Noisy Decent Graphics

We Make Stories

We've just spent a very enjoyable hour listening to The Boss and playing with Jeremy's new project We Make Stories.

It's the latest in the excellent We <verb> Stories series and follows on from the multi award winning We Tell Stories. It's a story making thing for 6 - 11 year olds. My kids are younger but they still enjoyed it.

You can build comic books, treasure maps and even a pop up book which you can print out and make pop up! It's really simple to use, a 6 year old could do it alone, and it looks great.

The interactions are nice. Playful, cute and well done.

If you have kids and you're permantly attached to the computer, you should combine those skills and make some stories this weekend. After you've been outside playing with the organic carrots etc etc.

Jeremy found 3 of the designers used in the project via Noisy Decent Graphics. ico who made remixit, comic creator, and Telling Tales. Studio Tonne who made Pop! and Willow Tyrer who made Tom Mouthy.

Further proof that reading this blog can seriously help your career.

Redacted scores

I was always led to believe that the great innovation Sky had brought to the world was displaying the score in the top left hand corner of the telly during football matches. Which is good and very useful, especially if you turn the TV on in the middle of a game.

So why, dear listeners, do the BBC not do this for Wimbledon? It's especially annoying as a game of tennis has a lot more scoring than a game of football. The score changes every minute or so and therefore when I come in from the terrace with a glass of Pimms I like to know what the score is.

The BBC only seems to show the score when the camera is on this view below:

but not any other view. Maybe that's the only camera that has the little graphic on it.

My bow tie matches my wife's dress

Last night seemed to go really well. I enjoyed myself, although I was more nervous about hosting than I ever have been about speaking. All the speakers were fab and did a brilliant job of sticking to 8 minutes.

Rather than me blather on, let us let Twitter do the review for us.

6pt Hellicar and lewis = fantastic.

withassociates the geek shal inherit the earth. Jamie from @Airside rules. Must talk more with him about sciencey things.

iaintait Having a bow tie that matches your wife's dress! Shits all over my trainer / jumper combo

tollerton "Damn fine inspiration" from Vaughn Oliver.

antiquote Just left #8x8. Damn fine work by damn fine people.

Futurefabric Nice evening out at 8x8 (http://www.ilovedesign.com/...). John Bateson stood out for me. Online video apparently coming soon...

Wagit went to the #8x8 ilovedesign event last night. Was very good. Better then your normal boring conference... and free beer! brucey bonus

And many more via the #8x8 twitter tag. Apparently they could have sold out several times over. I hope they do it again.

Joke update

There's no way to be nice about this. Your jokes were awful, all of them.

I was sent a million, <insert font> walks into a pub, barman says "Why the long face" and a thousand "How many graphic designers does it take to change a lightbulb?" "Does it have to be a lightbulb?" very lame. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Still, winners have been chosen and notified by email.

I'm getting pretty excited about tonight, it will be very different hosting and not speaking. Still if Richard E Grant can do it, then I'm sure I can.

If you're coming tonight use the Twitter hashtag #8x8 during the event and I'll read out the best ones in the breaks. Should be a great night, the mightly Iain Tait is up first and look what he did at his last presentation...

Design jokes needed

 

This Wednesday it's 8x8 London an event I'm hosting. Yes, hosting. 8 brilliant creatives are speaking and I'm going to try and hold the whole thing together like Terry Wogan at Eurovision with only an air horn and some poor jokes as props.

Due in no part to me the event is sold out, but I have some a handful of tickets to give away on the blog.

But I need something in return. I need design jokes. So email me your jokes and the best 4 will win a ticket. Email rather than comment as I don't want to give the punchlines away!

My email address is over here. That's kind of an initiative test.

FREE INSTRUCTIONS

Found, as ever, via The Design Disease flickr pool.

Redacting the office

There's lots of talk at the moment of redaction.

My Latin is a bit rusty these days, but redaction comes from 'the act of reducing' or more accurately compressing, or editing a work or an act. So you could have a redacted version of a piece of writing.

Or a redacted version of an official document, which is what's being causing all the grief at the moment.

For those not in the UK, MP's expenses have been published for the first time by Parliament, albeit heavily redacted. So redacted that it's almost impossible to glean any new information. Luckily we have the Fourth Estate to take care of that.

Anyway. We had some clients in the office the other day and before they arrived I spent 15 minutes redacting the office. You've all done similar things. You dash around hiding any scruffy old jumpers, putting the porn in a dark cupboard and taking down any revenue targets that may have been pinned to the wall. This is the kind of stuff that happens in every agency up and down the land. In this age of transparency and friendliness is this really necessary?

What's the worst thing a client could see? In fact, let's ask the listeners, what's the worst thing you've moved out of the view of a client?

A few more

Graphic Photo Experiments

We went to the British Grand Prix today. Had a brilliant time. But I forgot my Nikon.

Which was a bummer because I had a little experiment planned. Oh well. I had to make do with the iPhone camera. Which was OK.

I wanted to shoot some pretty standard GP photos, take one pixel and stretch that across the whole image. This is nothing new of course, Saville has done similar things (among others) but I thought with the colourful livery of a Formula One car you might get some interesting effects.

It feels like you need some of that classic red and white kerb in there. So I tilted the picture a bit.

 

Might end with an anyway.

Excel Spreadspeech

This morning I did my little thing at Designer Breakfasts. (As previously discussed.)

They asked me if I wanted a projector and I said no.

I'd like to move away from the crutch of PowerPoint. You don't see Obama using funny slides, do you?

Anyway. I still had points to make and I still had words I wanted people to remember. And seeing as I was sort of talking about business models and the like I toyed with the idea of using plastic figures. Or little gifty things. But that didn't feel quite right.

So I made some spreadsheets in Excel.

I'm pretty fond of them, so I'm uploading them here for you to enjoy. Obviously these slides won't mean anything to you unless you were at the talk, so just sit back and enjoy the pictures.