A little feature in .net magazine
I haven't written anything for a while since I've been busy with a few things, but just opened up my latest copy of .net magazine and found my face in there, where I talked about siteinspire.net.
My interview on MinimalSites.com
I feel very honoured to be featured as the member of the month on the newly redesigned and very sexy, MinimalSites: a website dedicated to profiling the very best minimal web design right now. In it, i talk about why I started siteInspire, and some details of my new venture, Kulör.
It does feel odd though that a web design gallery profiling another web design gallery, like one big Droste effect...!
Many thanks to Jung of MinimalSites!
The Uniqlo digital creative archive
I am a huge, huge fan of Uniqlo's digital work, so I was excited to see that they have created a handy archive featuring all their past projects. Make sure you check out all the Uniqlock pieces featured there, which I think started the whole thing off.
Iain Tait’s digital predictions for 2010
I enjoyed checking out Iain Tait's trend predictions in digital for 2010. I think it's mainly tongue-in-cheek but I agree with a lot of them. I partciularly look forward to the social media expert actually doing something constructive rather than talking about it...
“The Social Media Guru”
I know it's a bit hypocritical to post something about the amazing advances in social media and then this in the same breath, but I found this very funny video created using Xtranormal that sums up a typical social media expert.
My bug-bear with the new crop of "experts" is that they are peddling expertise in a medium which because of its social nature is inherantly not difficult to use and requires no expertise. A brand's use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. all demand just a modicum of common sense, yet it seems so many brands get it hopelessly, embarrassingly wrong, presumably after paying chaps like this a ton of cash to help.
The social media for any brand is easy: sign up for the (free) tools, and have a meaningful, two-way conversation with your consumers; but only after you have your core operations and marketing processes have been tightened and locked-down.
For instance, everyone's least favourite brand, BT, are on Twitter ready to handle the torrents of rant and hatred on Twitter yet can't even handle their own basic customer service procedures: a case where use of social media is damaging the brand even more.
Letters of Note
I'm particularly enjoying the website, Letters of Note that I found via Kottke. It features a fantastic array of fascinating letters and postcards from historical and contemporary figures, including Roald Dahl (above), Stephen Fry, Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, and a letter from Charles Monteith, then commissioning editor at publishing Faber & Faber, who sent a note to fellow editor and poet T. S. Eliot recommending Ted Hughes...
Welcome to the social media revolution…
Just found this excellent compilation of social media stats, put together by Erik Qualman. There are some pretty staggering figures here, but I do wonder how quickly they'll all be out of date: they probably already are, but it's start to get a handle on the scale and opportunities...
Bring Fling: How Mobile is Changing Design
I've only just realised that Adam Greenfield and Bring Fling look alike. Maybe it's time I go for the shaven head and specs look. (The image was borrowed from Maykel Loomans' Flickr stream.)
Brian Fling is a interactive designer for both the web and mobile and has worked with hundreds of businesses from early stage start-ups to Fortune 50 companies. He is currently the president (and co-founder) of mobile and web-app agency Pinch/Zoom. His talk at dConstruct was focussed around the idea that mobile is in fact be changing the way in which designers are thinking differently about the user and their context, and how this has implications on application design.
Adam Greenfield on the Elements of a Networked Urbanism…
On Septmber 4, I spent the day in Brighton for this year's dConstruct conference, which invited some leading thinkers from the fields of ubiquitous computing, interface design, gaming and mobile to explore the challenges of designing for tomorrow. I'm going to post a few notes about some of my favourite talks from the day, starting with Adam Greenfield.
Greenfield is presently Nokia's head of design direction for user interface, but has spent much of career as an information architect, most notably at Razorfish in Tokyo. His talk at dConstruct was based mainly around his book, Everyware, which concerns the question of what possibilities are going to open up for those who live in cities, once we move to a state of ubiquitous computing.
Michael Lebowitz on D&AD’s “viral” category
Big Spaceship's Michael Lebowitz on judging the viral category at the D&AD awards. He calls for the category to be completely removed, and I couldn't agree more. He argues that viral describes an effect of a piece of communication, not the communication itself.
New Hyperisland digital media crewsite launches: “meh”...
Hyperisland - the digital media and management school in Stockholm and Karlskrona, Sweden - recently launched their digital media crewsite, 53colors.com. The site itself is a fairly good Flash-mania portfolio site (not as good as the video site that was launched (I think) last year) but features a bizarre, badly produced Harry Potter-esque and incongruous video splash page.
I have just looked through all 53 portfolio sites, and sadly there is very little to comment on. I picked out a few people whose work I thought was pretty nice, namely Maja Bergstrand (her very confident ‘hello’ video will win her over to most agencies I’d think), Kirstofer Forsell (whose Kicks site caught my attention), Johan Dettmar, and my favourite, Anders Nærø Tangen, whose portfolio site and blog I’ll be putting onto siteInspire.
Overall I was pretty disappointed with the portfolios. So many featured quite staid web design, a lot of which we’ve seen before and it is very sad to see so many portfolios with a ‘web 2.0’ aesthetic. If anyone should be responsible for killing it off it should be the new talent coming out of such a great school.
Update: I just found the HTML version of 53colors.com: much more user friendly and enjoyable to browse.
Six recent additions to my RSS feeds
I recently discovered a few really nice design blogs that I regularly follow… I don’t think any of them are particularly new, but I’ve only just found them!
New version of It’s Nice That launches
The boys upstairs have just flipped the switch on the new version of everyone’s favourite design blog, It’s Nice That. It has been a while in development, but looks really great and they have added a ‘features’ section for longer posts such as interviews, as well as a shop.
You can find details of their new physical publication. I saw a copy the other day and it’s really… nice.
Digital campaign for the world’s thinnest condom; “Love Distance”
Iain Tait recently posted a great piece about Japanese digital talent on his blog, and picked out a few highlights from the One Show Interactive Awards, of which he was a judge.
One of them - Love Distance, by GT Tokyo and Non Grid - really captured my imagination and is one of the most ambitious digital promotions I have seen in a long time. The idea at the core of the piece is really simple: two individuals - a man from Tokyo and his lover, from Fukuoka (1,000km) apart run to each other over the duration of a month, and is documented on TV and the website through video blogs, messages, etc.
Only at the end of the campaign is the brand and product revealed: the world’s thinnest condom, at only 0.02m.
While I’m on the subject of Japanese web stuff, make sure you see Uniqlock by the agency, Projector. Also Creative Review posted some stuff about Uniqlo’s latest digital campaign, also by GT, which is pretty compelling.
What is information architecture?
I often call part of what I do information architecture, but since it’s a very new and somewhat nebulous area of web design and development, not many people know what it means. UX Booth recently posted this excellent article about what information architecture is, and also provides links to notable IAs to follow, books, Twitter links, and other related posts.