We've been around the block! Literally, having recently moved round the corner to our shiny new office and figuratively because we have been doing what we do since the year 2000 — remember the year when everything was supposed to stop working but didn't?
Obviously we have been fine tuning along the way, the internet waits for no man (or woman) as they say. Staying ahead of the curve has taken a careful balance of controlled experimentation and more interestingly, taking things apart without the manual for putting them back together. (Gareth is currently in the process of connecting an Arduino board to our kettle for statistical analysis)
When we aren't tinkering with electronic 'things' we are collaborating with our clients in order to realise their vision in digital form. Our service is simple, if you want to communicate, sell, educate, engage or entertain through digital technology, we want to help you with the solution.
We also like to consume tea and cake from time to time... if you are lucky, we might be doing it when you come to visit!
The most important aspect of anything we do is the people involved in what we are doing. That's us, you and critically your audience. Our collaborative and cooperative approach helps us to build relationships which enable the communication of ideas and concepts to flow in all directions. We want to know as much about you, your ideas and your audience as possible; the more we know the more focussed and creative the solution can be. We want you to be part of our team and actively encourage your involvement throughout the creative process.
To quote the famous philosopher Vanilla Ice
Conducted and Formed
This is a hell of a concept
We make it hype and you want to step with this
Design is a loaded word. Immediately images of colour, shapes and text are brought to mind: the visual design. This is of course crucial for the creation of a complete and successful digital product but is only one part of the designed solution. It is prudent to point out that our processes could be construed as a linear — collaborate, design, build and test — but in fact, each of these stages are continuously influencing, reinforcing and informing the other.
We know the importance of understanding how users go about their tasks and take great care to think through the information hierarchy and user interface of the digital work we produce.
The interface is the layer which hides the internal workings of an object (piece of software, website or toaster) in order to allow the user to have full control over said object without being an engineer or scientist. The user has carte blanche to determine how well toasted their bread becomes but without the in depth knowledge of how it happened. Our aim is therefore to ensure the users of our interactive digital solutions find it easy to perform the tasks they are intended to perform by creating sensible, simple systems for navigation and interaction.
Some call it familiarity in that we aim to make user interfaces familiar to those who use them by taking a set of tasks, workflow and data and creating simple, intuitive interfaces to enable trouble free and memorable experiences.
It's important for us to write tidy code because it makes us more efficient, updating projects easily when we need to dip in and out of them, other developers can understand the code quickly and easily and it helps us to create frameworks and models which we can re-use in other work.
Most important of all it helps us to sleep at night.
1990 was the year of the hyperlink (HyperText Transfer Protocol — HTTP). Things were so simple then. Nowadays we have the technology to produce such a wide range of rich interactive experiences. We are spoilt for choice with social networking, Google's suite of API's, RSS, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious and blogging; the list really is endless. And then there are the development environments from Adobe's Flash Platform through to server side technologies such as PHP and Asp.net as well as front end development including XHTML, jQuery and AJAX.
With these technologies comes added complexity. How do we use them effectively? How and when do we make use of them appropriately? Here at UVd we believe we know these technologies, we can't help ourselves but play with anything and everything that's out there. And we believe we know how to make them work for you.
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Recycle what you can, when you can and do it often. Habits form easily.
Kirsten Minshall - Director
Gareth Foote - Lead Developer
Patrick Hamann - Lead Designer
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We'd love to hear from you so drop us a line.
+44(0) 207 033 0394
Ultraviolet Design Ltd,
Office A,
151-153 Curtain Road,
London
EC2A 3QL
United Kingdom
