Each month, we’ll be posting a short profile on our most recent placements. You can find out a bit about them, and see some of their work…

Hello, my name is…
Tristan Dunbar
In three words I would say I am…
75 Percent Squash
And in my spare time I like to…
Play a lot of Blues.
I have just finished studying at…
Norwich University College of the Arts
You can see a portfolio of my work by…
visiting www.behance.net/tristandunbar or you can email me at me@tristandaviddunbar.com
And my piece of work that best represents me is…
Foyles the bookshop 

Because…
You can run with the idea until you’re out of breath – then keep going.
You would never guess that I…
Really (really) like dragons.
After The Partners, I’m going to…
Someone.

Hello, my name is…
Lucy Hutchinson
In three words I would say I am…
Determined, inquisitive, unconventional
And in my spare time I like to…
Put itunes on loud and paint, watch great films and explore new places
I have just finished studying at…
University of Leeds
You can see a portfolio of my work by…
Visiting my website at http://lucyhutchinson.weebly.com/
Or send me an e-mail at lucyehutchinson@gmail.com
And my piece of work that best represents me is…
My Final University Project, Lost In Digital

Because…
It expressed an important social message in an unconventional way
You would never guess that I…
Am a fully qualified open water scuba diver
After The Partners, I’m going to…
Work with Jack Renwick (the partners old creative director) and get some experience of a small start up studio

Hello, my name is…
Laura Evans
In three words I would say I am…
confident, excitable, playful
And in my spare time I like to…
See friends. They’re really important to me.
I have just finished studying at…
Kingston University
You can see a portfolio of my work by…
Emailing me at evanslaura1989@gmail.com
And my piece of work that best represents me is…
Self portrait

Because…
It was an idea I had always wondered about – and when I finally did it – the results were amazing. It’s a playful idea that has been moulded into a piece of design without loosing its charm.
You would never guess that I…
Am an avid list writer. I write lists to keep on top of my lists.
After The Partners, I’m going to…
Magpie Studio

Here’s our weekly round-up of some digital things we’ve seen… great sites, brand innovation, intriguing uses of technology and general digital things that have inspired us. Where appropriate I’ve credited the source, so please enjoy, explore and, of course, comment if there’s something related that you find equally inspiring.

PressReader
This app brings over 1,700 full-content newspapers from 92 countries in 48 languages to your iPad & iPhone. Incredible on the iPad and has already completely changed the way I read the Sunday papers. It makes the standard newspaper come to life with header links to an article reader pop-up and hypertext links wherever you find a url.

Give a Minute
An impressive use of the power of online communities. ‘…an opportunity for you to think out loud; address old problems with fresh thinking; and to enter into dialogue with change-making community leaders. Soon, you’ll also be able to link up with others who have similar ideas and work on making your city an even better place.’

Esquire’s High-Tech Scavenger Hunt
Esquire in the US are giving their readers a chance to win an iPad by hunting augmented reality images via landmarks using their phones and sending the images in for a chance to win. (thanks Ryan)

Brisbane floods – before and after
ABC News in Australia have created a simple interactive tool to view the effects of the recent floods in Brisbane. A simple, intuitive tool designed to help readers focus on the story. (thanks Henry)

TV is changing
An intriguing experiment into the take-up of digital TV services and how conventions may take longer than expected to shift.

Levi’s Brasil builds a presence on Instagram
‘While it’s becoming normal for brands to have a digital presence on social platforms, but what is interesting here is that Levi’s Brasil takes advantage of the fully visual nature of Instagram to connect with its audience in a non-intrusive way – it’s up to you whether you follow their posts or not.’

Here’s the first in a series of weekly round-ups of some digital things we’ve seen… great sites, brand innovation, intriguing uses of technology and general digital things that have inspired us. Where appropriate I’ve credited the source, so please enjoy, explore and, of course, comment if there’s something related that you find equally inspiring.

Intel’s Visual Life
As part of a recent online campaign Intel are sharing short films entitled Your Visual Life. The behind the scenes look at Scott Schuman aka The Sartorialist is a great insight into his working approach.

Tesco’s Grocery App
Launched late last year as a first of it’s kind, Tesco are aiming to make online shopping even easier with their new iPhone app. You can scan any product anywhere with this app and they’ll add it to your online shopping basket for you to purchase the next time you checkout online.

adiVerse Virtual Footwear Wall
An in-store digital installation that… “renders products in 3-D, and allows a shopper to spin and zoom in on the shoes, and call up specs from a touch-screen display.” Why not? (via @ade_engine)

Nokia Loop
“With the new Loop app, you can make music with anything, anywhere, anytime you like.”

Future gazing at Notion
Take a look at how the iPad could transform our TV-watching experience in the future. (Courtesy of Notion Design)

Gabriela Herman’s Bloggers
Ever wanted to see the faces behind the blogs. Photographer Gabriela Herman has created a beautiful set of portraits that show her subjects at work.

