We are rapidly expanding our team at Fahrenheit Technology in the Emerging Media Group and are looking for a Graphic Designer with demonstrable Interactive/Web/UI/UX experience. This position is located in Richmond, VA.

Things we’re looking for in the ideal candidate:

• Understanding and appreciation of Social Media and its influence on business
• A strong portfolio showing varied design style and user interaction design experience
• Understanding of web/micro game design
• Understanding of Facebook game mechanisms that elicit viral spread of games among Facebook Friends (in other words, you understand why Farmville and Mafia Wars are popular even if you don’t play them)
• Understanding of cutting edge web presentation methods ex. jQuery, HTML5 vs. Flash … Flash development skills would be a plus
• Understanding of the need and methods for user interface design to tie back to user interaction measurement/metrics

What kind of work are we looking for this position to do? Things such as:

• High-caliber Facebook Fan Page design
• Facebook Application & Game UI/UX design
• Web site design & landing page design
• Email campaign design
• Reporting Dashboard UI/UX design
• High-caliber Powerpoint/Keynote presentation template design

Interested candidates can email me at cbusse (at) fahrenheittechnology.com … please send your LinkedIn link or a resume in digital format and a digital portfolio or links to an online portfolio as well as any public social media presence you might have (ex. Twitter of Facebook Fan Pages/Apps you’ve worked on).

Lastly, this recent post I wrote outlines my personal view on Graphic (Web/Interactive) Design vs Front End Developer. At this time, we’re definitely looking for someone who is very strong on the design end of that spectrum.

Dear Web Designer,

To start, let’s reiterate that this is 2010. If I go now and look at your portfolio and most of the example websites I see look like you took the poster, billboard or full page ad from the “print” section of your portfolio and converted them to Flash, I’m going to move along to the next portfolio in my stack. This was tolerable in the year 2000, but not in 2010. Web design and print design are not the same thing.  “But that’s how the client wanted it” - okay, but not for your portfolio.

Carrying the elements from said print design in to a beautifully interactive site is what I wanted to see there. If it’s a grid-based layout, I want to see a grid that makes sense for presentation on a screen along with sensible navigation.

Good use of type on the web is hard. Show me you understand this and know how to work within the constraints of type on the web and how to overcome these challenges. Hint: this is not done by setting a lot of blocks of copy in JPEGs.

Show me some work that didn’t make the cut. I’m betting that every good web designer has poured their heart and soul in to some fabulous comps that your client sucked the life out of during the review/refinement phase. Or perhaps the opposite is true. Show me the progressions of a design evolving and highlight the choices you made during your iterations.

Are you a Designer or do you do HTML & CSS (a Front End Developer)? Do you know the difference? Do you think you do both?

Here’s a test: Designers can create original vector art in Illustrator or make beautiful things appear from a blank canvas in Photoshop, and name their layers well while doing it.  Front End Developers can apply jQuery functions to things in their Document Object Model.

Unless you can do both very well, this is your year to pick one and focus on it. Take a stand and make it your real strength. With the evolution of HTML5, jQuery, and other non-Flash modes of interaction on the web, spreading yourself too thin between art and code in an attempt to do both well will begin to limit your career choices in the coming years.  Or, take the time to truly master both and command a high salary/rate for your time.  Maybe 5-10% of the “web designers” I’ve met fall in to that category.

From the web designers, I would still like to see examples of wireframes in your portfolio showing how you’ve planned some amount of user interaction in a design.

Lastly, show me your passion. Show it to me in the work you’ve done for clients (perhaps a particular style or approach you strongly advocate?), but also show me some work you’ve done for yourself or for a cause you believe in. Furthermore, show me that you have a sense of community whether it be user groups you’re active in or charities you volunteer with. This goes a long way to bringing out a human element when sorting through a pile of resumes and online portfolios.

Best of Luck,

Busse

P.S. The opinions expressed here are my own.  However, if you are any sort of web professional in Richmond, VA exploring other employment options this year and would like to talk about working on some cutting-edge interactive/social media projects for notable clients in a fun environment that truly respects work/life balance, send me your resume/portfolio links with the assurance of strictest confidentiality to cbusse (at) fahrenheittechnology (dot) com

mirza:

The Short answer: Design.

I also think Tumblr is a more fluid experience — not sure I can describe it beyond that, but it just feels so easy. That might relate back to “Design” though.

I’m especially proud of him that it was in the Your Rights Online section. A post of his (linked as “Many people…”) about Tynt was linked to from a post that made it to their home page. His site stayed up under increased traffic load.  I’m looking forward to digging in to his web stats to see what kind of effect that had.

[originally published 3/6/2009 on my old DotNetNuke blog, moved now to Tumblr & republished]

When this website ran on DotNetNuke, I had a module I created called TwitterDNN that loaded a real-time view of the five most recents posts (“tweets”) I’ve made on Twitter.  It did this via a call directly to Twitter’s API at the server level, and rendered the results out as the page loaded, as opposed to using the JSON callback that many other Twitter badges/modules use, which execute client-side Javascript to render out the results.

As a result of doing it through the Twitter API, the contents of my tweets appeared within the HTML of my pages when Google and other search engines index the site.

