FRONT - A Strategy, Design and Technology Studio

Perhaps the end of the decade is making me reflective, but there has been so much happening that its hard to believe its only 12 months since I welcomed 2009. Time has flown.

The Front Team

Since the start of the year we’ve been working towards the Investors in People standard (and hope to have good news here soon).  Jamie, and Paul both passed their Prince2 Practitioner exams, so that we now have 5 professionally qualified project managers available - with the rest of the team completing their Prince2 Foundation exams too.

We’ve welcomed Lee Braiden and David Hughes onto the team along with internal promotions for Adrian (now officially our senior developer) and Paul May (now our user experience consultant).

Romance has been in the air; I got married this year too (as did three other Fronties - but not to eachother). Being able to switch off my mobile phone for a month and leave things to the team here was a sign of the way the company has grown and matured. 

The Front Studio & Website

The studio has had a bit of a well deserved face-lift with new collaboration rooms (see more images of the studio on Flickr) and some old kit sent off to Kenya.

The front website is still very much a work in progress, although we’re slowly getting there with a summary portfolio  and new careers page.  We’ve also written plenty of articles for the blog this year, including my Why Great Design is About Problem Solving and Paul May’s Smart Procurement: Buying Online Expertise.

We’ve started publishing content elsewhere on the web, with a great selection of photos on Flickr and videos on Vimeo.  Best video of the year has to go to Paul May for his most innovative use of a fruit metaphor:

We worked on several potential ideas for 4ip with the help of the incredibly talented Ewan McIntosh. We’d like to wish Ewan all the best as he leaves Channel4 after doing a sterling job to reshape and rethink public service broadcasting.

 

Projects

In 2009 we launched a flotilla of high quality projects for lots of lovely clients.

We launched BBC Irish back in March and have enjoyed watching it grow.

We launched a new site with nifty online ticketing for Abbey Theatre; the National Theatre of Ireland.

We created a new home for one of our major clients Carte Blanche Greetings

We built a new online greetings service calledNoPostie.

We gave Tatty Teddy a new home on the web.

We created a snappy new site for Violent Veg....

...and another site for the Vivacious Veg.

We’ve watched the Windmill Lane site grow to showcase the best video produced in Ireland.

We created a new site and Intranet for the Northern Ireland Utility Regulator.

We launched a new site for the qualifications regulator Ofqual.

We also launched our first sites integrating Magento, Expression Engine and Tessitura, and welcomed the launch of EE 2.0. This month we’ve also started a major strategy project for the Northern Ireland Environment Agency.

Getting Out There

Paul May and I kicked off the year in style, travelling to Web 2.0, San Francisco for a brain-melting week of speakers, workshops and events.

We also attended the wonderful Build Conference - the most ambitious, passionate conference Ireland has seen in a long time, with Eric Meyer, Mark Boulton, Wilson Miner and Tim Van Damme among the many speakers.  You can seen some of our BuildConf images on Flickr including Niklas Persson’s incredible mustache

Build included a second day of workshops, and we had the good fortune to attend Andy Budd’s Guerrilla Usability Testing Workshop - a brilliant reminder of the need to actually test our work as early as we can.

The rest of team were out and about too: at the ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter Conference 2009 in the Netherlands, at FOWD London, as well as local events such as Make Design Work For Your Business, the NI Design Alliance launch, and of course seeing Atto talk about responsible design.

Speaking, Teaching

This year again we had the opportunity to work with the MA and IMD students in our Masterclass at the University of Ulster.

We were asked by Build organiser Andy McMillan to speak at Refresh Belfast.

Paul May talked about Winning Bigger Web Projects - at Barcamp Belfast, I spoke at Bizcamp, Dublin and we organised an event of our own: Conversations, London.

Taking a Break, Looking Forward

It has been a busy year and no mistake. I’d like to thank all of the team for their hard work, and our clients for their energy and enthusiasm in 2009.

The studio will be closed over the Christmas period as we all take a well-deserved Christmas break, reopening Monday 4th January 2010.  We have support arrangements in place to keep things ticking over while we’re eating turkey and mince pies.

We’ll see you all in the New Year; 2010 is going to be another great year at Front.