own app.

TrackRecord

1. Track times for multiple projects
2. Allow you to see all your project in one easy to use view
3. Move timers between projects or To-Dos
4. Track or dismiss idle time

Best of all though, you will also be able to edit and repost time you’ve tracked and posted directly to Basecamp from within TrackRecord itself. No more posting the wrong thing and going in to Basecamp to find it and change the time.

We are still going through final stages of internal testing and will be launching the app to a controlled test group soon. If you would like to be one of our testers, please drop us an email at support@trackrecordapp.com.

Keep up with what we’re up to at http://twitter.com/trackrecordapp or at http://trackrecordapp.com

More to follow soon….

Discussing our latest application development

Here at Something Interesting we like getting together to discuss ideas. We all have different opinions on how the websites and applications we develop should work, and what would make them exceptional.

Today was no different. We needed to discuss some of the finer points on the UI design for the new application we’re building. So we all got round the table and started working on these ideas.

Why do we bother?

Recently we have seen a resurgence of new enquiries from potential customers with some of the key warning signs that make any quality web agency start to panic….

We need the website up and running within the next 3 weeks

and, our all-time favourite…

What we want is basically a copy ‘n’ paste job from one of the other sites you’ve built, and we have a budget of £2,000

For these customers, explaining that we need time allocated to just discussing ideas and the best way to develop the site seems completely alien, but it’s not for these customers that we do this.

We bother because it shows

Without time spent just discussing how the site or application is going to work, how the audience is likely to use it, what makes for a usable interface design etc, all we will ever produce for our clients is a mediocre result. No one ever set the world on fire with mediocrity.

At Something Interesting we are passionate about what we do and fundamentally believe in what we produce. That’s why we will always allow time for collaboration…

I’ve always enjoyed reading (and listening) to what Seth Godin has to say. Most of what he says makes perfect sense and I tend to agree with it (mostly). But I have never been moved enough to re-post his comments until now.

In his last post “Hardly worth the effort”, Seth talks about the importance of the final 10% of effort – no matter what you are doing. The last 10% takes a disproportionate amount of time to achieve, but it is most definitely worth it.

And that is exactly what we do here. That extra 10% in the research stage, in the wire-frame, design, UX and testing stages all adds up. It means the difference between a good user experience and a fantastic user experience – a good website and a fantastic website.

So many companies try to compete by being the cheapest or the quickest which is fine, but it is only with companies that try for that last 10% that products will evolve. So please, whatever you do, keep trying for that last 10%.

Seth’s article can be found here – well worth a read.

And you can follow him here > http://twitter.com/ThisIsSethsBlog