Russell has been banging on about objects and behaviours for years now. In fact it's all he ever talks about. This is a good example. And he's right, it's just that it's a bit hard to get your head round.
But now Adam Lassy has made a video that neatly sums up exactly the future Russell has been talking about. And it's as amazing and terrifying as he predicts. IMAGINE! A table that "expects feedback" fucking hell... Watch the video.
Ikea Robotics - Animals from adam lassy on Vimeo.
I think this is a good idea from Amrinder (read the full story here).
I spoke to Iain today and he thinks it's worth trying too.
So let's try it.
I'm going to try and persuade Engineering tomorrow. Wish me luck.
In an age where people rarely send letters or faxes. In a world where saving paper and ink would be seen as a huge advantage. In a time when every home has a desktop printer but those printers are used to print out address, or phone numbers or tickets. Why does the default paper size have to be A4?
One of the biggest uses of A4 is for stuff like this.
Every single one of these notices could have been produced on A5. Indeed they would have looked better on A5. In fact, I'll bet the total print area of most of these notices could fit on A5.
So why don't we have smaller, A5 printers. Why isn't A5 paper the standard paper size you can buy in Tescos? Why isn't an A5 printer more common place at home?
Wouldn't that be a more useful and a more efficient size?
It's an ambitious game that uses the iPhone's GPS, the camera and the speaker to create a sort of ARGish geo-cachingish mash up for families. You pick a park, head down there with the kids and run around solving clues and puzzles and trying to find the magical creatures.
I am not a gamer at all. (Apart from the iPhone) I have never owned any games console. The last time I played a computer game was Guitar Hero at Christmas and before that I have absolutely no idea.
But I have an iPhone and I have kids so I'm probably a good test case.
It's very hard to review this game for two reasons; firstly it's not as good as you're imagining it is and secondly that's because the technology is a weeny bit clunky for the full experience. I'll try a review and hopefully you'll see what I mean.
OK, first up, you choose a park. In London you can pick Kensington Gardens or the South Bank. That's a disappointment right there, in your head you imagined you could play it in any park didn't you? When you think about it, it's obvious that you have to play in a pre-determined place as the game play uses the features of the park, but that's a good example of the perception and the reality not matching up.
Anyway. You start the game. Trutton rings you up. This is brilliant, it looks and feels just like a real phone call and the kids identified with that straight away. Trutton gives you some instructions and off you go.
Most of the time the maps were pretty accurate, but a few times they weren't.
When the map works, it's ace. It picks up where you are and triggers the next chapter. There are little puzzles to solve along the way, simple ones that give you a great big rewarding 'well done'.
It does this really well, the graphics are fab and animated nicely. The kids loved this bit.
The best bit as far as the kids were concerned were these brilliant little photos created by standing in exactly the right spot.
They are pretty awesome. Especially as you (or the child not in the picture) can watch the creatures walk on to the screen.
In summary, it's not perfect but I think it's unreasonable to expect it to be. It appears (to me) to be at the forefront of a potentially massive market. It has the basics right, it looks great, it's fun, it's simple and it makes good use of the iPhone. It's sufficiently parent and sufficiently child.
It seems to make sense in an emerging post-digital world. It takes something you can't do on a screen (going outside and run round a park) and merges it with something you can't do with twigs or paper (animate creatures over pictures etc). But also it takes the best bits of those worlds, going to the park is a good fun thing and gps and camera etc uses the best of the iPhone. That's smart and importantly it doesn't feel forced or false. Throw in gaming on the top and you've got a very interesting mix.
We had a great time playing and I would play it again. For £3.99 you can't really complain.
I'm not interested in games, but this sort of thing could easily get me hooked.
I can't stand Stephen Bayley. There are loads of reasons why, but here's the most recent one.
That, in case it's not clear, is a whole book, a design book no less, called Woman As Design - before, behind, between, above and below.
The blurb says, "Stephen Bayley discusses how the female body works as a sign, a symbol...as a designed object." Does everyone else find that offensive? Abhorrent, even? It's not ironic or provocative, it's stupid.
It's precisely because I dislike him so much and because I am a well rounded human being that I read his piece first in a magazine article called 'Designs Of The Decade'. It's very good. Here's what he had to say.
Ignore the iPod bit and read the second paragraph.