Case in point: several weeks ago I was having a conversation on Twitter with @StyleWeekly about the fake (IMHO, disingenuous) ads for Syke Energy Drink.  They are actually an anti-smoking campaign that is attempting to market to emo kids or something like that in an attempt to be hip and cool (reminds me of the L. Ron Bumquist character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but I digress). There is no actual product called Syke Energy Drink.  Style published a great article summarizing what was actually going on with the Syke campaign.

During the course of our conversation they asked how I’d come to figure it out.  I replied that on the TV ads, in tiny letters you can see “VTSF” so I had Googled “vtsf syke” and came across some articles with more information about the campaign.

Ironically, that tweet, which was rendered on this site via the TwitterDNN module, got indexed by Google, and as of this writing [and still true 9 months later!] it appears on the first page of results when you search for “vtsf syke” and thusly has been sending visitors my way which caused me to notice it in my Google Analytics Keyword Referrer report, which prompted this post, which will probably get indexed by Google…

So anyway, I think my point here is that if you have a website, and use Twitter, then there is some value to rendering your tweets onto your site, and probably more so if the site content and what you’re tweeting are related so that resulting traffic is relevant. Since my module only shows the five most recent tweets, the “vtsf syke” one has long since scrolled off, and this article is now the only content I have here about it.

However, if you’re going to render out your tweets and you want them indexed on your site by Google, look for a module that does it through the API on the server-side, as opposed to the JSON/Javascript methods that seem to be more popular (and admittedly more accessible) because those methods don’t get indexed by Google the way they’re rendered out.

sdk7327:

I have been doing a lot of research on social media and its value, and I think it is interesting how many businesses want to leverage it to make money. The problem they come across when doing this is that they don’t know about the commitment social media requires to make it effective. It is not just about slapping up a blog or facebook fan page, its about building relationships with people.

Very true.  Helping them with the proper use of measurement tools like Google Analytics and its Goal Tracking can help prove the ROI on these efforts. For example of 50% of inbound traffic from Facebook leads to purchases (or whatever the goal), yet 1% of inbound traffic from Twitter accomplishes the same goal, then the commitment to Facebook is showing a much greater payoff.

As an experiment I streamed some sessions from Social Dev Camp East (scroll to “Agenda” for links to what I was able capture) using the free UStream.tv service.

I’ve gotten some questions about how I went about doing it (thanks @MissLynn13!)so here in no particular order are 10 Tips for UStreaming live events:

1. Use a camera better than a webcam. I used a 3CCD MiniDV camera connected directly to an old Mac Powerbook G4 laptop via Firewire. In comparison tests vs. my iMac webcam, this produced a better picture.
2. Audio quality is key! If you’re using a good camera, hopefully it will have a good mic.  The audience “watching at home” will care much, much more about the audio than the video — unless you’re getting a really good image of something being presented, most likely the audio will be the real content, and the image will be just to give the audio context.
3. Use a wired ethernet connection, or be sure to have a really strong wifi signal. This was probably my biggest hurdle — my wifi connection kept dropping, or there were times where I couldn’t get on the network at all. UStream does a great job of picking back up where you left off, but you’ll lose viewers for sure.
4. If moving between rooms for multiple sessions, give yourself time. For Social Dev Camp East, several of the session started and stopped at the same time.  This made it hard to break down and move between rooms.  15 minutes between sessions would have been a big help.
5. Avoid visual and audio distractions. Don’t film the back of someone’s head, don’t setup under an air vent or near a coffee urn w/ noisy burner.
6. Engage the audience watching on Usteam. Be willing to proxy questions for them. I surprised a presenter and the room when I started off with “There are as many people watching online as there are in this room, and one of them has a question…”
7. Promote the event on Twitter! We made the “trending topics” list on search.twitter.com with the #sdc2 hashtag and I think a lot of it had to do with discussion about the streaming both from people there, and people watching from elsewhere.
8. Be prepared to miss a lot of the actual presenation. I spent a lot of time fiddling with Ustream, largely due to trying to resolve network & connectivity issues, that I felt like I really missed some of the presentation content and Q & A.
9. If you’re streaming multiple sessions, schedule them on UStream and announce them in the chat. Ustream has a feature where you can setup a schedule for your show. Also, I would let people in the UStream chat room know when I was moving and what session I was going to next so that they would know what happened when I dropped off.
10. Record your stream for posterity. Ustream has a feature that lets you “Start Streaming” and “Start Recording” separately.  I’d start streaming as I set up everything, then start recording right before the speaker got going. Now there is an archive of everything I was able to capture! Bonus tip: if you have to hustle between locations, worry about titling and tagging the clips later.

Hopefully you found this useful, and please comment below if you have any other tips!

Too often I see well crafted LinkedIn profiles that have a section that looks like this:

Websites

• My Website
• My Website

I think the problem is that the form on LinkedIn where you can edit this isn’t very intuitive to a lot of people (myself included, I discovered this after some experimentation).

To customize your website labels so that they say something other than “My Website” or “My Portfolio” or one of the other system defaults, do the following:

1. Log in, and choose Profile from the left-hand navigation, then make sure you’re on the Edit Profile tab
2. Click Edit next to one of your “My Website” labels (it doesn’t matter which one, they all go to the same edit screen)
3. Next to each text input box to put your website link, is a drop down box where you can choose things like “My Website” or “My Company”.  In this box is a choice called “Other…”  Select that.
4. Now a new text input box will appear and you can label it whatever you want.  What you enter here will replace the system’s default website label in your profile!
5. Click Save Changes.