Most of the interviews we shot for COFA Online have now gone online. A few others with Jona Piehl from Land Design Studio and Nik’s brother, Tom Roope from The Rumpus Room will be released next year and they all explore working in the grey area of merging and emerging disciplines.

Nik Roope gives some great insights into the thinking behind many of Poke’s successful projects:

Sebastien Noel and Eva Rucki from Troika on their cross-disciplinary projects:

Here, Mark Hauenstein talks about his journey from studying fine art to being head of Research and Development at AllofUs:

Thanks to Rachel for the great camera and editing work.

The good chaps and chapettes at Poke love a pun, but they love a hot bun even more. So they have created Baker Tweet, a simple way for bakers to tell the world that something is fresh out of the oven.

It’s a mix of Arduino components that hooks into a Django CMS system. The nice part about it is the simple, chunky metal dial and a single button – perfect for floury, gloved hands.

The baker can update the items on the dial via the CMS (or via iPhone, no less) and then turn the dial to update, hit the button and it pulls in the latest items, so it’s also futureproof. In a working day though, the baker just turns the dial to “Fresh Buns” and everyone who is subscribe to the bakery’s Twitter feed goes off for a bun feed.

The first one is installed in the Albion Café – follow them at @albionsoven.

Despite the puns, it’s certainly no half-baked idea and shows that Poke’s creativity shows no signs of going stale.

Wandering off from a post by John Hicks about staff photos I ended up on the jobs page of my mates at Poke. They have a good tip for recruitment agencies (I’ve had similar experiences):

Please no agencies.

You’re too expensive. And some of you are really horrible too. We do work with a couple of recruiters, but they’re ones that we’ve grown to like. Not cold-calling, staff-nicking, lying, cheating thugs.

There probably are ways to make us your friends. But if you were any good you’d have figured them out anyway.

Very true.

By the way, I really can recommend working at Poke – I spent a very entertaining couple of weeks there on a project for Yahoo! and they’re lovely folks. If I were to move back to the UK and put up with the wreckage of lifestyle that is living in London, they’d be one of the two places I’d want to work at.

They’re looking for a Senior Project Manager and a Frontend Web Developer at the moment.

[tags]poke, london, agencies, recruitment[/tags]

I meant to post this last week but was travelling and forgot. Take a look at the never-ending web page that Poke designed for the Orange Unlimited campaign “Good Things Should Never End”. Iain also posted some secrets about the site – goodies are hidden therein.

Lovely, silly animations by Rex and some smart little interactive toys too. Infuriatingly it really does seem to never end too – I keep trying to chase my scrollbar to the bottom but the fun just keeps coming.

Apart from it being a fantastic, playful time-waster it’s also perfectly aligned with the message. Nice.

[tags]animation, marketing, illustration, Poke, play, interactivity[/tags]