At Hutchhouse we are busy. Very busy as it happens. And because of this we need some extra hands to help us deliver our promises. This keeps the clients happy and the wolves from our door.

We’re potentially looking for two (or more) people:

Web Designer
With a few years experience and skilled enough to design a website to the point of sign-off we’d like someone with good (and realistic!) ideas when it comes to designing and delivering a website.

Project Manager
This person should have good organisational skills, a good knowledge of our industry and should be someone who really understands digital and everything it can offer.

Whilst we’re ideally looking for full time staff, we’re always open to the idea of working with freelancers and/or collaborating with other small agencies if it will help us deliver.

Think this might be you? Then drop us a line, your CV and some examples of your magic to: enquiries@hutchhouse.com

Ed Cooper is a talented artist. Originally from Suffolk, Ed was studying Painting & Drawing at University when we first became friends. It was pretty clear from the outset that this guy had talent and he soon became a source of both inspiration and good practice.

Ed would always carry a notepad and pencil wherever he went, often stopping off to ‘bust out a sketch’. The sheer amount of output impressed me and his imagination often made it’s way onto the back of a Sunday supplement. Much to our amusement.

Visit Eds website here. Although I’d suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg…

This morning we were incredibly flattered to learn we’d been mentioned in an article over at designinformer.com. Jad Limcaco- himself a web designer – wrote the piece entitled The “Wow” Factor in Web Design in which he highlights some unique design details on a handful of websites.

But the story gets better. By 11am we had an enquiry from a restaurant in Shoreditch, London, who we are due to meet on Monday. They mentioned that they’d seen us in this article and it had persuaded them to get in touch. Looking at the email enquiry it’s clear to see how this customer found us. Midway through the email is written:

“…and I would like to redesign our website and branding to have a ‘wow’ factor”…

I’d hazard a guess that this sentence contains the choice keywords that might be responsible for leading the customer to us. Maybe I’ll ask on Monday.

Still, we look forward to the meeting and we give a big thank you to Jad for the lead!

Merry Christmas!

Glug last night must have been one of the most successful yet. The Munny Doll Auction was a stroke of genius and raised a cool £5,000 for worthy charity Barnardos.

The Book Club proved to be the perfect venue for a cold December evening and the atmosphere was dimly lit and cosy. The crowded room cheered as the auctioneer (appointed from Sotheby’s) sold off the Dolls one-by-one.

There was the usual interesting talk, and sponsors Digital Gurus supplied drinks. As always, the (free!) nibbles were good and came as a welcomed companion to the flowing drinks.

I hear there’s a break in January so hopefully we’ll all be back in the Book Club again come February. Look forward to it.

Try it out: Allworkedup – Project Management for Designers by Designers

Along with our good friends at White October and Nonsense we have given ourselves 24 hours to conceive, design, build and promote a new web based start-up company. It’s currently 03:16am and the office is mostly quiet apart from the odd murmor from the development team and the tip tap of keys.

The project situation is pretty healthy. We have a name. Dr.Hue. We have a business idea (shopping by colour) and we have a brand. We even have a holding page Drhue.com. The main site is being templated, whilst the templates are being finished off and there’s a whole host of image manipulation trickery going on in development. In the background, accross the room, the marketing boys set about promoting the site and pulling together a campaign.

And of course… you can currently see it all unfold: 24hour-startup.com

It’s 9 hours into the new start up business and things are flying along. We are close to a brand execution and the developers are steaming along (lots of odd sounds coming from that quarter). Looking at the developer plan it all seems to be finished by 1pm – which is a little ambitious – although as we all know developers always underestimate things….

Continuing-on from my apology earlier, we have been genuinely busy this year and have had our noses pressed firmly against the millstone.

Back in February we won a fantastic project with BT. There’s not much we can say about it unfortunately because it’s all under lock and key, but needless to say it’s kept all of us at Hutchhouse very busy. We’re excited about its implications and with phase one out the door, we can’t wait to get stuck into phase 2. This is a huge project and likely to be ongoing for the rest of the year

In May we did some work for a local company based here on the business park: CMS Industries & CMS Ergonomics. They required two websites to cover both aspects of their business. For the ergonomic website they saw a requirement for some videocasts which we filmed, edited and compressed for the website. You can see them here (bottom right video library). A big thanks to Matthew Royan for his help as the cameraman on this shoot.

Around this time I went to New York with my good friend @NickClement. We had a fantastic week meeting up with old friends, cycling around Manhattan and generally enjoying the trappings of the metropolis. We visited the MoMa and the New Museum. Both rammed to the rafters with inspiration.

