What a month it has been at Evisua, now that the memories of Hooters have faded (unfortunately) and the dust has settled, we are in good swing! As Sam originally posted and as the work section has shown we have launched a couple of projects, BNT & Given.org. The former is BraveNewTalent which you can read about in Sam’s previous blog post.

Given.org was a very interesting experience. Sam and I both attended an even called Launch48, the event is aimed to get a whole host of web and marketing professionals in the same room. A whole load of the attendee’s pitch to the audience and we all vote for the best sounding 6 projects, which we then decide which we want to work on. Given.org was the project we decided to help out with. The guy who pitched it was Lucian, founder of http://www.BraveNewTalent.com so it ended up working out quite well for him that we decided to participate. To cut a long story short we turned around a website, a brand, and a working demo of the Facebook app with the hard work of a crack team of experts. Check out http://www.Given.org to get a little more information on the project.

Another great project we have just started is the website for the PCGamer Top 100, this is their annual “ask the readers” voting platform for finding out what the top 100 games of the year are. The task is to build a games database of 2009′s PC releases and allow the users to vote for their top 10 games, this will in turn decide the top 100 games of 2009 which will be announced next year, online and in the magazine. This a great project I had to pleasure to work on and build while I was at Future a year ago. It will be even more fun being the agency responsible for delivering a far more complex and important product.

We are well underway with a complete rebuild of the Fnatic website, this I can tell you is looking and working superbly! We are very excited by the prospect of launching this, it should blow away pretty much all other eSport websites. So keep an eye out in November for the launch of that!

Finally, I have the pleasure of being invited to the 27th Annual Golden Joystick Awards, presented by comedian Sean Lock at the Park Lane Hilton in London (a few doors away from the studio luckily!). Unfortunately it starts at 11.15am and going on until the wee hours, so as well as bring able to brush shoulders with the biggest names in gaming and a few celeb’s I am able to meet up with a few of my old colleagues at Future Publishing, so a good day and night all round there. More importantly, if not one person is interested in Evisua, UGame or Fnatic, then we must be doing something wrong! So here’s hoping!

For now, back to work!

In just under two months we have re-built the complete site of BraveNewTalent.com from scratch, on a tight budget, sticking within the deadlines and specification. We have delivered a site which went above and beyond our clients expectations and as a company we are extremely proud of our first large scale website!

Of course creating BraveNewTalent wouldn’t be possible without the BNT Team themselves, we thank them for their vision, their testing and their  openness. As well as being great clients, we have also a had a great time as friends with them, sharing a laugh  or two throughout the build phase was important, I’m sure this will continue in the months to come!

BraveNewTalent is a relatively unique concept, here is a summary of it:
BraveNewTalent  brings out the best of online recruitment and social networking combining them to create the ultimate  interactive job search. Through BraveNewTalent.com Talent and Employers can interact through messaging and forums offering a plethora of information about one another. Talent also has the opportunity to create relationships with other Talent gaining insight about potential employers before applying. Ultimately both the Talent and the Employer will have more information about one another creating a longer-lasting and better work-place experience.

We have worked closely with the team of Lucian Tarnowski, Alon Azar and Tim Tottenham from BraveNewTalent, here is what they had to say about working with us:

“Evisua certainly is London’s most lovable web design studio!  We have had many fun times, late nights and laughs over the last couple of months rebuilding the site from scratch.  We brought in Evisua after recognising our existing platform had poor foundations and needed a full rebuild.  We knew what we wanted and with the help of Evisua we have now relaunched! The team has worked closely with our own project manager and have together created a fantastic product and we are now looking forward to building on our relationship through further iterations of our product.  Big thanks to Evisua – they come highly recommended to all.”

Lucian Tarnowski, Founder and CEO BraveNewTalent.com

We’re excited to see where BraveNewTalent can go, and look forward to doing much more work with them in the future.

We are exploring some more exciting projects to work on soon, so if you or your company are after a new site, a redesign or even just a chat to talk about possibilities, then feel free to drop us a line!

Bye for now,
Sam

We have a few fast approaching deadlines with both BNT (Brave New Talent) an T3 (Future Publishing) which all arrive within a week of my return to the UK on the 17th, so the obvious option is to take one for the team and spend a few hours a day helping out, after all, the work would be on my mind anyway! In this case, big up’s to Sam, Michal, Paul and Antti for “hauling some ass” while I am luckily sunning it up!

I am of course still relaxing and having a good time, watched England’s demolition of Croatia last night in Hooters, interesting really, they have a reputation for being sleazy and/or tacky, the latter being true and actually written on their shirts! I am also taking some time on the beach and enjoying the all inclusive lifestyle as a true Brit, getting your money’s worth! I have also bought and awesome hat, which I will get a picture of later to show just how awesome it is!

For no, the restaurant is opening up so must be time for dinner, no more coding, design or email housekeeping for today!

The awesome hat

So, you can see the website, you can see some of our work and you can read our blogs, unfortunately our biggest problem so far is finding the time to spend on our own website! We have been inundated with project requests, negotiations, project scoping, wire-framing, designing and building.

First of all, as this is my first post it would probably be best if I introduce myself, my name is Gavin and I am Evisua’s Creative Director. Its has been 10 years since I wrote my first tag, doesn’t time fly!

So, what is going on at Evisua? well after all, we are a recent start up. We have been officially trading now for 2 and a half months, however our main product (The Evisua Kit) has been in development for the best part of 2 years. Just to bring you up to speed, the Kit is a fully featured social networking platform that can be tailored to any use, subject or interest. Our main example at the moment is over at UGame , so check it out if you want to see the power of the platform.

Our past work might be a little specific in subject (gaming) but this is because of the background both Sam and I originated. Heavily into gaming and spent a lot of time focusing on this subject. However now that we are officially a web design studio we are spreading our wings.

We have a great deal of work on at the moment, our main project is with a company called Brave New Talent, they have commissioned us to create a new website that will connect recent graduates and possible employers, offering the graduates a great chance at finding the kind of career they have been training for and for employers to have a very impressive talent pool to choose from when looking for new employee’s. This is a massive project for us and will keep us busy for a few months and beyond.

Another of our recent additions is The Filter, this is the creation of music legend and digital pioneer Peter Gabriel (Genesis), we are working with them to help them deliver their B2B (Business to Business) website.

Finally we have a local London company called iPlatform, they focus heavily on integrating your brand with social networking platforms so you can get the most of what social media has to offer. So we are working with them to help design and develop some rather funky Facebook integrated applications.

We also have a few other small bits and bobs we are working on including some of our own properties such as new versions of UGame and Fnatic, so with all this work you can see just how busy we are, not bad for a new but experienced studio eh?!

One thing I think would be wrong of me to ignore is the fact we had our official company launch party last weekend (Friday Aug 14th). Suffice to say it was a huge success, turning in almost 200 people at Adam Street private members club for a well earned free bar, good times and of course the main attraction – lube wrestling! – before I show any of the photos I would firstly like to say thank you to all those who came and especially those who were game enough to compete!

Launch party photos: Here (thanks to Adam Charnock) & Here (thanks to Paul Clarke).

For now, take care and look forward to my next post!

Our current compatriots in our office space are the good chaps of BraveNewTalent.com, a social network connecting graduates for large graduate employers. We have made a nice area for ourselves, complete with bean bags, projectors, 32inch TV and many 22inch monitors to feast our hard working eyes on. We hope to be sprucing the area up in the near future to make it sexier so stay tuned for some photos!

Our location:
Click for larger map