Creative Jar

Having recently entered the MIX:UK 08 Silverlight Competition, Creative Jar are pleased to have come in at 1st place! The competition 'Be all you can be', by Microsoft was sent out to all developers who attended MIX07, with the requirements to build a new agenda page for MIX07. The challenge was to redesign the entire look and feel of the MIX:UK 07 agenda page - using Silverlight and your imagination.

One of our lead developer's Timothy Hustler together with designer Simon Sturgess collaborated to produce the winning piece of work, which can be seen at http://mix.creative-jar.com.

Using the full suite of Microsoft Expression tools: Expression Design for the initial drawings, Expression Web for the static pages, with Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2008 for the agenda application.

The guys even went the extra mile and also produced the entire event site using SQL Server 2005 back end, LINQ for the data access tier, WCF Services to make the data public and finally Silverlight 2.0 for the controls, animations and client-side interaction.

This unique way of working allowed the developer and designer to work collaboratively on same project and files throughout the entire delivery meaning no translations/approximation of design and real-time interaction between departments.

From meeting the client to go live within four weeks, the Creative Jar team worked all hours to produce this unique political based website for creating the next mayor of London. Our architects and senior consultants mapped, planned and devised the entire project in four days then set the design and development team to building the solution in .NET 3.5 technologies (LINQ/AJAX/etc).

With video posts, audio, polling and voting the site looks to hijack the Mayoral elections by throwing out financial support to the winning candidate produced from four weeks of polling.

Being in partnership with Creative Jar for many years now the British Canoe Union requires an entire visual and technical over-haul of the core BCU site, along with the federal site for Canoe England.

Early planning has been critical in evolving the migration strategy along with integration with multiple legacy applications and data stores. The set-up is complex and vast with many user experience factors to consider not only in design stages, but in .NET development.

Watch this space Q1 2008 for an eagerly anticipated re-launch campaign.

What a year its been for Creative Jar. We've increased headcount and turnover yet again and worked on some amazing projects with some great clients. We've grown up and matured as an agency, so thought an entire site re-design was long overdue to better present who we actually are and the many great projects we've engaged on.

We also felt that our early brand didn't reflect our agency maturity so addressed this too with a contemporary new look - of course the orange has stayed though as that certainly is who we are!

Good things come in threes and to top it all off we are now enjoying the fourth month in our stunning new office. With room for growth and a chill out / games room its certainly been a big hit with the team.