Is that a Jeroboam of champagne in your pocket or are you just pleased to see us?!!

Last night codegent scooped the FITC Award for Motion Graphics for our work with 40|30 at The Gherkin.

We beat off some really strong competition to win this award as we were short-listed with Coca-Cola and Warner Brothers so a huge congratulations to the codegent team for an amazing job – it makes me really proud!

Next up: the Webbys! You can help us put our trophy cabinet under further strain as there is also People’s Choice Award - you can cast your vote at http://pv.webbyawards.com. Our nomination section is Website » Ballot » Marketplace » Restaurant or click this link to go direct (you have to login first).

I'm off to iron my tux...

Wow! We are one of only a few UK based agencies to be included in this year's prestigious Webby Awards for our work on 40|30 at The Gherkin.

Hailed as the "Internet's highest honor" by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honouring excellence on the Internet.

"Nominees like Codegent are setting the standard for innovation and creativity on the Internet," said David-Michel Davies, executive director of the Webby Awards. "It is an incredible achievement to be selected among the best from the nearly 10,000 entries we received this year."

In a similar vein to our FITC Award nomination, we also eligible to win a Webby People's Voice Award, which is voted online by the global community. From now until 30 April, you can cast your vote at http://pv.webbyawards.com.

Our nomination section is Website » Ballot » Marketplace » Restaurant or click this link to go direct (you have to login first)

I can't believe it's the second time I am asking this in a month but if you could take a few minutes out to vote for us then I think you improve your chances of a place in Heaven ever so slightly :)

It's an amazing time for us right now and I cannot think of a better way to celebrate our 5th birthday on 1 May! We are so proud of the team that worked on this project.

We fly out to Toronto on Monday for the FITC awards...

The following email snippet was joyous music to our ears...

Congratulations!

You are one of the finalists for the FITC 2009 Awards!

Your project: 40|30, The Gherkin, 30 St Mary Axe
Has been nominated in the Category: Flash Motion Graphics

Our Awards show is on April 27th in Toronto and it will be during the show that the winners will be announced. So good luck!

To say we are a bit pleased would be an understatement. It's a great honour to be shortlisted at the awards for such a major flash event but we are up against some pretty stiff competition in Coca-Cola and Warner Bros. Fingers firmly crossed!

But you can help!

In addition to the formally judged categories there is a people's choice award - you could do us a massive favour and vote for us here. We will love you forever and ever if you do!

We were thrilled to be invited to the launch of Searcys 1847's new St Pancras Grand restaurant, in conjunction with GQ.

You know the usual thing with these types of affairs - you get a glass of champagne that is replenished before you get a third of the way down and then to soak it up you get 3 tiny hors d'oeuvre, so after a couple of hours you can't see straight.

The launch party at St Pancras Grand was different: the food, whilst still bite-sized, was absolutely amazing and there was plenty of it. It was quintessentially British food: bubble and squeak, fish and chips, roast beef and yorkshire pudding, as well as classic favourites such as oysters, smoked salmon.

Duncan Ackery, CEO of Searcys 1847, has selected an expert team, passionate about innovation, quality and service. Critically acclaimed, Billy Reid, is the executive chef. Having previously worked his magic at L’Escargot, the Vineyard at Stockcross and The Belvedere, Billy comes with excellent credentials and forms a formidable duo with Tom Aslanian managing the front of house.

How do we know all this? Well, we've had a long relationship with Searcys and have recently redeveloped a suite of sites for them including St Pancras Grand and 40|30, the restaurant at the top of the Gherkin (see McD's earlier blog).

www.searcys.co.uk

We are ecstatically pleased to be able to announce that we will be developing the lead sales and marketing tool for the restaurant and bar at the top of the world famous 30 St Mary Axe building AKA The Gherkin!

We haven't exactly set an easy stall out for ourselves with our design solution as we intend to develop a truly immersive web experience that will simply rock your world! More details in due course...

Obviously this has required many codegent team trips to the top of the tower, usually around lunch time or at the end of the day... drink o'clock. Long may our on-site "Recces" continue and our client's fantastic hospitality last :)

Watch this space people!

Interesting editorial comment in this week's New Media Age. Justin Pearse talks about production outsourcing. He quotes Poke's CEO as saying there is a need for a "Soho for digital production". In other words, where the advertising industry uses specialist production houses (traditionally based in Soho) to do the post-production work on its TV ads, so the digital industry needs the same thing. This would leave the full service digital agencies (such as Codegent) to get on with the "strategy" and "creative" elements of digital projects and not get their hands dirty on the grubbier production end.

In many ways this has been going on for years with marketing agencies who profess to offer digital. For them, digital isn't their specialism, so they may employ a 'head of digital', who acts as a liason between the creative in-house team and the outsourced digital production team. Sometimes agencies will be straight with their clients, sometimes they will lie and say that they're doing it all themselves and get the outsourced agency to stay quiet. Pearse cites BBH's technical outsourcing of the entire Lynx digital work to Preloaded.

Pearse conculdes ultimately that the separation of technical expertise is too vital to a digital agency to be separated from its core operations. I would tend to agree. Digital production is so much different to video post-production, in that there isn't a distinct cut-off point between creative and technical build. In many ways, much of the creative input is as much in the technology itself as it is in the visual elements of a project.

However, as with most things, the real answer as to whether it is good to outsource or not, is: "it depends". If all you are doing is building an HTML newsletter, or e-zine, or animated gif, or even a simple microsite for a client - then why not outsource? For these things the distinction between creative and build is clear (the only one caveat would be whether the designer actually understands the medium too - as designing for print and online is about as similar as driving a bus and a sports car). But, if you need something more than a tactical digital element, then I would always go for digtal specialists every time.

Technology and what we understand about user behaviour is evolving so quickly, how can someone outsourcing ever hope to be on top of it when they aren't actually doing it? And if they don't know about it, then what sort of strategic advice can they really give their clients?