Blog by InfinityWeb

We are hiring, Digital / Interactive Designer :)

Andrew — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 07:55:42 +0000

InfinityWeb are a team of digital enthusiasts located right in the heart of Auckland City, New Zealand. We’re passionate and we love what we do. Now we’re on the lookout for new talent to add to our ranks.

We’re all about pushing the limits of fine pixels and creating beautiful design that everyone will appreciate

Your Job: As an ambitious digital / interactive designer, you will be wearing many hats and see projects through their entire development cycle. Your work will involve designing interfaces from scratch that solve complex interactions with simplicity. You’re enthusiastic about design and technology and know how to work alongside developers, researchers, and project managers.

Requirements:  You have a passion for visual design: you know the difference between “good” and “great” work and are able to work within teams to deliver excellent design. And you must be fluent in…

- Superb web typography skills
- Layout / UI design (e.g. using Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks, etc)
- Information Architecture
- Concept Model Design
- UI Development for Functionality
- Visual UI Development

Like the look of this but you consider yourself a freelancer? No problem, we would love to hear from you too.

So if you think your potential is limitless then hit us up at be@infinityweb.co.nz we’d love to hear from you.

Please no recruiters, thank you.

Weekly Challenge: No Acronyms

Ashley — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 05:38:43 +0000

We just started weekly challenges for the team here at Infinity Web, this weeks challenge was to use no acronyms. While these may seem like a walk in the park when it comes to the internet you can’t escape them! The most slip-ups came from what we do everyday:

HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language CSS: Cascading StyleSheet png: Portable Network Graphic CMS: Content Management System

Trying to discuss URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) was also a bit tedious as you can imagine attemping to speak “http://www.somecompany.com/faqs.html” resulted in a whole lot of gibberish “Hyper Text Markup Language, colon slash slash, World Wide Web, dot, somecompany, dot, com, slash, Frequently Asked Questions, dot, Hyper Text Markup Language”. Some of the funnier mistakes were correcting one acronym, while forgetting to correct the other and I think this was me wanting to say “High Definition, Digital Video Disc” but instead said “High Definition, DVD”. The prize for dumbest fail goes to Andrew, one of my hoodies I wear has “LBC Netball Prems” written on the back, after a conversation about the game, walking out of his office he pikes up for no reason asking “Hey, what does LBC stand for?” hmmmm whoops.

The tally at the end of the week ended up looking something like this:

28: Andrew (though to be fair, 50% were from one conversation)
26: Alex
22: Ashley
12: Nacy
05: Tiga

So for Andrew’s poor, poor performance we all enjoyed some delicious Paddle Pops.

Join our team…. if you dare

Andrew — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 22:15:12 +0000

InfinityWeb are looking for some new talent to come and party with us. We’re currently after an Interaction Designer / Frontend Developer and iOS / Mobile Developer Check them out and drop us a line if you’re interested at be@infinityweb.co.nz Chur

Arduino Meetup

Alexander — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 21:30:03 +0000

Last Thursday was the first time we actually went to Arduino meet up event that was organized by the Tim Carr from MindKits. The meet up is to catch up on anything Arduino and we were fortunate enough to see with our own eye the MakerBot 3D Printer. MakerBot 3D Printer is basically an affordable version of a 3D Printer which runs with Arduino to print any 3D sculpture you can think of by melting a strip of plastic and layering the sculpture. During the meet up, Tim made a bottle opener and a iphone stand within an hour. Making your own stuff without having to buy them, how awesome is that?

For those who doesn’t know what an Arduino is, its basically an open-source electronics prototyping platform thats intended for artists, designers and basically anyone who wants to make stuff. On development environment side of things, it able to run Processing/openFrameworks/Flash,etc. If you are still wanting to find out more, click here.

We have already placed down an order for an Arduino kit with MindKits and we cant wait to get our hands dirty and start creating, testing, building our own electronic interactivity. We have no idea yet what we want to be doing with the Arduino, but i guess that’s what makes it really exciting because it doesn’t limit our creativity to what we can create. We will try to post any progress we made with our own experiment here as much as possible, stay tuned.

