AKQA – Revealed

Well, some of you may have noticed a couple of tweets, over there on the right that informed you about my trip to AKQA. That is obviously not enough info on the topic, so here is the 411!

Guys at AKQA: Sorry, I cannot remember everyone’s name that I met at the studio. The only ones I can remember, were obviously Andy, and Adam(?). Sorry to all the others, I still remember our discussions though :)

Right well, here it is:

I arrived there at about 11am, after a trek from Waterloo, to St John’s Lane.
I rounded the corner. “Where is it?”, my dad kept asking.
“Over there, over there”, I said, “Bloody hell! There it is, AKQA!”.

Their offices were absolutely fantastic. Smart doesn’t even come close. So, me and the rest of the clan walked up to the reception. Nervous doesn’t even start to tell you how I feel. After asking the receptionist how to enter AKQA’s flagship, we entered the lift and headed to the fourth floor.

The doors opened. We were so quite, you could hear a pin drop. We walked out into the main reception, and headed over the where 3 or 4 attractive ladies were sat. “Hi… err…”, I stumbled, ” I’m here to see Andy.”.
“OK, take a seat over there please.” she replied.

We turned round to face the fancy waiting area. Our heads turning in opposite directions taking in as much as possible of the fantastic studio. My parents and I sat down. I turned an smiled at the person that was next to my dad. He smiled back, then continued working on his very fancy looking MacBook (Pro?). “Damn, I’m jealous…” I remember thinking. A few seconds later, he stood up and asked “Are you Harry Northover?. “Yes I am!” I replied with a slight quiver in my voice. We all stood up and shook hands, me being supported by to poles of jelly. “I take it that you are waiting for Andy?” he enquired.
“Yes, I am”.
“I’ll just go and find him for you” he replied.

The chatter continued…

“Do you often do this? Invited younger people up to the studios?” My mum asked.
“No, it’s actually pretty rare for this to happen. Harry has been talked about a lot around the studio” he said.
This did my already quivering nerves no good at all!

A few minutes later Andy appeared. There were the usual introductions and this was when I found out the itinerary of the morning. After this, my parents disappeared back down the lift, and I walked off with Andy down to there cafe/eating area.

What do I say now???

During this little interval, I found out quite a lot about the London office and the company itself. There are 380 employees there, and they are running out of space!

We reached the cafe-cum-dining area and managed to find a table we could perch on.

“Would you like a drink? Coke, Coffee?”
“Coffee, two sugars, White. Please”

My mouth had gone so dry by now, talking was becoming more like drinking super-glue :).

Andy came back with my coffee. Then we started talking.
“So how did you get in to web design then?”
I told him all about how I came into Flash, and why I have stuck at it.
Then we moved on to new stuff that they had/were working on.

This discussion went on for ages. It was great to talk to somebody who knew more about Flash/Flex etc, than I did. I only usually talk to myself or attempt to talking to my parents, which never goes anywhere (as you could possible imagine) :)

I started to relax a bit now, but still didn’t know where to put my hands! Then we moved onto Silverlight, and where it was going. I was out of my depth here. I had been so into Flash for the past year or so, I hadn’t really bothered to play around with it.

“Deep Zoom is a great part of Silverlight. Have you seen it in action. It is very easy to use, compared to doing it in Flash” he informed me.
“Err, I’ve seen one example…” I replied. What an idiot I felt like! Silverlight is one of the most up and coming technologies and I hadn’t taken the time to play around with it! I swore to myself that I will start to use it when I get home. Thinking about it now, two days later and I still haven’t, damn…

When our chat finished, we walked over to his desk. At least that is what Andy called it. I couldn’t see any thing resembling it, apart from the all stuff on top of it must of had something supporting it :) Apparently that was on a good day! He is the only person in the studio with 3 screens, very impressive!

I met a few of the guys in his team. They were great, and helped to calm my nerves even more. Cheers guys!