During June I did some designs on behalf of White October. Working in conjunction with the RSA and Carbon Limited to create an online web application based around the emerging Carbon Trading Market. I was particularly happy with the design for this and think it’s easily one of the best works to date. I’ll post up here when it’s live.

July also saw the release of allthingsbeer.co.uk. One of our first projects where we gave our Junior – Paul Clement – as much control as we could. Paul got stuck right in and produced a good website which the client was more than happy with. He also did a fine job of the business cards, logo and comp slips, also producing a glossy brochure that eventually reached over 1000+ copies.

August saw us push through two more websites for local businesses Space2Think and Landscapia. Neither of them are live yet but they both went through the design/build process seamlessly and should be ready before long.

Another two happy customers added…

We’ve just finished designing/building our first Wordpress theme for an overseas client. After advising them this was a cost effective way to get what they wanted the client was happy to install all the plugins themselves before handing over to us for styling. Check out youropex.com to see what we did!

That brings up up-to-date. Along the way we’ve done plenty of other bits and bobs which has also kept us on our toes. We’ve started using Harvest to clock our time-sheets for the larger projects and our ‘high tensile project line’ has been put to the strength test at last.

We were also (un)lucky enough to have regular visits from the wasp nest that’s formed in the wall below our window this summer. There’s a picture of what we called ‘The Killing Fields’ after the jump. Because of this we’re glad to see Autumn coming.

That’s all for now. More to come…

…promise.

Please accept our sincere apologies for not updating the blog. There’s really no excuse for it other than to say that – despite the current economic conditions – we’ve been quite busy here and simply haven’t got around to it.

This will change.

As of now, we promise to add more content to our blog regularly thus giving subscribers a reason to be subscribed!

Much love,

The Hutchhouse Team

Smashing Magazine have compiled a fantastic list of Ajax techniques and Plug-ins. Any designer worth their salt need to know a few – if not all – of these. When designing websites it’s not just our job to make it look nice. It’s also our responsibilty that the user has a pleasant, seamless experience. Ajax can really help us achieve this. Here are the topics the article covers:

1. Calendars and Timelines
2. Navigation
3. Tool Tip
4. Menu
5. Slider
6. Slideshow
7. Image
8. Image Previewing
9. File Upload
10. Auto-Complete
11. Lightbox
12. Form
13. Table
14. Worth Checking Out
15. AJAX Examples and Demos

The folks over at Vandelay have pulled together this impressive list of PS and Illustrator techniques. The list is big, but I’d have to say it was the first 7 examples that really caught my eye. Some really nice modern techniques here.

Here at Hutchhouse we’re always trying to streamline our workflow to both maximize efficiency and keep the wasted design time to a minimum. Over the years we found a natural course for presenting our designs online which has culminated in the creation of AllWorkedUp: An online management tool for designers.

At Hutchhouse we predominantly design websites so it’s only natural that – during the design process – we should want to show these designs online. Like most agencies our clients are dotted around the country so it has proved really useful to upload our creative work to a protected area and have clients access them. It guaranties everyone is looking at the same design wherever they might be located.

When we had some spare time we added some further functionality to the system enabling members of a project to leave comments. This works great for both designer and clients as notes can be added when a creative is uploaded, and the client can then comment against them. Once a comment is submitted all members of the project are notified. This really helps small teams like ours react to client responses without having to always go through the Project Manager saving countless emails flying back-and-forth.

This week we put a Beta version live offering 200 free accounts on a first-come basis. We’re interested in hearing what people think of the system, whether it has some legs or whether it should be thrown out with bath water! Any feedback regarding tweaks, added functionality or obvious floors would be gratefully received!

Please, have an account on us!

“Give the gift of friendship this Christmas” is the message behind this latest viral collaboration from the Hutchhouse and White October team. Dave Fletcher – inspired by the ‘Help the Aged: 1 is the loneliest number’ campaign – saw a need for some ‘geek love’ this Christmas and managed to get this great little parody to our screens. Follow the links to befriendageek.com to find out more. Also, please take time to visit the genuine charities that really need your support at this time of year.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

UPDATE: Been checking the Google search results to see what people are saying about the video. A great response thus far. We even got coverage in the Metro today! Links to articles below:

Metro – The Free London Paper
Reddit Geek
Geeks are Sexy
Escapist Magazine

As taken from the OGN homepage:
“Oxford Geek Nights offer a chance for web developers and designers in the local area to get together, share their skills and talk about new ideas, techniques and technologies.