"I do think we're coming to the end of a sort of sinusoidal wave, which began just after the second world war, in which life was all about making more, consuming more and so on. In architecture this is quite clear. The Chelsea Barracks is the last gasp of Richard Rogers, he is now as much an historical anachronism as Quinlan Terry."
Leaving aside that fact I hate people who say "I do think" and "I do believe" and so on; thank fuck Modernism is over.
I have always felt guilty that as a designer I don't like modernism enough. I mean, I like white spaces and hard edges and everything, but I don't feel the need to align my whole life to modernism. I would love a Huf Haus, but I'd be just as happy in a Victorian terrace. Sorry.
A Huf Haus by Lewis Broughton usual stuff applies.
Christmas is a good example of modernism facism. Designers always try and fuck Christmas up by making it stylish and modernistic. Christmas should look like this if you ask me.
And he's right about the Chelsea Barracks thing too. People are looking beyond steel and glass in big cities. I'm not a steel and glass hater and I'm not a big fan of Chelsea red brick - it's nice to see a mix of both.
And there's another very interesting point in that second paragraph.
"I do think we're coming to the end of a sort of sinusoidal wave, which began just after the second world war, in which life was all about making more, consuming more and so on."
Which reminds me of this brilliant quote from Lewis Mumford which I used in my I'm A Designer. Use Me Better talk.
“Why should we so gratuitously assume, as we constantly do, that the mere existence of a mechanism for manifolding or of mass production carries with it an obligation to use it to the fullest capacity?”
I do hope Stephen is right and we're moving towards the end of that era.
I realise this is an incredibly simplified version of Modernism. But I'm glad it's dead. And thank you Stephen Bayley for letting me know.
Still hate that book though.
I know how much you all enjoyed voting for me in the hotly contested D&AD Election. The good news is you've now got another chance to vote for me! Yay!
Not for D&AD this time, but for a panel at SXSW in Texas next year. Chris from Michelin Red Guide, Aaron from Flickr, Mike from Stamen, James from Bridle and me and Russell from the future are planning to take the event by storm with our panel on Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media Design.
The blurb is here: The Internet is situated in the real world, and interesting experiences have to blend physical and digital. Mixing new technology - Arduinos, GPS, RFID, QRcodes - and old (web, paper), we present examples of the recently possible future, and the lessons we've learnt. And we'll make something along the way. (Note the "we'll make something along the way" bit. It's got to be worth voting just for that.)
You can vote here. We need your votes to get the panel approved, so vote early and vote often.
A few weeks ago you may have noticed this gorgeous thing whistling around my Flickr pages.
It's a newspaper we designed and printed for the BBC called 8.
It's a collection of essays which came out of 8 studies commissioned as part of the AHRC/BBC Knowledge Exchange Programme. The paper contains articles by Bill Thompson, Katherine Corrick and Pat Kane among others. Brendan from the BBC talks more about the project here.
I'm particularly fond of the cover. Looked great on the press.
Back in January when made TOFHWOTI we said it was a product of the future. The success of that project made us investigate that a bit more. We spoke to 4iP, Channel 4's investment fund, who agreed to fund a separate business called Newspaper Club.
Newspaper Club will have two components. It's main purpose is to allow anyone to curate, create and then collect (by that I mean print, but that doesn't alliterate) newspapers. It might be a group of birdwatchers, the residents of an estate campaigning for improvements, or a yearly “best of” printed product for obsessive bloggers. You'll be able to organise this stuff online and then print as little as a few to as many as a few thousand.
Like TOFHWOTI but made by you.
Those newspapers will be based on template designs and the user will have limited design choices. Obviously. Which is why I've been thinking about this stuff.
But we realise that some people may want a bespoke option to create something extra special, like 8 for the BBC. A document created from scratch. We're currently working on another one for Penguin which I'll tell you about soon.
Newspaper Club is a major project, lots of people already seem excited by it and there is a lot more I want to tell you. Stuff about how we're working as a team, how we're building the Newspaper Club brand, 4iP, designing templates and so on. But I shall save that for another day.
We launch in September, but in the meantime you can follow our adventures on the blog over here. According to Tech Crunch it's 'hilariously frank'. You can sign up for a beta invite here, you can read our insightful Twitter updates and if you'd like a bespoke newspaper for your corporation you should give me a call or drop me a line - [email protected].