Design Charts

Andrew — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 03:31:35 +0000

#2 spot on DesignCharts - achievement unlocked

Living through your screen

Tiga — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 10:02:58 +0000

These days, more often than not when I go out with friends I’ll find myself in a situation where at least one person will whip out their smart phone and deliberately use it as a distraction.

Possibly because being in my presence is so boring that any sort of distraction is welcome, but I’d like to think not. However I have noticed this behavior in other social groups as well which leads me to believe that it’s not just my bad jokes turning people off.

When did it become socially acceptable to disengage from your friends and live in your virtual world? When did it stop becoming rude and become acceptable? People don’t seem to have any hesitation to pull out their iPhone, check their Facebook, make a Tweet, play some Farmville, waste away on Youtube or even worse… check in on Foursquare. Do people really need to know where you are all the time? Or is it a matter of feeling close to your friends without exerting as much effort as it only takes to type their name?

It seems to me that we are more content at living our lives through our screens rather than taking the time and effort to make a human connection. Myself included, I’d rather do all my interactions behind a digital safety blanket, because thats what it is. Theres no emotion found on my Facebook pages, which makes dealing with my ‘friends’ a heck of a lot easier and safe. Hassle-free friendships.

The future for us as designers and developers (from all trades, but I speak from my web experience) is not how to make the hottest gradient, or how to make a perfect Apple-like wet floor effect, but rather break these invisible strings that attach us to our electronic devices. Although these devices achieve their original goals of sharing free information to the masses and keeping people in contact, it seems that the rise of digital entertainment is costing us our human interaction skill set.

There are one billion views on Youtube per day! Isn’t this alarming? Will there be a point when this digital entertainment outshadow everything? How much time do you spend on Youtube a day? I’m going to guess probably too much. What if instead of spending your time on Youtube you went to learn something new? Probably something amazing. Do you care? Probably not, and you’ll go back to watching Youtube regardless, I know I would. Its hard to avoid these pitfalls because the internet and our devices are tailored to encourage these distractions. Of course there is a time and place for such sites so it is on us to monitor ourselves.

We need to create a crossroads because if we keep going down the same path then we will be a society of attention deficit, unimpressed, demanding people. And as designers and developers we need to consider how our digital life improves, or degrades our real world well being. Otherwise whats the point? Do you really want to look back in 20 years time and be horrified by how much time you spent mindlessly surfing the internet as life passes you by? We need to build our virtual environments in a way that improve our physical well being.

Although my article doesn’t provide any answers, because really I have no idea how to approach this situation, I think this important food for thought.

With our current knowledge and intellect we should develop our virtual environments that enrich our lives, and not move our lives into the digital realm and in turn live through it.

Design Licks Site of the Day

Andrew — Tue, 31 May 2011 21:41:41 +0000

just sayin…

Job Opening – iOS Ninja

Andrew — Mon, 30 May 2011 07:53:05 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

InfinityWeb are a team of rock star ninjas in the digital world. We’re passionate and we love what we do. Now we’re on the lookout for new talent to add to our ranks. We’re located in the CBD and work with a diverse range of clients big and small specialising in finding the best solutions for them. Whether it’s website design, flash or mobile development to name a few, we cover all aspects of the digital and interactive experience. Right now we’re looking for an iOS developer who is keen to develop their skillsets. You may have had some time in the battlefield or maybe your still learning the trade. Either way we want to hear from you.

iOS (Cocoa framework) development experience
Experience in developing efficient and complex algorithms and heuristics
Proficiency in C, Objective-C and/or C++
Embedded software development and experience with iOS or Android
Code optimisation and memory/performance tuning
B.Sc. in Computer Science or equivalent

Does this sound like you? Do you think your potential is limitless? Are you not going to beat my high scores on the PS3? If you answered “HELL YES!!!” to any of those questions then drop us a line and tell us your story (or a good joke) we’d love to hear it.

be@infinityweb.co.nz www.infinityweb.co.nz

Applicants for this position should have NZ residency or a valid NZ work permit.