I genuinely love what I do and as anyone who knows me can tell you, I can talk about web strategy and design for hours. I love sharing ideas about design, which is why I was so honored when Dr Joyce Yee of Northumbria University asked me to be a visiting lecturer on the first year of Interactive Media Design BA (Hons) this semester. The module  I’ll be sharing with Professor Ann Light is Emotional & Immersive Media, which I think is a particularly interesting subject and touches on everything from storytelling to complex interactions, usability to affordance.

I’m sure I’ll learn a lot from the experience and I’m hoping to inspire and be inspired by a new generation of designers with fresh ideas. In order to get them thinking, in my first session we discussed a few examples of clever emotional and immersive campaigns:

Parisian Love

Google’s simple and elegant story through search.

When nobody is watching

I’m not even sure if this Amnesty campaign is even real, but I think the concept is really powerful. The camera recognises people’s faces, from within the bus shelter. When people are looking at the poster, the couple look happy. It’s only when they look away that the images changes to something more chilling.

Choose a different ending

A powerful series of Youtube videos that form an interactive journey about knife crime. You choose the path and decide how it ends.

Computer Tan

A brilliant hoax for charity Skcin, that spread awareness about skin cancer.

http://computertan.com/

Decode JZ

Bing piggybacked JZ’s book launch with a huge integrated campaign, that publicised both the book and Bing’s features.

Take this Lollipop

Nothing highlights facebook privacy issues more than this impressive personalised film.
http://www.takethislollipop.com/
Please Tweet us any other examples you think the students would find interesting.

I’ve been working on an internal project that uses both wordpress and bbpress (A forum plugin for wordpress). One of the major issues I came across with bbpress was privacy. I needed a way to only allow specific users, or specific groups of users access to specific forums.

I had assumed that this would be standard in any install of forum software, however it appears that with bbpress the only control I had was to make a forum private, closed or public. A private forum only allowed access to administrators. So in order to invite or give access to a private forum you had to give that person admin rights – not ideal obviously.

So, after a bit of research I found WP Sentry by Pete Holiday. It’s a very good plugin for controlling access to posts and pages, it allows you to create user groups, and give access to specific groups as well as individual users. Which was ideal.

I ended up with so much customisation outside of WP Sentry, that tracking hooks and filters back and forward between files became a little complicated and I decided it was worthwhile turning it into it’s own stand alone plugin.

I’ve edited the plugin so that it not only works for bbpress forums, but for any custom post types.

Each custom post type gets its own admin section in which you can assign users or groups and manage access across your site.

It is still in an alpha state, having only been used and tested by me. It has a long to do list on it, for example;

• Include Javascript differently so that it doesn’t duplicate if WP Sentry is also active
• Admin sections for creation of default group access for each custom post type
• Get the widgets working across all custom post types

and many more.

I’ll update this post with a roadmap and keep the link updated to the latest version of the plugin

As said, there is still a huge amount of Pete’s code in the plugin, so much so that I have not even taken his paypal link out (So if you use this plugin feel free to donate to him), I’ve essentially overwritten a few of his functions and renamed things to keep the namespace unique.

If you do use the plugin please feel free to post comments and suggestions here and I will try to support and expand on it as often as possible.

Download the Custom Post Type Privacy Plugin

So what makes a good viral?

• Entertainment
• Interactivity
• Relevancy to the product
• Memorability
• Most importantly – I want to share it with people I know

The Tipp-ex viral meets all these and makes use of video. Of course it uses some really clever use of technology, but I don’t want to spoil it for you.

Have a look yourself on the Tipp-ex viral YouTube profile.

We’ve kept the same phone number, and we haven’t moved far. Once again we find ourselves in the attic of the building, which gives us some great views of Blackfriars, the City Wall and St James’ Park.

It’s been a big year for us – lots of great new clients, interesting projects and an expanding team, and it’s great to finally have the extra space we’ve been urgently needing for so long!

Pop in for a visit

Actor and TV travel presenter Charley Boorman was so pleased with the branding, viral Twitter campaign and tour website that we had created for him previously that he asked us to design and build his official website too.

The site really shows off his personality – it’s packed full of videos and images from his travels, including snippets from the BBC TV shows “By Any Means”, “Long Way Down” and “Long Way Round”, and there’s also plenty of opportunities for fans to keep up with Charley via an integrated Twitter functionality.

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so watch this space

Communications company JK Consultancy needed a dynamic website that could keep up with their rapidly expanding business. We created them a fresh new brand and a fully content-managed website.

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Web Designer magazine, as you may already know, is one of the top web industry mags in the UK and we’re pleased as anything to see Jo get a regular slot on its panel of industry experts.

Every month Jo will be writing 6-page tutorials and sharing her tips and tricks. Jo’s tutorial for issue 170 is a ‘how to’ on creating wireframes and using them to complete a finished design, and she’s hinted that future tutorials may cover HTML5 and CSS3, so watch this space…

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