Professional Development

Posted on by Luke Wakeford
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The professional development project, is basically to make us think about our career progression and to help us think about what we have learnt at university and how we will apply this to our jobs in the future. We were asked to answer a number of questions relating to our skill set and how we worked before, during and after our degrees.

Here are my answers to the questions.

1. The work that I carried out before my degree consisted of Website design, Short film production and Computer repairs, I also sat a year on a foundation art course which helped me progress to university, I feel that these things all pushed me to think about my professional development, however having sat the art foundation my I was not entirely sure about where I wanted to progress to.

2. The work that I have carried out during my degree has influenced heavily the way in which I wish to develop my career. I attempted to focus all of my projects around my area of interest and have been working on projects that can stand on their own as functional applications and websites, I think this sort of work is really useful for developing a strong portfolio, and they also have the potential to generate revenue on their own.

3. The context in which I work is in very much a application/web developer role, I love figuring out how things work and then reproducing the functionality in my own way. During this process I also like to make my work look and function as smoothly as possible. I feel that to progress in a career I will need to find a job where I can still be making creative decisions but continue to develop my programming and coding knowledge without becoming a desk rabbit.

4. During my degree I have taken every opportunity to learn more about web/app development, until I started my degree I did not know any IOS development, myself and a course mate decided that we wanted to learn so got together with Xcode and the SDK and wrecked our brains and googled tutorials to get a hello world up and running. Later in the year we attended a iPhone development evening class which gave us the basics of delegates and views. In the next few months we both had applications on the app store and were excited about the prospects this brought us in terms of career development.

5. This year I have also been working with people outside of the university on IOS applications, I have found it easy to work as part of a group, taking design and audio input from other group members to collaborate in to an application design, I have been able to write an effective time plan and flow diagram for the development of the application, keep to the plan and launch the application along with social media on time. I intent to strengthen the relationships that I have developed with these small business ventures to further my career and produce richer applications.

6. I currently have great experience with clients, discussing ideas, interpreting via email what people want changed in terms of updates and website amendments. I have experience with working in a professional company developing web applications within time constraints and version control systems. I have a number of programming languages under my belt and a number more in the works that I have great interest in, I can use Adobe suit proficiently and have knowledge of hosting, domains, networks, operating systems and technology. I have also worked freelance and on my own on a number of projects so I can work effectively by myself to complete tasks and projects on time.

7. I think that there are a number of programming languages that employers and companies are now progressing in to, to progress further in my chosen field I think I need to study further in to modern programming languages and their usage within the industry. I would also like to learn a bit more about business, I have studied some aspects of advertising and product sales strategies, but the business aspect in terms of stats, figures and money is a bit vague.

8. I already have an online portfolio of work that holds a lot of media, video, pictures, graphics, website and application that I have worked on. My intention is to re-design this portfolio to match my new area of professional development, with a focus on web and app development. I think it is important to show that you also have interest in other areas of digital media, but to make a focus of the applications that I have built and also show some of the thinking/working behind the products encourages employers that I know what I am doing.

9. The portfolio is a really great way of being able to show someone what kind of work I love and also some great examples of the products that I have built, it’s a key place that people can see easily and make a decision about you style of work. Having an online portfolio is even more important as it as accessible world wide and it can even be included as part of a blog where you can gain user interest from around the world. Cold contact is rare but a big bonus if someone lands on your website, loves you style and pays you to build them an app.

We were also asked to provide our most recent CV, I think after my degree, my CV is going to need some work to update it with what I have been working on this year. to view my current CV click here.

Brand Name Development

Posted on by Luke Wakeford
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After my initial brainstorm I cam up with four simple ideas that relate to my idea in one way or another, I still think these ideas need some work however I wanted to put them in a digital format with some images from google as ideas to spur more.

The capitalised and enlarged letters “I” and “O” in the first two relate to input output “IO” is universally recognised by programmers and developers. The second two make use of “runtime” which is what a program is referred to when it is running. and the final one uses a mixture of runtime and “sandbox” Sandbox is a point of testing for programmers, if an application is in sandbox it means it is not live however it may function as if it were.

