An Epic Blog

Epic Agency is looking for a Swiss Army Knife Interactive Producer

Epic Agency, a human scale creative workshop in liege is looking for a talented interactive producer, who will help us in taking care of our beloved clients and helping us getting the  ones who still don’t know they want to work with us.

About you

• You have at least 4 years experience working in interactive agencies.
• You’re aware (for real, not like our beloved jean-claude) of the upcoming technologies and and still have an edge on competition.
• You have a real passion for web in each of its forms.
• You’ll need to be fluent in french, english maar u mag ook nederlands spreken ( it’s a plus).
• You live for challenges and you laugh at them (like Chuck Norris) because you’re obviously THE man (or woman, no offense).
• You were sung «for he’s jolly good fellow» so many times you can’t count them on your fingers.
• You were bullied at school because you were not only awesome but also you were taking notes about everything.
• You’ve been told many times you’re really good at listening to people.
• You sleep with your smartphone and there’s an iPad hiding over the pile of books in your toilets.
• When you’re not working, you love making photos, go waterskiing, or whatever…in other words, if you don’t already have one…get a life !
• You know that Steve would sell a lot less tablets if Mark had made his website in flash.
• You were just thinking that a good philosophy was missing in your job.
• If I say 300 you certainly won’t reply 4.
• You’re a perfectionist, but for real, not because it’s the easy thing to say in a job interview.
• You’ve got a driving license.
• You will also need a firm hand when time comes (And we don’t speak about violence here ).
• You have the ability to know when it’s time to speak…and when it’s not.
• You have the most excellent organizational skills…I mean you will have to handle a big-ass lot of stuff at the same time.

About the job

• You will have to manage each of our clients and you will succeed with class.
• You will have to be the most efficient project manager in town, because believe me…delay is not an option
• You will have to convert a simple prospect into an awesome client.
• You need to have some love for community management because Epic is growing and we want to make some noise.
• You’ll know that working with prestashop was a better choice than using magento on this one but not as good as choosing to replace flash animations by jquery ones to get more efficiency on the iPad.
• If something goes wrong, you’ll bear with self-control and you certainly won’t get a rest until everything is under complete control.
• You like and you’re good at writing offers (to be precise,you may not like it but you have to be good at it).
• The clients really love you and they always tend to smile when they see you coming and even if they know they’re money to spend here.

About the agency

Epic agency is a young belgian digital agency (2009) which proudly works everyday on ass-kicking projects such as highly interactive and creative flash websites, usable XHTML, HTML5 websites, efficient IPhone / IPad applications, nice and clever graphic identities, succesful e-commerce development, and many more great projects.
Our clients  include L’Oreal, Ice-Watch, Opera de Liège, Chocol@, Darcis, Hard Graft, Quatuor, Leidgens,…

Interested? Get in touch with us on info@epicagency.net

Epic Agency is currently looking for a web developer to join its forces.

The perfect candidate would be able to work in-house in belgium (We’ll provide beers and waffles) and he(she) will meet these requirements :

Your Skills

• You have at least 2 years of experience slicing/developing websites;
• Fluent in french or english (spoken/written);
• Possibility to provide some samples of your best code;
• An advanced knowledge of PHP and SMARTY, xHTML, CSS2/3;
• You’re alreading looking over the shoulder of HTML5 and you can’t wait to kick its ass;
• A proficiency in JavaScript/JQuery, the DOM, DHTML and AJAX;
• A really good eye for details, and pixel-perfect design;
• A real team player and you’ll be able to be part of something bigger (slightly);
• You are really really…I mean REALLY passionate by your job and you’re always a step beyond others;
• An expert exprience with accessibility, cross browser requirements, and graceful degradation;
• Did we mention you’ll have to be fluent in english or french?