More to follow.
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.
Recently I've been thinking about designing something that will allow other humans to create another thing. And still keep it looking good.
The best way seems to be restricting their choice.
People don't need to make every part of a thing to feel like they've created it and by restricting choice you're guaranteed to get something good out of it.
And I'm not just talking about the design of documents or graphics. Yet.
Flickr for example are very good at letting you play around with your page, but ensuring that the actual webpage still looks great.
You can edit the text on your page, but you can only edit the yellow bits:
That's smart. It makes you feel like you're editing your personal page, but you're not allowed to choose colour, font, font size, position of headline and so on.
Apple are good at this too.
All you designers think those photobooks are too restrictive, but remember, these services are aimed at people who aren't designers. That's the point. That's why they're using these services. It's very hard to make an ugly photo book, that's because of the restrictions they have made. Or, if we change the word restrictions for design choices, that's because of the design choices they have made.
Here's an example of how you could give people a little too much choice. A few months ago, Jeremy was making a book, in front of my eyes, in the pub. Suddenly he asked if Garamond was a good font. Instantly, Harriet and I, the two designers present, said, "NO!". All designers know that Garamond is not a good font and maybe Lulu should have taken that out of their list of options.
And, seeing as this post gets sillier as it goes on, here's a pub bench.
Everyone loves these benches. You see them in dirty brown pubs and posh back gardens. They're nice to sit at, they always work. You never arrive in a pub garden and find the table bit missing. They restrict choice in a good way.
There will be more.
I've had a bad day.
Nothing to worry about, just your classic "below par" as Tom described it. One of the reasons is that I've been trying to finish an article and I've been struggling with the ending. The reasons I'm struggling is that I'm ending by talking about The Web Of Things and Fanufacture and Thingfastructure, clever things I know little about.
I've written articles like these before, or course, but the previous one was written by Adrian Shaughnessy so my one needs to be, proper. You know. Good. (In my head) I know the point I'm trying to make. It's just a struggle to get it down on paper.
And then I get home and these things arrive in the post.
Firstly these little notebooks I've made.
They are lulu books. Nothing that unusual about that, we all know what they are. But they are also cheap, ultra limited edition, bespoke notebooks for a new project.
And then there's this.
Loïc has been telling me about this for ages. But, if I'm honest, I never 100% understood what he was getting at. Loïc is French and although his English is a thousand times better than my French, I got lost in the translation. But now everything is clear.
He's taken this talk and printed it as a limited edition of 1,000 booklets. One side in English and one side in French. Which is pretty humbling and flattering. Thank you, Loïc.
And, lastly, the third thing. Less serious than the other two. There were some emails flying round today after Thursday night. Bearing in mind that we didn't really know each other before Thursday, someone said, "I just could not have enjoyed myself more. I felt completely relaxed within minutes and just had a blast."
All of these three things point to how the internet makes collaboration and remixing easy and fun. And how it lends itself to that kind activity. But more importantly it's how various bits can become more than the sum of their parts. Which is sort of key to how success happens.
More seriously, the first two hint at the new world we're entering. A world where people can take your work and build on it. A world where people can make things quickly and cheaply. And sometimes they might make your things.
A world we can control less than at any other point in time, but a world that needs designers more than ever.
I have no idea what the APG is, really.
It stands for the Account Planning Group and as far as I can tell is a bit like D&AD but for planners. Winning the Grand Prix is just like winning a Black Pencil. To win a Grand Prix, or a Gold or a Silver, you have to write a 2,000 word paper describing the rationale behind a piece of your strategy work.
Most people write these papers over several weeks, with 3 or 4 drafts.
Two planner friends of mine, Paul and Doug are entering the APG this year. They haven't written a single word yet. And the deadline is tomorrow - at noon.
This isn't down to their laziness or inefficiency. This is because they're writing about the something (can't tell you which client) where the strategy behind it was that people perform better under pressure. So they are going to write the paper in just 24 hours, live on a webcam. To place them under pressure.
Good, eh?
You can help by increasing the pressure and watching them live over at Two Planners In A Room. The more pressure they're under the better the idea becomes. So spread the word.
You may not have noticed, but The Sun have just launched a radio station.
