Team Cooper Blog

It’s been 7 months now since I decided to take the leap and increase the company’s operations. I thought I’d post a little on what we’ve achieved so far and where we’re hoping to go.

I’ve certainly been keeping busy. I find most of my waking day is spent thinking about the business, talking with current & potential clients or solving some problem we are working on. It has well and truly become my obsession and I have really been enjoying it so far.

The first major step was getting our office sorted. Well, I suppose it wasn’t really that major a step, but it did give a lot of weight to the feeling that things were actually progressing. Actually one of the highlights for me so far was when the “Team Cooper Ltd” sign for the door finally turned up. It doesn’t look like much, but it meant a lot.

The second major step was employing Kyle. It has been great having an extra person to help out and delegate work to as it has meant that 3 important things have been happening. Firstly I have had time to spend on promoting the company and researching the ideas I have had. Secondly, when the need has arisen I have been able to take on a bit more work. Thirdly, we have been able to start development on our first production.
I don’t want to say too much about it just yet because there is still quite a way to go. All I will say is that it has been a monstrous effort so far and I can’t wait for it to go live.

Things should be all change again over the next couple of months. Some projects will be drawing to a close and some new ones (to be confirmed) will be running alongside and/or taking their place. I think that the these coming months should be the most exciting so far as there are a number of directions we could go right now depending on what the client decides. At least 2 of the options would require getting an additional person on board so if you happen to be a Flash Developer reading this and think you might be interested in joining us, please get in touch (The email address can be found in the contact section of the Team Cooper homepage).

In terms of future activities, we have a couple more small productions planned (which I hope to start development on as soon as the current one is launched) and one larger production which may not happen for a while, but will ultimately play a key part in demonstrating what we are capable of.

Finally, we should hopefully launch our new website soon. It won’t be anything too ground breaking just yet, but hopefully it will at least look cool.

A friend just sent me these links… and thought I would share. He likes the Lexus site best as he feels the navigation is really intuitive, even though it’s a very pretty site I found it frustrating, I’m very old fashioned and used to clicking my way round sites - it kept telling me off… so I’m voting for the AMG site

http://www.lexus-rx350.ru/

http://www.mercedes-amg.com/SL65BlackSeries/

I found this photo in Phil’s camera. It made me chuckle so I thought I’d share it.

Best caption win’s some stuff from my desk (Currently the prize fund includes a plastic fork, a pen lid, some lovely Team Cooper business cards, and a Kazoo).

Working from shared offices means that we share a fridge (and kitchen) with some of the other small businesses on our floor. Because all the offices seem to buy the same milk from the same shop from time to time, we’ve got into the habit of tagging ours. Today’s tag was so amazing, we decided to share it with you.

Mmmmmm. Penguin milk!

When we’re not busy… which is usually the crack of dawn on a Wednesday morning… we’ve been thinking about reworking the Team Cooper website. I’ve been looking at other agency sites  to find inspiration - thought I’d share my current favourites…

http://www.mcbd.co.uk/ apart from the acid yellow (I can’t decide if I love it or hate it) I love the approach of this site, the movement and use of offset planes.

I still quite like Dare… http://www.daredigital.com/ for straight forwardness

It’s a different industry but I really like the home page idea for getting everything you need to tell your audience quickly… http://www.seymourpowell.com/

And finally this is v.pretty… http://www.varywell.com/

Last Thursday we got invited by creative space to go on a site tour of the Electric Works building site.
Kyle and I went down at lunchtime to go and see the building and get an idea for where the new office will be.

My first impressions were so far so good. From the outside it is starting to look pretty impressive, and on the inside, although there are no internal walls or fittings, you could get a good idea of the space.
Toby Hyam took us round and was doing a good job of selling the building as we went. Apparently some of the businesses that have signed up for spaces will not completely make up their mind until the whole job is finished so I guess it’s up to the creative space team to try to get them to understand their vision for the building.

Having moved into other offices and had time to think a bit more about the prospect of moving into Electric Works, I have found myself weighing up the pro’s and cons of moving over there.

