Digital media was first a passion, then the subject of my studies and finally my profession. In fact, I deal with consulting and development of interactive software, be it a site, a web application, an advergame or anything else.
Although sometimes I work on commission taking care with my client of every aspect of the job, my professionalism is best applied in providing an integration service or support to the work of advertising agencies, communication agencies and events planners, web agencies, software houses or graphic studies both as a consultant in the design phase and as developer in the subsequent implementation phase.
Whether it is to operate more independently or more in synergy, in any case, working (well) in company is always more interesting than alone 🙂
I can create websites (or parts of websites) with particular functionalities and a custom contents management system.
During more than twenty years I have worked (alone, or much more often in collaboration) on company websites, product catalogs, mini-sites and landing pages linked to advertising campaigns, contests and games with draw prizes and more.
In general, when looking for solutions, I attach great importance to robustness, lightness, maintainability, accessibility, safety, adherence to standards, orientation towards the protection of users in terms of privacy and of user experience.
In development when possible and wise I prefer to avoid large frameworks and libraries or to make the website depend on the availability of third parties.
Compared to a website, which is a software focused on communication, an application is a software centyered on tasks completion, even if in reality the difference is not sharp: a site can often have applications in its contents, and vice versa.
I happened to make several web apps, with different degrees of complexity: product configurators, management tools for booking, organization charts and documents or creation tools for contents to be shared social medi and the like.
Between native applications (i.e. developed and compiled to be installed on a particular operating system and distributed mostly through third-party "store" channels) and web applications (i.e. that they work directly in the browser or even offline in a browser window inside a "shell" or link on the desktop / home screen) in the most common cases I think web applications are preferable, for reasons of economy, flexibility, maintainability and freedom of distribution.
I have always enjoyed developing video games since the 2000s when the main tool for this type of content was Flash.
Since then I've been involved in sponsored entertainment games for magazines online, promotional games stand-alone or as part of the media mix of advertising campaigns or also associated with prize gadgets to submit questionnaires or collect data in stores, fairs and events.
As simple as video games can be, it often involves more effort than it could seem. It's a process that requires you to spend a lot of time on test iterations and to keep an eye always focused on performance. It needs custom quality multimedia materials. It is an adventure that I hardly face alone and obviously it is limited to the "casual games" category, quite far from millionaire productions of commercial video games.
Although nowadays most people have access to the internet anytime and anywhere, there are occasions in which providing users with an interactive information device is preferable to letting them alone with a QR-code.
Sometimes I have created interactive content both online and offline to give information and instructions, to collect data or to propose small games or questionnaires. I see more often the use tablets, cheaper and more portable, given for temporary use or guided by a clerk, compared to more expensive and bulky (even more flashy) kiosks or touch screen totems, especially for impromptu events.
When I have time, I really enjoy keeping up to date and experiencing the opportunities offered by (endless) technology and computer science for bot professional culture and pure curiosity.
In this last period of turbulent ferment of technologies and services linked above all to artificial intelligence, I have decided to systematically consolidate and expand my basic knowledge in order to be able to act with greater awareness and agility in the future scenario.