Noisy Decent Graphics

Review of 2010 part 1

Time for some reviews of the year then.

First up a boring, self indulgent one about me. Then over the weekend a much more interesting one consisting of links from my delicious.

2010. It's been a good year.

As Newspaper Club we won the Design Museum's Design of the Year award for Graphics. That's a nice award to win as you don't enter yourself your peers nominate you. And it's from the Design Museum too. Very chuffed to win that. 

 Newspaper Club also made it into the D&AD Annual and we picked up a British Interactive Media Association award, a special award no less, for Technical Achievement. Full credit must go to Tom Taylor for that one.

Newspaper Club has had a fantastic year. We've taken a Christmas joke and turned it into a business with a six figure turnover, staff and actual customers. We've navigated software, usability, financial and fulfillment issues. 

We were even in Time magazine.

But most importantly we've made an actual product and put that into the world. We've shipped. And as Tom says, "You’ve either shipped, or you haven’t". We have and the vast amount of stuff we've learned along the way will ensure the next project is a thousand times easier. And there will be another project.

One of the most exciting things I've worked on this year has to be Nike Grid, which claimed the 3rd best digital campaign and the 6th best poster in Campaign's Review of the year.

You've all read about that before, but it's nice to be involved with a project that's a realisation of stuff people are talking about in many different sectors. Digital, maps, mobile, real time data, the city, visualisation - all that. It's a real collaborative project too and on the second version I got to work with Stamen, which I'd been wanting to do for a long time. Hopefully that project will grow next year.

 I also continued to work with w+k on the Guardian and Observer account. We relaunched the Observer with much success in a difficult market.

I think this is my favourite Guardian campaign of the year.

 

One of the more surprising and pleasing things of the year was the success of BRIG which turned out exactly how we planned without us planning anything.

Way back we had this idea of a space where all the interesting people we know could work together formally or informally. You know like all those Tech Shed Co-Working places in America, but less aggressive. And that's sort of happened. And like Russell says we don't do enough stuff together. Yet.

Look how happy these people are. Believe it or not, these people are working.

But looking at BERG's Flickr stream the other day it struck me all the brilliant things that have happened in that building in the nine short months we've been in there.

You will all be familar with Dentsu and BERG's lovely Making Future Magic video. Lots of that was shot in and around the BRIG (obviously as BERG are based there).

James, who was the start of dConstruct partly made his Iraqipedia books in the BRIG. Seems like ages ago now, but they were tantalisingly left on his desk for ages before his talk.

The brilliant Pseudos were always around. Newspaper Club is based there. And Chris, Phil, James, James and Leila and various visitors from all over the world drop in.

It all that was one Agency we'd be off to some fancy foreign land to win Something Of The Year.

But it feels good that our building, the BRIG, is becoming part of the fabric of a very interesting time.

It's also worth mentioning other things we've worked on - Dextr, Starling and Radio Roundabout. All exciting projects that I enjoyed working on and you'll be hearing more about next year.

And that's kind of it. Some great stuff up there. Exciting stuff. But there's a niggling feeling at the back of my mind. Frustration. Anger even. Stuff I've wanted to achieve that hasn't been achieved yet. Stuff that's nearly working, but not quite yet. Gotta fix that in 2011.

And if you fancy a laugh.

 

Radio Roundabout starts in 2 hours

Listen to the show at 3pm here www.radioroundabout.com there is no podcast, there is no listen again. It's all live, all show.

You can send requests and stuff via The Twitter @radioroundabout.

 

Please Retweet Me

It is cheesy but it is Christmas and it is for charity. And my Mum's charity made it.

Radio Roundabout

Want to hear me talking on the radio? Seriously.

Then listen to Radio Roundabout this Friday at 3pm. It's our annual stupid Christmas thing. More details on the RIG blog.

Christmas Gifts

A while ago I was sent this lovely book by Threadless.

It celebrates 10 years of Threadless and lots of tshirts they've printed. I'll be honest, they are better than I was expecting. The book was better than I was expecting.

I didn't blog about the book at the time and I should have done. Soz. I occurs to me that this would make a perfect Christmas present for a designer. So buy it now! Buy it from here!

There are more pics here.

That got me thinking about other Christmas gifts. Present & Correct is always a good place to start, especially for those hard to buy for graphic designers. They even have a pop up shop for the Christmas period.

Disclaimer, the next bit is self promotional.

You could even buy some Newspaper Club gift vouchers. The perfect gift for someone for whom you can't think of the perfect gift. They are available in various denominations from over here.

Or maybe you could buy one of these splendid Silicon Roundabout tshirts and hoodies we've just launched. As modelled here by me and pointed at by Dougie Fresh. You can buy those from over here.