On the up side it will be a great building. I think it is very much going to be Sheffield City Councils poster child when it comes to pimping Sheffield as the new place to be for the creative and digital industries. That means lots of press attention (I hope) and lots of support (I really hope), which for a small company like us is a good thing. Toby was saying that they are looking to get in lots of high quality furniture and fittings to make the space a truly desireable place to be. In fact, he said it was going to be the nicest building they have been involved with so far and having been pretty impressed with the facilities at the round foundry in Leeds, I can’t wait to see the finished product here in Sheffield. Toby also reminded me of the regular networking events they are planning to hold. Parties, exibitions, shows and that sort of thing to give the tenants an opportunity to get to know each other better. This could be very handy for meeting people to collaborate with on larger projects. I think that being a small company it will good to keep close to other small creative companies for skills exhanges and other such things.

On the down side, the cost of renting the office is going to be almost double what we’re paying now and although it is a bigger office, it’s not twice as big.
Also, whilst the offices themselves will be arguably the best Sheffield has to offer for small businesses, their location is not. Sure they’re right next to the bus & train stations which is great for visitors (especially during conferences), but for the people that work in them, I can’t think of many nice places in close proximity to go eat, entertain clients, have informal staff meetings or after work beers. There is the Showroom, but that’s not a lot. In our current location we have all of West Street and Divison street to keep us amused.

That said, I won’t have to make the decision anytime soon. Apparently the building won’t actually be ready until March 2009 because the internal fit out has had to be delayed until the external work is finished. That’s 10 months away and a lot could have happened by then.

On a final note, Did I mention the slide? No? I wasn’t sure if it was going to actually happen, but Toby says there is definately going to be a spiral slide which runs from the 3rd floor down to the reception area at the front of the building. How cool is that!!?? I keep telling people about it, and nobody seems to believe me. As sad as it sounds, I think that is the single greatest thing about the building and those that know me well will find it no surprise that the office I have reserved is on the third floor. Heh heh.

Electric Works from the rear. Our office will be in the top right hand corner.

This is where our office will go. It will stretch from the window to the fire escape and will be 5 windows wide. Got that?

This is what will be the view from our office window. Should be fun watching the crazy’s hanging out in the bus station.

This is inside the front of the building taken from the 3rd floor looking down to where reception will be. You can’t really see properly because of all the scaffolding in the way, but this is where the slide will go.

I joined Team Cooper just under a week ago as a multimedia developer for ActionScript 3.0, PHP, MySQL and other fun stuff. I’m actually pretty new to those things so don’t expect to see any amazing AS3 stuff right away, but i’m learning!

I’ve just finished up a degree doing Computing (Visualisation) at Sheffield Hallam University where I did all sorts of stuff (databases, programming, design, even film editing and special effects!) but all throughout that I found that the thing I liked doing most was Flash, specifically Flash games. In fact, in my final year I even set up a website and so far I have a couple of games posted there along with a few bits and pieces of coding i’ve done.

Up until now i’ve mostly been working in AS2, self-taught from online tutorials, so as you can imagine my coding style was a bit sloppy. Moving to AS3 and learning the proper way of doing things has been an interesting experience (I can’t believe how easy it is to do some things that I was doing an incredibly difficult way before) and i’ve been enjoying it a lot so far.

Also, I’ve been tasked by Tim to create a cool game for the site so look out for that sometime in the future!

2 people joined the company this week which I am very excited about.
Emma brings with her a wealth of experience in delivering digital projects to end clients from her previous role. She will be spreading her time between helping with the marketing and branding aspects of the business and assisting with the contracting & consulting side of things.
Kyle is a very talented chap and has joined as an additional multimedia developer to assist me with the Flash and PHP work that I am doing. He has some background in the design and development of Flash games and should prove a valuable asset in helping to acheive the aspirations of the business.

Oooo first day, second blog post… cracking!

I’ve been a fan of Red Interactive’s website for a while but…

…I saw the Minuit site earlier and even though it’s probably quite a bit simpler I think I like it more, it’s definately cuter.

How exciting? As of Thursday I will be joining Tim and helping him/us build and develop Team Cooper.

I’ve been working as a web designer, flash developer, team manager in the digital world for over 8 years. The chance to work with Tim, for the clients we want to and on our own terms was too much to resist.

Also, I saw this… and even though it’s not that relevant, it reminded me of our branding, and it made we wonder - how much time do some people have???