I am going to think more on these brand names and develop some more logo brainstorms like the above to hone my idea down before then going to a poll to whittle down to a decision, I will also be thinking about colour schemes, menu graphics and the user interface. I have a basic list of things that I need to cover for the branding here

Branding Begins

Posted on by Luke Wakeford
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Now I have some fundamental research down I can start to look back and pick out the parts of mobile applications, social sharing, branding, graphics and business that I want to integrate in to my new app. This process will of course start with me deciding on a brand name and identity.

Brand Name and Identity

  • Name
  • URL
  • Logo
  • Graphics
  • Theme
  • Fonts
  • Website
  • Social Design

All these things will work towards the creation of my products branding guidelines, I might be worth also putting together an actual brand/media guide for my product so that I can refer back to it in the future. This will be a worthwhile exercise to get me used to working in the constraints of a brand a new product or a company.

The name of the product/brand is very important, it needs to be easy to read/say/recall something catchy that people will be able to tell their friends and nothing to long. same goes for the URL, if you can get a URL with exactly the same name then thats great, names are being snapped up all over the place so sometimes you can struggle to match you url with you product name, settling for a domain with ‘online’ or ‘web’ on the end is not ideal.

I want to come up with a good name for the application that is fun and not to serious, the application will hopefully encourage people who wouldn’t normally code to use it. using a humorous or clever name along with a logo that matches might help, I would be using humour at a risk but it may just work really well with some of my name ideas. here is a snap of my brand name ideas.

To narrow down the best name and brand idea to use I am going to mock up some really simple text logos and some graphics ideas surrounding them then submit a poll to get some external feedback on the ideas surrounding the idea, I think I will also provide a simplified description of what the app will do to aid users in deciding which name will suit best.

App Flow

Posted on by Luke Wakeford
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I realised that before I can start branding my product I need to layout what the app does 100% nail down what I want the app to do and then I can build my brand and product around the concept. Creating a brand name, logo and design without the product in mind could potentially be dangerous.

The concept for the app has already been laid out here but i feel that by producing a flow diagram it will help everyone understand the concept a lot better. This first flow diagram looks at the interface basics in terms of views and buttons, these things will all be available in the IOS app, I will produce graphics for each of these main views so that I can streamline my development process by literally dragging the correct graphics in to the correct areas.

The next flow diagram represents the websites functionality and integration within the application, the website will be built using php and will have stats and counters that relate to users that use the app and amount of programs stored etc.. I think providing users with as much information and displaying it an interesting way is beneficial as it keeps users interested and enticed.

Baby Boom Boom

Posted on by Luke Wakeford
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Another project that I am working on as a freelance developer is a multilingual kids app. here is a little interface idea that I had for the menu screen, the plan is to make the app accessible for kids from 11months to 3years of age. So big buttons, interesting animations and sounds are what we will be using to making it useable and exciting for children.

The company I am working with is called Baby Boom Boom and I am also working with my flat mate Jeremy who is on animation, he will be building and animating the characters for app.

Barbershock

Posted on by Luke Wakeford
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So over Christmas I started work on an app which has just been submitted to the AppStore, I have been working with a bunch of awesome guys who are at Bath Spa University studying music, Mike, Chris and Jim. The guys are in a band together and also live in the same house, a lot of banter is generated in this situation which lead to the idea behind the app. In order to capture their musical banter/insults and share them with the world we put together a plan of action for the website and application build. bellow are some of my initial development ideas and time planning that I sent over to the guys.

This was a really useful part of the planning that helped me set aside time for the project and plan how the app and website would integrate to manage users interaction.

The website graphics were designed by Chris and I had some input in to the app buttons and icon graphics, I have really enjoyed working on the project as the idea is great fun yet I have still had to seriously learn some new techniques within IOS development, frameworks and APIs are constantly being update and keeping up to date is essential. It was also interesting creating the app to cater for all IOS devices in terms of interface, I had to program the app to cater for iPad and iPhone. here are the final graphics used, also the icon graphics, hope you enjoy.

The app goes live on the 1st of March 2012 so watch this space.