I think it's interesting for several reasons. Lots of non-radio media owners have launched radio stations, or at least tried to. Or stretched podcasts into sort of radio stations. Channel 4 tried and The Telegraph do lots of this sort of thing, but this feels different.
For a start, it's by The Sun which have the largest readership of any UK newspaper. They're also (I think) the second biggest UK newspaper website outside of the UK. So that gives them big numbers to play with.
They've made the very wise decision to have John Gaunt host the main programme. John Gaunt is a Sun columnist, but more importantly he's an actual proper Disc Jockey. A radio person. So that already makes more sense than a journalist doing it.
And it's backed by Murdoch. Who has great experience of different media channels and of broadcast media, including radio.
So when you add that little lot up, it's a no brainer. As people say.
If you read Alistair Campbell's Diaries, you'll see that Blair does a lot of cosying up to Murdoch in the few years before Labour get elected. That's verification of how important Murdoch (and the associated media channels) are. So it was even more interesting to see that the first ever guest on Sun Talk was David Cameron. That's a big deal, in a litte way. I bet a lot of radio stations would love to have an hour long interview with Cameron.
Of course, a big set piece interview with the (possible) next Prime Minister yeilds a few stories for the paper the next day.
They start with a big, global audience, they have proper DJ's presenting, it's funded by someone who already runs radio stations and they can attract big guests. I think it might work.
I'm working on a couple of identities at the moment where their primary usage is online. You could call them digital identities.
Sure, they will be used offline at some point, people still have business cards, but the over riding majority of times they will be seen online. At least 95% of the time.
A couple of times whist working on these identities we've discussed a black and white version, that's a normal thing to do. And every time someone has asked, why?. Every time it's been a struggle to answer that question.
Lots of you will be horrified by that, but most of the time, I think I'm a pretty traditional designer. Function before form, ideas will always win, etc etc. And I can put together a decent case for a black and white version of a logo. But if you start to look at the evidence it becomes harder and harder to defend. We need to be clear that in the example above I'm specifically talking about digital companies that operate in the digital world. They don't have shops or vans. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's some pretty big money in this arena these days, Amazon, Facebook, Skype, Yahoo! et al. Do they need b+w versions of their logo?
Let's have a look at both sides of the argument.
The case for having a black and white version of your logo
1. It's good discipline.
If your logo can work in b+w it can work in any situation, ever. It's the mark of a good mark that it can be stripped of colour and still work. Think of the classic logos, V&A, Shell, Apple, Kelloggs, VW, IBM, whatever - they all work just as well in b+w.
2. It's practical.
At some time in your companies life you will need a b+w, or single colour, version of your logo. Whether it's to send to the company that makes polo shirts or for the sides of the vans or for the NCR invoices, one day you'll need a b+w logo.
3. It's cheaper.
Put very simply one colour is the cheapest form of production. If you need to produce a full colour logo on every single piece of collateral costs are going to rise. Considerably if you're a large firm.
4. It's a mark of quality.
Often, if a logo can't be produced in B+w that's becuase it's some hideous 3D spinning globe of a thing. And we want to avoid all that, don't we?
The case against having a black and white version of your logo
1. Everything is full colour now.
Almost all printing these days is full colour. With the exception of till receipts it's rare to see a big brand using black and white printing. Do you ever see single colour vans? Do you ever see single colour logos on polo shirts? Come to think of it, does your company have any vans? Would you ever produce polo shirts? And in any case all that media can be full colour, at not much extra cost.
2. You're online almost all of the time
If you're an online firm, like say Google, then you hardly ever exist offline. You don't have shops, or vans or carrier bags. So why do you need a black and white logo? Have you ever seen a single colour version of the Google logo?
Full colour Google logo on stickers, bags and err, a tin of mints? Picture borrowed from Mex Beady Eyes, usual rules apply.
3. It doesn't affect quality.
I've never seen a single colour version of the Google logo. Or the eBay logo. The Tate have a single colour logo, but it's always used in glorious full colour. It doesn't seem to affect them.
Sure, there are some companies who will always need single colour versions of their logo, a brick making company for example. But more and more we're going to see firms who simply have no need for a black and white version.
So, what do you think? Should we retire the black and white logo in 2009?