About you

• We need you to be proactive and willing to keep on learning about emerging technologies;
• You’re passionate about new trends and developments;
• Capacity to laugh to Belgian humour (you’ve been warned);
• You’re a musician, a writer, a friendly companion or you like to design as well ? You’ve got all our attention;
• You’re living the internet, you’re eating the internet and you’re sleeping with the internet but you’re still in a human form;
• If you were always alone during lunch at school and if your best friend is your dog… well, we like dogs but we’re looking for a teamworker here!
• You must be able to understand the fun, challenges and long-term benefits of working with a young but very promising agency;
• Your mama doesn’t understand a single word of what you say when you’re talking about your work;

Your job

You’ll get to work with the next place-to-be in Belgian agencies.

As part of your job you will have to slice pixel perfect designs, to develop front-end websites, integrate e-commerce solutions, give a help to the development of our own CMS solution, play to the XBOX with us during lunch, get to challenge your skills every single day and perhaps we will even need you to tell jokes.

You feel like it’s a job perfectly made for you ?

then hit our mailbox at info@epicagency.net

We know it’s been a while since our last post but things are going crazy here at Epic Agency, between the FWA, a lot of new projects and a master developer seeking!

Anyhow, we’re back on tracks and we’ll start sharing new things with you soon! To be honest, we noticed the quite urgent need for a new blog design because this one isn’t quite easy to read and follow so, there’s one more task to add to the looooong one already started. You know…when it comes to personal promotion and communication, agencies are often dying to have some time to get things right, until then, be patient and we’ll keep you informed of the upcoming projects and features.

Smashing magazine

Cherry on the cake : last week, we were lucky enough to be featured in a smashing magazine article about “designing memorable websites“. The title in itself explains everything and even if we know these kind of round-ups can easily be criticized for the possible lack of judgement about UI elements and global usability we’re still really glad our portfolio made its way to international ears and eyes.

Job applications

For the last monthes we had some inhouse/freelance and internship applications coming from all over the world and we couldn’t be prouder! Sooooo, if you think you’re likely to please us, don’t hesitate and send over your CV to info@epicagency.net. There’s always a place for talented and passionate people here at Epic and even if currently there’s no opening, we’re always glad to hear from you guys.

cheerio!

First, we shamely reckon it has taken a much too long time to get a decent website but finally its  version 1.0 is here.
It’s shiny, it’s black, and it’s epic…the only downside in this yippee-yay story?

It will evolve like a pokemon during the next weeks with interactive stuff and pieces to show to your mamma! So comeback later and check it out again!
This very first year for Epic was a hell of a good year for us, with great projects, a lot of passion, some first recognitions and the very same lust for more!
Let’s get the ball rolling!

it’s over here : www.epicagency.net

Yesssss !
We are lucky to win the very first walloon FWA (read Favourite Website Award ) site of the day with our twitter based game : Tweets For Honor!
Speaking of honor, it’s certainly one for us to get this highly appreciated distinction and we’re more than ever determined to work harder and harder to honour this choice.
Thank you judges, thank you FWA, and the most important: thank you mommy and daddy!
*makes the chicken dance*

Today, something completely different is about to start here : talking about design stuff

Yup, I’m self confident enough in my pretented skills to start a discussion about it…

So here I am with a disarmingly common design mistake which really REALLY manage to get on my nerves : I’m talking about spacing here guys !

How come that most of the (young?) designers aren’t able to see that their content is completely eaten, pushed back,  by its surrounding elements. Le me be more precise here…let’s say you’re designing a website for one of your customer and you’re beginning to design the content the way you think it should.

During this long and difficult process, you still might want to insert texts, icons, lines, and so on…in other words : put content in your website…logical…

But it’s often the very beginning of your slow descent to the hell of failed UX websites and unreadable contents. Let’s be clear : I can see, everyday that too many designers would still come with this type of integration for a text

So what, some may ask?