Christmas. The tradition of giving.

 

Omega Company Watches

I was in a watch shop the other day. On the counter was a book about the history of Omega watches.

It seems like Omega went through a period of making watches for large corporations for example Shell, Esso and Coca Cola. Kind of expensive branded giveaways.

I'd like to see one of these in the flesh.

Could train companies find a real use for hyper local reporting?

This is a thing now, isn't it?

Across lots of the UK this week there was lots of snow. Enough snow to stop trains and buses and make roads to dangerous to drive on. Enough snow to stop people getting to work.

As you would imagine the social networks were full of banter about snow and commuting. Being a bit of a boring wally I kept searching Twitter to see how that compared with the official information being given out. It was actually quite interesting.

 

Let's get the obvious out the way. The main train company websites were completely useless. So ill informed as to be totally redundant. This one just says the "live departure boards are currently unavailable". And look at the horrible vague language "most Southern services are currently suspended due to adverse weather conditions". And then they feel the need to tell you this is an important annoucement in words as well as a whopping great exclamation mark road sign thing. In, er, a yellow lozenge.

As a side note just look at that as an example of a 'digital strategy' gone wrong. Bookmark the site on StumbleUpon - tick! Share with your friends on Facebook - tick!

Compare this redundant, vague information with this deep, rich information from Twitter.

 

 

 (And yes that's a different train company, but they were all acting the same. I was just doing random Twitter searches.)

That's really rich information. Genuinely helpful. Let's not forget that lots of Twitter is inaccurate and profane, but if you bypass that you get really useful stuff in there. It's really helpful to know that they've started closing stations, in someways more helpful than whether the stations are just open or closed. And it's one thing to tell you the station is "experiencing overcrowding" it's another to explain that Police are on the platforms to deal with overcrowding.

If I was smarter I could write something here about fuzzy states or something. Something clever about giving you information that's between an ON and an OFF state. Grey as oppossed to black and white.

You also get pictures which add yet more depth. Some of these pictures even manage to add humour to a miserable situation.

Here's another example which further highlights the gap between the information being given out and what is actually happening.

 

So why can't the train comapines provide richer information? Information that's greyer and fuzzier but more helpful for that. I guess it's (way) too much to ask them to just display tweets on days like this instead of their official, boilerplate info. (Yes I know most of it would just show swearing, but they could filter out certain keywords.) Maybe they could get someone to manually search and select tweets and twitpics to display?

They could actually find a genuinely helpful use for hyper local, citizen journalism style reporting.

Once again, I am reminded of this quote by Larry Page.

"It turns out you have two choices: You can try to control people, or you can try to have a system that represents reality. I find that knowing what’s really happening is more important than trying to control people."

 

Nice bits of UI

Two nice bits of User Experience design I've spotted this week. Just small things, gentle things, but things that delight and add to the experience. Lovely.

This from Iain.

And this from Chris.

Like the Thames?

Like second screens?

Then you should love this.

  By STML Obviously I have no books about Italian Food.

From the consistently brilliant James Bridle. A single-serving web page that tells you how high the tide is at London Bridge. Romance has lived too long upon this river.

Don't hit me, it's just the advertising talking

However you want to cut it I work in marketing. We all do.

I am constantly reminded of this phrase.

 

Awesome cartoon borrowed from Hugh MacLeod at gapingvoid.

That really rings true with me. Most of the time advertising, and all marketing, is ridiculous. We've just got used to the absurdity of it.

But that expression haunts me, “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face”. No one wants to be responsible for work like that, right? So most of the time if I have to "talk to people" I try and keep it as straight as possible. Be straight forward, clear, honest. Say what you need to say and get out of there. (There are exceptions but let's not go into that here.)

Then walking round a high street on Sunday I cam across some advertising talking that made me want to punch them in the face.

Ahhh yes the tradition of giving. At Christmas, the tradition of giving 'COS I'D FUCKING FORGOTTEN ABOUT THAT YOU FUCKING MORONS. I thought it was national holiday so we could all sit around the fire moaning how shit the Vicar of Dibley is and why the fuck did they cancel Only Fools And Horses. Silly me.

And then there's this. What are you getting for Christmas? A book on how to fucking use punctuation if I have anything to do with it. But hold on a minute IT MIGHT BE A GAG!

Look! Quite possibly they mean what illnesses will you get at Christmas? Think about that for a minute. You might get a dreadful cold. Yeah. So let's stock up on the old Milk Thistle.

They must mean that. They can't be suggesting you buy someone that shit for a Christmas present, can they? I have no idea because the communication is so mangled and confused it ends up meaning nothing.

And if you talked to people like this, they would quite rightly punch you in the face.