» Interactive Art Director

» Senior Interactive Designer

These are both fulltime opportunities in the heart of Center City, with easy access to the subway and regional rail. They each come with great benefits and perks, and they both come with the opportunity to embrace your creativity and take pride in the work that you do. This is the philosophy that has led us to more than 130 awards in the past five years and we want you to be a part of the next bunch we haul in.

And hey, if these opportunities don’t sound like quite the right fit for you, but they sound perfect for a friend or relative who may be underappreciated where they work now, well then pass it along! We’d love to meet them.

To apply to either position, please send your resume and salary requirements to careers@singularitydesign.com.

Singularity is more than a traditional advertising or marketing agency. What we really are is a company and a culture of ideas. We bring to life brand stories that people want to experience again and again. We work to make relationships flourish and elevate our client’s brands. We work every day to conceive, create and build relevant user experiences that can play across all media.

We are part of the Communications Media Inc. family, a minority-owned, privately held firm that treasures a work/life balance, prides itself on its diverse staff, and is committed to the future of communications. We love to have fun – just ask us about our last community service day or our company-wide picnic. We strive to make sure our employees have access to the latest and greatest; the rumors are true: yes, we gave every single employee an iPad when Apple launched them.

Designers with tunnel vision need not apply. Our client base stretches across the spectrum, so versatility is crucial. The ideal candidate will be able to infuse their own style and creativity into any genre of design. You will work with the client, the programmers, the project manager, and anyone else involved in the project to deliver great results.

YOU WILL:

1. Work closely with our Executive Creative Director and Art Director, as well as collaborate with developers, programmers and project managers
2. Take direction as given to produce high quality work and to ensure all clients needs and expectations are surpassed
3. Assist in projects by helping with photography, image preparation and creation of other assets when needed
4. Follow projects through from brainstorming sessions to comps to final websites

REQUIREMENTS:

1. A passion for creativity
2. A body of work that demonstrates your vision, versatility and attention to detail
3. A strong understanding of the potential of online and interactive design as well as industry best practices
4. Proficiency with Adobe CS4 applications
5. The desire to continuously learn new things and push your boundaries
6. Knowledge of HTML, CSS and Flash are not required, but a definite plus
7. Skills such as 3D, Video and Illustration are also a big plus
8. Must be able to be proactive and able to manage your own time to ensure delivery of projects within tight deadlines
9. Must have strong written and verbal communication skills

We are Singularity Design. We work hard, we have lots of fun doing it, and we make an impact. Take one look at our website (http://www.SingularityDesign.com) and you’ll see that we’re passionate about creativity, devoted to making the most of technology, and dedicated to getting great results for brands. If you’re the right fit, you’ll get to work with a very select group of digital professionals, on the same kinds of projects that have brought us nearly 120 awards in the past five years!

We offer an excellent benefits package including medical and dental. Please send your resume and salary requirements to creativejobs@singularitydesign.com and reference the Senior Interactive Designer position in the subject line. Singularity Design is an Equal Opportunity Employer, M/F/D/V.

Singularity is more than a traditional advertising or marketing agency. What we really are is a company and a culture of ideas. We bring to life brand stories that people want to experience again and again. We work to make relationships flourish and elevate our client’s brands. We work every day to conceive, create and build relevant user experiences that can play across all media.

We are part of the Communications Media Inc. family, a minority-owned, privately held firm that treasures a work/life balance, prides itself on its diverse staff, and is committed to the future of communications. We love to have fun – just ask us about our last community service day or our company-wide picnic. We strive to make sure our employees have access to the latest and greatest; the rumors are true: yes, we gave every single employee an iPad when Apple launched them.

The Interactive Art Director’s role is to initially collaborate on overall campaign ideas and concepts with the team. Other than the Creative Director, the Interactive Art Director will be the most senior ‘hands-on’ creative for an interactive design project or online creative campaign and must have the ability to look at the ‘bigger picture’ and the details at the same time. You will work with the client, the programmers, the designers, the project manager, and anyone else involved in the project to deliver great results. All of these people contribute their insight and talent, and it’s your job to make sure that the end result remains as closely related to the concept as possible.

MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS:

1. A great book
2. Qualified candidates will have 5+ years agency experience

SKILLS:

1. Strong concept development and graphic design ability.
2. Excellent understanding of composition, color, and typography.
3. Strong working experience with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash.
4. Experience creating and working with site maps, storyboards, user flow, wireframes, and other information design documents for web sites and online advertising.
5. Experience working with various online ad design specs and media requirements.
6. Understanding of user experience issues
7. Solid experience creating Web graphics, animations, user interfaces, and layouts for use in online advertising and web site projects.
8. Experience providing art direction to Flash and Web Developers
9. Ability to self-manage projects and work within time deadlines
10. Team oriented, self-motivated

EDUCATION REQUIREMENTS:

1. Bachelors degree in graphic design or equivalent in education and experience

We are Singularity Design. We work hard, we have lots of fun doing it, and we make an impact. Take one look at our website (http://www.SingularityDesign.com) and you’ll see that we’re passionate about creativity, devoted to making the most of technology, and dedicated to getting great results for brands. If you’re the right fit, you’ll get to work with a very select group of digital professionals, on the same kinds of projects that have brought us nearly 120 awards in the past five years!

We offer an excellent benefits package including medical and dental. Please send your resume and salary requirements to creativejobs@singularitydesign.com and reference the Interactive Art Director position in the subject line. Singularity Design is an Equal Opportunity Employer, M/F/D/V.

Yes, it’s highly technical. Yes, it’s a B2B offering. No, that didn’t stop us from slathering on the creativity and giving Max some serious personality. We also gave him a real raison d’être by putting him face to face with the ContamiNites, a group of nasty little buggers that need to be zapped, trapped and scrapped in order to leave us with clean soil and water.

Check out http://www.Max-Ox.com to get a good look at Max. Play the mini-game on the homepage to unlock the secret room, and click around the site to see all the ways Max deals with the ContamiNites!

Read “Syncing the iPad with Your Brand’s Digital Strategy” here.

The iStrategy series of events invites marketers, CMO’s and brand stewards to gather in cities like Chicago, Sydney, London and Singapore to consume a 3-day program of content and interaction from globally recognized experts and leaders.

Success in software and technology these days generally means being open to integration. APIs and interchange of data have almost become standard requirements, and consumers increasingly expect them. As a consumer, it gives us freedom and power, but the concept and the extent is something that is very new to the software industry, and some of the strains of adaptation are starting to show up in some very public spats between tech giants.

The most obvious ones over the past year have centered around Apple, and it’s artificial boundaries around the iPhone and iPad platform. I’m not taking sides on this issue. I can see both the good and the bad. I don’t like the fact that there are applications that I would want (that people want to develop and sell to me) that aren’t allowed past the gatekeepers. On the flipside, I value the relatively high level of security that comes from the approval process. Witness the study released a few days ago finding that 20% of the apps in the Android app store can threaten your privacy in varying ways.

Of course, the major public Apple spats are related to a) Flash, b) non-Apple app development tools and c) competitive mobile ad offerings from Google. Apple has a public line on each of these, but it’s really a power struggle over control. We’re used to computers that will run whatever software and function we choose to run on them, and phones that only give us what the carrier or manufacturer provides. The iPhone is actually another mashup.

If the Apple/Adobe/Google struggle was the only one, it probably wouldn’t have warranted this blog post. What inspired me is a new spat between two completely different high-profile players: Facebook and Twitter. Facebook, which is well known at this point for questionable privacy practices and data sharing, also seems to be struggling with a desire to only share with its own “friends”. Twitter introduced new features into its Facebook app to enhance what its users can do, and Facebook promptly blocked those features. The two claim to be working together to figure it out, but my guess is that Facebook would prefer to just leave the blockade in place.

The Genie of Integrations is out of the bottle and consumer expectations have been reset to include free-flowing data and blurred lines. The technology companies know that this same flow can accelerate a good product from zero to success in no time flat, so they have to be open to it, but we should expect more (and louder) battles in the next few years as the industry adapts to the new reality. Hopefully there won’t be too many great innovations that fall as casualties.

1. The Fail Whale is triggered by the system either a) having no available threads to process a request or b) having a request time out while waiting to be filled.
2. A request that has timed out has still occupied system resources while waiting to be processed, so the longer that timeout period is, the more likely a Fail Whale is to spawn more Fail Whales.
3. A longer timeout period gives a request a better chance to be fulfilled, but means more resources will be occupied by pending requests. A longer wait also gives more chance for us impatient clickers to hit “Refresh” (I’m guilty, but I’m not the only one).
4. A shorter timeout period means fewer stacked up requests, but a greater chance that any given request will timeout (calling more Fail Whales to the surface).
5. Finally, most of us are never quite content to sit back and bask in the majesty of a single Fail Whale. Nope, we always try back in a few seconds or a few minutes, hoping to break out of the pod into open water and get back to our Twittering. Obviously, that doesn’t help because we just increase the load that much more.