Then I had a tour of the studio. Blimey, the place was absolutely awesome! As I walked round, I started to think what a plonker I was sat night after night at my PC, compared to these guys. I started to feel at home when I saw what I thought was FlashDevelop :) .

As we went round the 2 floors, words like architect, and user experience kept popping up. This got me worried. I knew nothing about that. Flash/Flex anything like that I can handle, but things like that are way out of my depth.

On my way round Andy introduced me to one of their guys that came up with ideas. It was a very interesting discussion. We ended up talking about a TV humping chicken :) !! He was a very nice guy indeed!

After that, I continued my tour. It was great, seeing how such a great agency is organised, and how their teams interact with each other. The key to this is for each team to have a fairly good idea about what the other does. This gives them a good idea of what the other is capable of, what sort of time frame is needed, and what sort of stuff could be implemented easily and what can’t. Also, on the developer front, I found out how they keep their code to a standard that is understood by all developers working there. This was achieved by developing a custom library of functions etc. Like Cairngorm, but glib (the name of the library) had a universal interface which was understood by all developers. This meant one dev could write the code, and another could maintain it without any trouble. The same princeable is used for developing game engines. This helps the game engine developers updated existing code, with out the people using the engine having to rebuild their game.

Once the tour was finished, we returned back to the dining area. Andy grabbed his MacBook Pro, and started showing me some very cool site. It was nice to see my blog appear on his screen when he opened the lid, or was that just for effect? :) Anyway, first of he showed me this. It is a great blog, be sure to check it out.

Then we moved onto Nike Bootcamp. This was really interesting, as it is actually a Flex app, but could you tell? No way! Their components are skinned in Photoshop, then used in Flex. This is a great example of how powerful, and flexible Flex really is! No pun intended….

Then Dave came over and sat down. Andy disappeared for a while, while I was shown some of the other cool projects that were on the net. Not necessarily done by AKQA though. This was when I was introduced to Away3D. I had briefly heard of it, but this gave me more of an incentive to give something other than Paparvision3D a try.

He also showed me the Ferrari California site. As we chatted, I found out that quality took priority over loading time. He told me that if you visited this site, that majority of viewers would want to wait and view good quality pictures, not a quicker loading time which in turn would result in not so good video/pictures. This defnitly made sense and relates back to this post here, I wrote a while back.

We chatted for a good amount of time, and like the conversation I had with Andy earlier, it was great. Really informing. I hoped what I said made some sort of sense :) . Then, Adam came over, and started to chat away as well.

Adam was the whole reason I was invited to their studios. I left a comment on their FWA Hall Of Fame page, a he noticed it and got put through to my site! Cool eh? It’s amazing that all it takes is a comment!

This discussion was sort of different to the others. A lot of it was about school and Uni. Adam just about managed to make me stay in school + uni :) After the tour I was prepared to walk out at 16, but I think I’ll stay! He also explained why AKQA look for younger talent like my self. They needed younger people to come in with new ideas, and also people with a completely different approach to creating a site. They needed someone to go at it like a bull in a china shop, but with the more experience guys like Adam to hold them back, they can combine to two. This gives you fresh ideas, but also makes sure they are plausible, and useful to the project in hand.

Once I had finished talking to Adam, Andy came back. My time in AKQA London had come to an end :(. I felt so at home by this time, I would have done anything to stay just a little bit longer! :)

When I thought things couldn’t get any better, Andy had a few surprises waiting for me! That was very nice indeed. Then my parents, Andy and I all headed out to lunch! It was great!

I would like to thank Andy for inviting me up there and giving me the chance to see the studio, and the simply awesome people that made such inspirational work happen. I would also like to thank the other guys that I had a chat to, and even anyone who smiled at me :)! It gave me the biggest confidence boost, and inspired me to carry on striving to achieve. There is no experience that could of matched the one I had on Monday. Thank you very much indeed!

Harry.