You may remember, back in August, I blogged about my Samsung camera being broke.
Every picture had a purple line funky effect on it. Not good. I posted about it here and on Flickr. Chris searched on Fixya and came up with an answer. The image sensor was broken. Which sounded pretty accurate to me.
So, since August I've been using my iPhone as a camera. And you know what, it ain't bad. It ain't brilliant, but in the daylight it's fine. I've done a summer holiday, a kids birthday and a US trip armed with only an iPhone camera. And it's done the job just fine.
Meanwhile I called Samsung who said they would fix it for me, for free. Even though it was a month or two out of warranty. They posted me a neat little cardboard net which deftly folded into a secure box to send the camera back in. They even rang me to ask me why I hadn't posted the camera back yet. Now, interestingly, Samsung assign you a customer reference number which lasts your entire Samsung buying life. Apparently, every time you ring them, about any Samsung product, they'll call up all your details etc etc.
Now, there's a lot of this datastuffomatic around and most of it is rubbish but in my short experience (admittedly with only one product) it worked really efficiently. It's only a small thing but that's the kind of thing that would make me buy a Samsung TV over a Sony TV.
Anyway. It was January before I finally got round to sending the camera off. It was returned last week fixed. In fact, I think the picture quality may be better than before. Super job. I've missed that little fella.
Between August and January, I tried really hard not to buy a replacement camera, which would be the usual way of fixing something, obviously. And I did pretty well. For a bit. Until I spotted this beauty on Amazon with 50% off.
Yes. Half price. You gotta buy it if it's half price right? It's still available now for just over £200
I've have loved using an SLR again. Looking through the viewfinder as opposed to an LCD screen.
Depth of field. Remember that? Wonderful.
So, to sum up. iPhone camera - not as bad as you lot say it is. Samsung - great customer service so far. Nikon D40 - fabulous camera at a fabulous price. More product reviews coming soon.
There's a post in my drafts folder called 'The difference between an advertising business and a design business'. It's been there for over a year. Look there it is.
It's about the differences in the businesses, not the industries. The things an advertising business is good at and the things a design business is good at. It will be a great post. I may never finish it.
But I was reminded of one thing an advertising business is good at the other day. Something design businesses don't ever do properly. (Well, packaging companies sort of do it, but it's different.) Strategy, trends, consumer research, call it what you want. It's looking outside of your field at the wider world and, most importantly, real people. Those last sentences sound very clumsy but you know what I mean.
Luckily for all you designers Piers from PSFK is putting on a brilliant thing called Good Ideas Salon London. You should go. Here's some people from the speaker list.
Jeremy Ettinghausen \ Director of Digital \\ Penguin
Kate Moross \\ Designer
Eva Rucki \ Founding Partner \\ Troika Design
Paul Graham \ Partner \\ Anomaly UK
Kevin Anderson \ Blogs Editor \\ The Guardian
...and 20 or so others. I'd like to hear what all that lot have to say. Wouldn't you?
Lots of agencies are freezing pay but increasing training at the moment. You could do worse than to book a ticket for this and write training on your expenses form. You can buy tickets here.
Whilst we're on the subject. Here's another thing you should do.
Ruby Pseudo is speaking at the above event (that's reason to go in itself).
But you should definitely subscribe to the Ruby Pseudo Chat Chat blog. Ruby Pseudo is essentially a youth consultancy. And a brilliant one. They have a network of over 250 kids and they offer genuine, unfiltered, raw research. "If you want it told like it is, with some very real and useable strategy recommendations, then you have found the right person..." Simon Pestridge said that and he's Marketing Director of Nike UK. So he probably knows what he's on about.
I've just worked with them on a project and it the stuff they provided was superb. And I definitely probably knows what I'm on about.
If you still think the kids wear chambray shirts, dance to Deacon Blue at discos and say "wicked" (like I do) then you should start reading that blog. This post, for example, rounds up 23 brilliant, talented teenage photographers on Flickr . Not two, or five. But twenty three.
Again, as designers we don't really get exposed to this kind of stuff very often. Nowhere near as often as we should, and it's a revelation when we do.
So. Subscribe to Ruby and go to Ideas Salon London.
I've noticed something recently; city kids play differently to country kids.
Picture taken by Russell. Usual rules apply.