Each OGN consists of two keynote talks of 15 minutes each. There are also frenetic bursts of socialising, sometimes adverts for other local groups, but always interspersed with two sets of 5-minute-long microslot sessions.”

Hutchhouse will be there, as will the White October gang.  Hope to see you there too!

The guys behind the successful networking notworking™ night are throwing their first Christmas bash. They’re even throwing in a competition with some decent prizes (more info below).  The once-a-month evening has been gathering pace and now boasts a regular turn-out of talented creatives.  Visit the blog to find out more.

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Here’s the info for the Christmas competition, start sending your entries in now! We’ve got an incredible judge lineup and prize list. Event will be 17th December, venue is the Bodhi Gallery in Brick Lane, East London and tickets will be out soon, keep an eye on the blog, entries need to be with us by 1st December. Good luck!

VAUGHAN OLIVER (V-23)
MICHAEL C PLACE (BUILD)
JON BURGERMAN
PHIL STUART (PRELOADED)
ADAM JENNS (MAINFRAME)
LAURA JORDAN BAMBACH (GLUE)
GINA LOVETT (DESIGN WEEK)
GUY FEATHERSTONE (WIEDEN & KENNEDY)
HELEN BAYNES (NET-A-PORTER)
IAN HAMBLETON (STUDIO OUTPUT)
NICK CLEMENT (MADE STUDIO)

Prizes are:

- SIGNED FRAMED ‘PIXIES’ PRINT BY VAUGHAN OLIVER
- SIGNED FRAMED ‘BUILD’ PRINT BY MICHAEL C PLACE
- INTERNSHIP AT EITHER STUDIO OUTPUT OR MAINFRAME
- JON BURGERMAN HEROES OF BURGERTOWN MINI FIGURES
- 3 COURSE EVENING MEAL FOR 2 AT BLUU MOORGATE INCLUDING BOTTLE OF HOUSE WINE
- A YEAR’S SUBSCRIPTION TO DESIGN WEEK
- PLUS FURTHER PRIZES TO BE ANNOUNCED.

Email entries to gluglondon@gmail.com or by post to Studio Output (London), 109 Black Bull Yard, 24–28 Hatton Wall, London EC1N 8JH, UK.

Poster design by Sam @ Studio Output, thanks Sam.

At last! We’ve finally got our new website designed and built!

Why the Giraffes?
“A new website was so overdue that we’re hoping our new offering makes up for it. We toyed with keeping the previous ‘yellow & white’ colour scheme but we finally decided to let it go. A good thing too. We’re really happy with the direction this one took and chuffed it made it to the slice & dice stage!

We really wanted to add some fun to the site. A comment was made about a logo we’d been trying out (and finally chose!) and how the wordmark looked a bit like two giraffes standing back-to-back. This got us thinking about a softer approach to our redesign; perhaps introducing zoo animals and adorning the design with vibrant, friendly, exotic creatures! After a brief search on iStock we stumbled across this fine illustration from Borisz. Immediately we knew this was what we were looking for and so the giraffe(s) were purchased, reworked and placed into a mock-up. It looked right.

We’d already discussed adding extra functions to the site and one of those was a ’style-sheet switch’ or ‘theme-changer’. It didn’t take long before we were thinking of themes for the giraffes. ‘Client concerns with web technology’ seemed like a good place to start so we worked up a few analogies around this idea, finally settling on four themes for the different homepages; Jungle, Night, Space and Depth. Themes that are then clarified further with the following headlines:

It’s a jungle out there!
It’s not rocket science…
Don’t get left in the dark!
Feeling out of your depth?

We hope you enjoy the the site as much as we do. Add the RSS feed if you like. It will keep you updated with our latest work.  Have a listen to our last.fm studio radio whilst you browse. It makes for a good backing track to the website.  We can’t promise you’ll agree with our taste in music though!

As always, feel free to get in touch…

The Hutchhouse Team.”

40+ iPhone wallpapers here sourced by Danny at Outlaw. Some of them are actually very nice. The Carbon image above graces every screen I can get it on. iPhone included.

A couple of lists here with some good logo & web inspiration. This particular list from Outlaw has a unique angle; they’re all blue…

Blue Logos
Blue Websites

Laying out and building forms can be a tiresome task.  However the kind folk over at Wufoo have made a load of templated forms for download.  Simply select the form that suits, edit it, style it, save it and use it!