Wayne & Garth Spotted

Alongside the part of my phone that actually makes calls (the old fashioned bit), my Google Maps app is probably one of my most used. It’s become indispensable in the same way that being able to text once was. What would we do without it!

Modern spoils aside, the success of Google’s mapping technology may partly be down to its adaptiveness. As with all good web services, the Google Maps API has spawned a mass of location based mash-ups. Google, for example, recently partnered with We Are What We Do to create the wonderfully rich Historypin. It’s all too easy to forget about the history that surrounds us here at The Partners HQ, but a quick post code look up perfectly placed archived and geo-tagged photos from over 100 years ago. To refer to images like this in isolation is one thing, to see them in context and contrast with our modern surroundings (places we inhabit everyday without considering the past) can completely transform our sense of place. Today, Berg London announced Dimensions. Born out of a series of workshops with the BBC, this set of mash-ups forces us to reconsider our surroundings by overlaying historical, political, and environmental data on to our own neighbourhoods. With these filters and layers applied, mapping becomes less about wayfinding, and more about changing perceptions of our sense of place; both of our own locality, and of others’.

With Google’s Street View, the mental images and memories of our surroundings are at once put to test, and the sheer volume of imagery captured by Google’s roaming cars across the world must represent one of the most significant image archives in existence. It provides us with an almost complete panoramic view of the urban environment, albeit one recorded in 1/100th of a second. For the virtual tourist, or the freeze frame voyeur, street view offers a world of exploration like never before. Last year, Art Fag City bought together snapshots of some of the more weird and wonderful findings. Our treasured Daily Mail more recently got in on the act with the story of a seemingly dead girl laying in the street.

Thank god last year’s AR craze has seemed to have died down, when every brand seemed desperate to get a piece of the emperor’s new clothes. This highly ironic video summed it up perfectly. Why do something that could be much better achieved without the added layer of a webcam? Context, of course, is key. ART + COM showed that there were practical and meaningful applications for the technology when they bought dinosaurs out of their skeletons and bursting into life at Berlin’s Museum of Natural History. And with dedicated hardware in gaming consoles, the opportunities still seem genuinely engaging. Oh to be a kid today!

Of course mobile and augmented technologies are a match made in heaven. Amsterdam’s Layar first launched on Android some years ago now, but the potential still seems to be slowly unfolding, and marketers are quicker now to spot an opportunity. While The Rolling Stone’s take on the Layar app for their Exile On Main Street album may have been overly literal, it’s interesting to think how we can begin to engage an audience not just online, but in the real world too. Over in Japan, where adoption of new technologies is often quicker than anywhere else, the Sekai Camera app spawned an ‘Air tagging‘ phenomenon. Surely it’s just a matter of time before this spreads. Let’s just hope users can learn to leave data behind that actually enriches our surroundings, and resist the kind of comments you’re likely to find in a shoreditch pub toilet.

Yesterday I received a notification from Google informing me I was now being tracked by Latitude. I’d opted in for this some time ago, only to be disappointed to find very few of my friends had shared my enthusiasm. Sharing your location with Google (search now factors in your location) is one thing, sharing it with your friends, it seems, is another.

The social aspect of location awareness is, however growing fast. And while Foursquare’s success may be in part down to its reward schemes and gaming aspects (ultimately, its competitive nature), the check-in concept now seems to be spreading beyond the merely physical, with more & more start ups like Gomiso allowing us to ‘check-in’ to movies and tv shows. It’s yet another way of allowing us digital natives to define ourselves not just by where we hang out, but also by what we consume. In 2010, privacy, and personal space appear outdated concepts, while the commodification of the personal reigns supreme.

If anyone can popularise the concept of location in the social space, it’s Facebook. Sure enough, Mark Zuckerberg recently confirmed rumours that Facebook will soon be adding location to its services. Facebook might just show Google how it should be done here. Friends & followers, are you with me?

Ever since Jobs and Co. created the iPhone, there has been intense speculation that Apple were going to re-invent the Newton, with all kind of rumours about what the device would be and what it would be capable of.

For those of you that have been living in a bunker, the iPad is what Apple describes as a bridge between the world of the smartphone and the laptop — a third ‘mobile’ space that sits between the two. Indeed, at first glance, the iPad looks nothing more than a giant iPhone — it features the same glass multi-touch display (albeit a huge one at 9 1/2 inches), the same buttons – it can even run the same applications.

So many are wondering, well, what’s the difference; “Why do I need one of these shiny new toys when I have an iPhone and a laptop?… I was expecting an all-singing and dancing device that could read my thoughts and intiate command for me on the impulse of a brain wave! …This isn’t the JesusPad I wanted!” Yes, many of these points are true. But what people are forgetting to remember is that content is king, and just like the iPhone and the iPod before it, if the content is good, (in the case of the iPod; huge libaries of mp3′s versus a cd, and the iPhone with the app store full of entertainment and usefulness), then it will be a must-have product.