Well…let’s say that the one thinking he can just push his content on the page as it was some kind of useless junk he had to use because the client intented to, is terribly wrong. The thing is content is the most important part of your page and no design could exist without content! First, i’m not an user experience expert but let’s say that some years working on webdesign taught me a lot of things, and amongst them :

• There will always be a lot of people who are a lot better than you are,
• There is still a lot of interesting stuff to learn everyday (and sometimes very far from your computer),
• Content is one of the most important thing when designing a website

As for the last point, my point is to remind you to treat the content as it IS part of the design and not an obstacle on your way. Webdesign is all about communication and not some art related considerations. You probably have a product / person / activity / whatever it is to present to the outer world. You just have to remember you’re not designing things for you, or for your ego, but for your client needs (well, if you’re working for you, I guess you’ll be more than happy to give an appealing image to your website).

Okay, I recognize I’ve been a little carried away here but this whole thing about “content” is helping me to get to my point : Let your content breathe because it’s part of the design, part of the very final aim of your website : presenting this very same content to the outer world.

To be clear, when you’re applying for a job, you’re very likely to get your nicest clothes and only wear them if they really fit you.

Nobody would want to see you apply with your socks all discovered by too-short pants. Everything is about harmony here and breaking this harmony will just give just another information about you…And I’m afraid that this first impression about you to your client won’t be as good as it could have been.

When it comes to a website and its content, this is all the same : things at their right place, with their right “strength”

When you begin to stick your text to the borders of your page / block, you’re just taking back all its strength and somehow perhaps its interest and readability.

Leaving space between borders and content is a good way to emphasize the content and to ensure it’s in the best condition to be read, and it’s the same with underlines and titles.

There is a lot more to say here, and I could take an infinity of example but as soon as I got my point, i’ll be happy with that right now.

Some of you may disagree with my way to point and explain things but I dare anyone to challenge me on the importance of white space in any graphic design or webdesign project. White space is the blood which flows in your design body to ensure its heart (the content) will still beat.

Period.

Hi everyone !

We’re back with some more stuff ! We’ve been really really busy these past weeks with a lot of projects and we also had to take (for some of us, including me) some vacations before going nuts with the past monthes activity. Anyway, the real surprise for you is a brand new interface for the “tweets for honor” game, and prizes to win this week!

In other words, you can now play directly within the interface and the game will interact by itself with twitter ! Can you make it even simpler than that?!

I don’t think so!

Moreover we changed the points system, the levelling, number of blocks, and so on…In brief: better, faster, stronger and also still playable with twitter.com or your favorite twitter client because we know you would want to block attacks even when you’re at the restaurant little nerdy warrior. We also have made a brand new demo video for you to understand the new gaming method.

Finally, as we really love you (or at least we tolerate some of you!) we decided to reward the 3 best spartans of the week with collector dvds from the “300″ movies (Yay, no one is surprised ) and a spartan helmet (it’s a miniature guys).

The contest will be launched today at noon and will last until next monday at the same time. The last man standing at the top will get the first prize and second and third players (according to their score) will get the second and third prize. Now you know everything and you are ready to tweet for honor dvds.

Everyhing starts today at noon on www.tweetsforhonor.com

Have fun !

The Epic Team

Good suprise today !

We had the surprise to notice we were featured in this month’s “talk magazine“ which is a belgian cutural mag about arts, music, design and all that kind of stuff.Thank you guys !

The next good news is that it is just before the release of our second version of Tweets for honor which is really better, new system of levelling, new interface, new buttons, well in brief a new game…We’ve been getting good reviews for the game, the idea, the design and the initiative but we are not pleased with the gameplay as it is right now and we think that it needs to get to the next level.

We’ll keep you informed with the last details as soon as we’re finally done with them ! There’s some good and new stuff coming from us right now !

At last, we’ve been receiving “9bulles” business cards 5 minutes ago and we want to share them with you. 9 bulles is a new brand*slash* e-shop which is set to be released soon and dedicated to pregnant women who are looking for clothes, etc… more informations on their facebook page

cheers !

The Epic Team

A lot of happy things to come, and a lot of nice projects to work on. Epic is one year old, long live epic, long live the team !

It’s been an exciting and amazing year and the one to come is even better. Someone told me that I should put the word amazing several times in the post. Whatever…

Amazing

Hum, it seems that my iCal is trying to tell me something… ;-)