Swim silent, swim deep…

Saturday was the fourth birthday of Gareth’s twin daughters, Ellie and Imogen. To mark the occasion, he decided to make a Cinema 4D animation (that’s a 3D modelling and animation package to you and me) inspired by a robot they’d made out of cardboard and toilet rolls at home. The post work and grading was done in After Effects. It took our budding film producer about 8 weeks and several late nights to produce. This was his first attempt at character animation and we have to say, we were wowed, never mind a room full of four year olds.

Happy Birthday for Saturday little ladies.

Have a passion for all things online? We’re looking for a front-end developer to show some love to existing sites. You also need to be able to develop scalable cross-browser interfaces for a variety of applications from the ground up.

You must already be an expert at writing high-performance, semantic HTML and efficient CSS to consistent effect across IE7, IE8 and all modern browsers.  Your JavaScript ability needs to go far beyond hacking together plugins, but knowing when and why to use JavaScript libraries, particularly jQuery.

You don’t need to be a design guru, but should have a solid appreciation of design, UX, accessibility and usability. Bonus points if you’ve worked on design solutions that you’d describe as responsive or adaptive. We’d also like you to have some version control experience, particularly Git.

You’ll be reporting to Anthony Sterling, our Technical Director. Don’t worry, he doesn’t bite.

If you have a general love of web standards and doing things the right way, send your CV with samples of your elegant markup to kathryn@drummondcentral.co.uk

If we like your stuff, we’ll be in touch.

Hello. I’m Bob Castle. My sister Penny and me are the characters for Newcastle Building Society’s Big Little Saver Account. The idea behind us was to teach kids about saving up their pocket-money to buy the things they really, really want, without shoving the building society down their tiny throats.

Those clever creatives wrote and illustrated a story about the time I asked mum if I could have some stickers and she told me that money doesn’t grow on trees. Whenever anyone takes out a Big Little Saver Account, they get a copy of, ‘Bob and the Money Tree’. The campaign has only gone and won a Marketing Excellence Award for ‘Best Integrated Campaign’. The awards were held at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London on the 23^rd February.

The judges said that it was, “A brilliantly executed integrated campaign that demonstrated great understanding of audience.” They also said, “A well thought out targeted approach to refreshing an already established product, producing excellent results on a limited budget.”

Just goes to show that you don’t have to spend all your pennies to walk away with a shiny award.

We’re looking for an experienced account manager. You’ll be working closely with Beth, our Account Director, to provide support and project management on the global brand, bet365.com.

You’ll need to have TV production knowledge, a confident manner, client facing experience at meetings and presentations, and strong planning and strategy skills. For this is a job that requires an extra-special personality in order to maintain and develop long-lasting relationships with our Clients.

You must be able to work as part of a team, as well as being proactive. It goes without saying that you’ll need to be brilliant at the detail and easily handle paperwork including contact reports, invoices, quotes, and creative and media briefs. Digital understanding has to be in your locker. And when it’s full on, you’ll know the importance of hitting those deadlines. You’ll need to convey client requests through the agency, and liaise with external contractors including media buyers, printers, production companies and photographers.

We’re offering a competitive salary and great rewards for the right walker/talker. Send your CV to info@drummondcentral.co.uk with Account Manager in the subject box and if we like the sound of you, we’ll talk. Closing date: Friday 23rd March.

We’re looking for a Developer, but not just any developer. No siree. Reporting to Anthony Sterling, our Technical Director, you’ll need to have a minimum 4 years commercial experience for starters and be able to handle lots of projects in a fast-paced agency environment. Here’s the square stuff: experience of the LAMP stack is essential, it’s a must that you have a solid understanding of Object Oriented Programming and software development principles; plus, you’ll need a comprehensive understanding of PHP 5.2/5.3, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and a good working knowledge of MySQL and relational database modeling.  And we know this is a big ask, but familiarity with the Linux command line would be just brilliant. So if you can decipher this post, send your CV with samples of code to Kathryn@drummondcentral.co.uk. If she likes the sound of you, she’ll be in touch to talk code. Over & out.

We’ve been voted ‘Best Advertising Agency in the North East 2012′ by the Drum. Don’t worry, Julie won’t be doing a Gwyneth.

This award is based on the standard of creative work, new business won and awards won. To celebrate we had Gorman’s Fish and Chips for lunch today courtesy of Steve and Julie. Because that’s just how we roll. Celebratory chips. In January. When everyone else is on a diet.

We’ve got two new bods in digital and they’re really gonna help us strengthen our digi offering. Kathryn Taylor recently came on board as our Interim Head of Digital and loved it so much that she joined us permanently as Account Director. Kathryn has over 12 years commercial experience in the digital industry, and she’s managed her own web and digital agencies since 2003.

Then there’s Anthony Sterling who is our new Technical Director (or ‘Chief Geek’ as he’s fondly nicknamed!). Anthony is highly regarded in the developer world – he joins us from Draka Holdings BV where he was IT Manager for UK Operations, as well as a PHP Developer for the last seven years. He also founded @phpne, a PHP User Group designed to share knowledge and skills, in addition to raising the focus of local developers. Now that’s being pro-active.