So let’s look at the killer app, and with a screen this size, it has to be publishing — anything from books to newspapers and magazines. Both Sony and Amazon (with the Kindle) have made significant inroads in to this new area with eBook readers: devices that are like carrying whole libaries in the space of a paperback. But these devices look a generation old compared to the user experience of the iPad – gimicky it may look, but simply turning and flicking a page on the iPad instantly feels more real. The printed book is all good and well, but it’s in the magazine and newspaper area where this product will excel. Take a look at this digital version of the Sports Illustrated magazine and try to say to yourself that you’d rather have a traditional magazine:

It’s been forecast for many years that the ‘death of print’ cometh. Maybe with the iPad and devices like it, we’re at the beginning to this new era. This fuzing of new-media and traditional print publishing into a new and interactive form is going to be exciting for both consumers and designers alike, hopefully reigniting what is a shrinking industry. Take a look at this concept video for a product called Mag+ by Bonnier R&D and their digital design partners BERG – it shows off the potential experience for what a product like the iPad can deliver:

No doubt the iPad will open the flood gates to millions of copycat tablet computers, all hoping to do the same thing. Will I be getting one? Well, I’ve always said; never buy the first gen of any Apple product; but if content as rich as this comes out, I might have to change my mind.

So yesterday via Twitter I received two identical tweets from the same ‘company’. Being a little more specific, one form the ‘official’ Twitter feed of that company, the other from the ‘personal’ Twitter account of the MD of that company. I say personal, however in the profile he states that he is MD of X…. so in my book, that counts as a representation of that company is a ‘pseudo corporate’ feed. So, two identical tweets, sent from the same ‘company’, to the same individual, me, in the space of a few seconds.

Now if that happened with email, to which I had subscribed, i.e. which is permission based, as is Twitter… I’d be annoyed and think ‘what a stupid company’. Well the same thing happened with those tweets, I thought ‘what a stupid company’. Just because they are short, possibly less intrusive than email, it’s still really dumb to send identical messages over different accounts when you have the same person subscribing to both accounts on the other end! We wouldn’t do that with email would we? And as the business that did this was, surprise surprise, a social media agency (ROFLMAO)… that makes it, as we say on the Internets, an EPIC FAIL.

So, to an extent you have to say ‘bless’, let’s face it a lot of people working in social media, on the face of it, aren’t that experienced in the grand scheme of things, email is for old people right? But more seriously it points to the fact that platforms such as Twitter, even when combined with some of the 3rd party corporate tools, are still massively lacking in maturity and functionality to run at the same level of ‘permission’ and accuracy as email or more traditional direct communications. To my knowledge, (I did say this was ill-informed) no tool exists to manage Twitter subscribes across a companies multiple accounts in the same way as email (i.e. with really thorough, get prosecuted if you mess up, list and subscriber management… yes I get that Twitter is a little less complex in that if you unsubscribe that’s that, to an extent). If it does I get the impression many companies aren’t using it. As far as legislation goes, again I’d welcome an update on this… however, if the law doesn’t hover channels such as Twitter in b2c communications, isn’t it about time it did?

Pictures by Matt Knight of W+K

A couple of weeks ago I participated in a D&AD pub night held at the Hoxton Pony, called: An Apple A Day: Technology in design.

The D&AD pub nights are informal presentations by designers to designers, based around a particular topic, and are always lively, slightly drunken, and filled with debate. The brief was to talk about a piece of technology that changed your life. I decided to take a slightly unusual angle on this and talk about a totally unsexy, unloved technology: the intranet. Yes that’s right, I talked about a piece of technology that is even LESS SEXY THAN POWERPOINT.

I used the daggy intranet as a way to tie in a variety of exciting brand engagement projects we’ve been doing for Deloitte. If anyone is interested in more info about the content of my talk please email me and I’ll create another post.

I was pretty nervous when I turned up, and was relieved to see that there were only a couple of hundred people there, as well as stage lights and cameras set up to record the event… (!!!) Overall it was a really interesting night with some great speakers from agencies such as Wieden+Kennedy, De-construct, Tonic and Dare.

Despite my nervousness in the lead up to the event, I ended up thoroughly enjoying the experience and would recommend other designers get involved in the D&AD education activities.

I’ll make another post once the videos from the night are posted up online.

Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.

This companion application is based on the branding and identity work that we undertook for the gallery and allows you to search for paintings tagged under a series of themes. The application contains over 250 works and includes video, audio, zoomable hi-resolution images and image galleries from the likes of Leonardo, Renoir, Rembrandt and Van Gogh.

The application, called Love Art: National Gallery London is available now and is completely free – just like admission to the National Gallery itself. Go check it out.

Identity and branding by The Partners