So, my solution for the Fail Whale problem is…. hmm…. yeah, no solution that I can offer. I can just offer my sympathies for the Twitter engineers working on the problem and my hopes that they get those whales back out into the open ocean before we start to give up and look for other channels.

In terms of web analytics, we’ve come a long way from the days of just counting hits and generating monthly reports. Tools like Google Analytics give us robust metrics and the capability to analyze all aspects of visitor behavior and site usage. I’m a huge fan of what the guys at Google have developed, and in large part GA has replaced the log-based tools that we used to use (WebTrends, SmarterStats, etc.). Still, recent developments have made me reconsider the use of log analysis tools.

The development that was a real eye-opener was Google’s own release of a browser plugin to block Google Analytics from tracking your visits. GA has always had a few weak spots, especially in regards to browsers that don’t support JavaScript, but now we face the prospect that fully functional (and relatively advanced) web users might start flying under our radar, lowering site traffic and skewing data. The worst part is that we might never know it!

So now we have technology that is decreasing the effectiveness of our technology. What can we do about it? Well, in reality if we want the most robust data to work from and the largest set of options in analyzing it, we should be using BOTH a page-tagging method (like Google Analytics) AND a log-parsing method (like SmarterStats, WebTrends or Omniture). Each one will give us a different view of traffic, with different strengths:

Page-tagging

1. Strengths: Richer data about browsers and computing platforms,
2. Weaknesses: Susceptible to privacy and opt-out plugins, as well as browsers without JavaScript. Provides no data on bandwidth and other media file usage.

Log-parsing

1. Strengths: Full access to all file requests. Ability to clean/modify data and reprocess.
2. Weaknesses: May miss pages/files when they are cached on the client-side. Less ability to manipulate tracked data from complex webapps and Flash.

Yes, it may seem like a pain to have to use different tools to collect and analyze what “should” be the same data, but that’s the state of affairs for web analytics, and I don’t think it will get any simpler. The long and short of it is that if you have enough traffic (and enough untapped opportunity) to justify the resources, go for a combined approach (and if you can afford it, go for a higher end package that can merge both types of data). Happy measuring!

Singularity’s winning entries are:

1. First Place in Web Design (Non-Flash) for www.FamousCookies.com
2. Second Place in Web Design (Flash) for www.OperationDairy.com

With over 60,000 entries annually, the ADDY® Awards are the world’s largest and arguably toughest advertising competition. The ADDY® Awards represent the true spirit of creative excellence by recognizing all forms of advertising from media of all types, creative by all sizes and entrants of all levels from anywhere in the world. The American Advertising Federation, a not-for-profit industry association conducts the ADDY® Awards through its 200 member advertising clubs and 15 districts. It is the only creative awards program administered by the advertising industry for the industry.

The Addy Awards are organized in a 3-tier structure. Entries are first judged and selected within each member club. SingularityDesign.com received a Gold Addy at the Philadelphia Addy Awards in March. Gold winners at the club level (along with select Silver winners) are forwarded to the district-level competition.

District 2 incorporates 16 local clubs covering 6 states, including:

1. Ad Club of Metropolitan Washington D.C.
2. Advertising Association of Baltimore
3. Advertising Federation of Central Pennsylvania
4. Advertising Women of New York (AWNY)
5. African American in Advertising
6. Albany Ad Club
7. Advertising Club of Buffalo
8. Advertising Federation of Northwestern Pennsylvania
9. Greater Frederick Advertising Federation
10. Lehigh Valley Advertising Club
Northeast Pennsylvania Advertising Club
11. Philadelphia Advertising Club
12. Pittsburgh Advertising Club
13. Rochester Advertising Federation
14. Syracuse Ad Club
15. The Advertising Club (of New York)

With this Gold Addy at the district level, the Singularity website will now be forwarded to the national judging, joining winning entries from the other 14 districts around the United States. National winners will be announced on June 12, 2010.

We are very familiar with industry recognition. Our agency has received nearly 120 awards for its work since 2005, firmly establishing itself as one of the most creative agencies in Philadelphia. In 2009, Singularity was acquired by Communications Media, Inc., a leading media agency with offices in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, transforming Singularity into a full-service digital advertising agency. Singularity serves well known brands across industries including consumer packaged goods, food & beverage, higher education, health & wellness, and business services.