This isn't Mumsnet so we'll skip over the societal aspects of that observation. What I mean is that city kids seem to play within a small self defined boundary. They are happy to play smaller.
I guess we can generalise and assume this is because they live in smaller spaces. But I don't just mean smaller houses, I mean the whole area they have available to play in is smaller. If they are lucky enough to have a garden, it's a small garden.
Everywhere they go, the space available to play in is smaller. If they eat out, they are probably more used to small coffee shops and restaurants. The Pizza Express on Great Portland St is smaller than the Pizza Express at Meadow Hall. So they learn to play smaller.
This brilliant photo was taken by Matt. Usual rules apply.
When I was doing A Level Art my Mum used to organise a 100 mile charity bike ride. At the bike ride one year I made a series of teeny weeny sketches. A montage of the whole day, no bigger than a postage stamp, in my sketch book. It was the best bit of work I'd done all year.
When I showed it to my Art teacher he encouraged me to make it in to a big A3(ish) size canvas. You know, in that A Level art way. I spent a few weeks scaling the sketch up. And it was shit. I thought I still had the picture but I can't find it anywhere... sorry.
When it was small, it was the best bit of work I'd done all year. When it was big, it was shit.
Working at a really small scale is something you'll be familiar with if you've been lucky enough to have done an Art Foundation course. Wil Freehorn is a master at this. Take a look at his business cards.
Picture taken from Wil Freehorn. Usual rules apply.
Gorgeous, aren't they? Wil is an expert at working with this scale. Interestingly, it's not just the scale that makes these images so great, it's also the speed. The quick, light touch. The immediacy of his work is exhilarating. Here's some slightly bigger (but still small) sketches made smaller.
Picture taken from Wil Freehorn. Usual rules apply.
They're great too aren't they?
It's not just the physically small that I find interesting. It's small ideas too. Here's a wonderful small idea featured on innocent's blog.
Isn't that great? A small, simple, quick, straight forward, good idea.
One thing that really brings home Play Small to me is iPhone web pages.
Most people would assume that a mobile web page is a compromise. Not as good or as rich as the main page. The thing is, more and more I'm finding I like the mobile pages better than the main pages.
Stripped of all superfluous content and navigation, devoid of over elobarate graphics, they're like raw 'what I came here for' in one handy pocket sized rectangle.
I now find myself opting for the small version even when the full sized is next to me on the laptop. I prefer the BBC News small. I prefer Typepad small. Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Financial Times, Telegraph - I prefer them all small.
These aren't iPhone apps. These are web pages designed for the iPhone.
Dopplr is pretty much the only site where the big version works just as well on the small screen, I'd even say it was better than the mobile version. Dopplr is very well designed and it's also constructed around a very strict grid and I suspect this is why it works so well small.
The full Dopplr site is on the left, the mobile Dopplr site is on the right.
It's a design truth that it's better to design something with restrictions. And it maybe that size is just another restriction, but I think it's more than that. Just like Wil's sketches feel light and quick, so do iPhone web pages. Partly because they are quicker (quicker to load etc) but partly because they're demanding less of my attention. I can get to where I want to go much, much quicker.
Make no mistake, we're currently leaving the era of Baroque brands and moving into a new period of austerity in communication. And as we move towards Depression 2.0 maybe Play Small will become a vital tool for all designers across all forms of media.
Thankfully they thought of a better title.
I've written an article for a new magazine in the Design Week / Centaur stable. It's called Interiors and it's available in all good bookshops now. Helpfully the article is also available online and you can read it here.
The hottest place for the coolest cats at the moment is Silicon Roundabout.
I was fortunate enough to be in the Dopplr office the other day when Matt Biddulph had a eureka moment. "Silicon Roundabout!" he exclaimed. How we laughed.
But look! He's made a Google map of all the cool Boom 2.0 companies working off Silicon Roundabout and he's started a social networking site (that's what they do after all...) for Silicon Roundabout residents.
But the meme isn't just self propagating. The FT featured it on their blog and London's Evening Standard ran a story on page 11 today.
Silly season? You must be joking.
In other logo related news; whilst I was at Dopplr, Russell and I dropped off a present of some mugs.
Been meaning to do that for a while.
So this balloon thing, good or annoying?
I've wasted a decent amount of time playing it today and I've had fun. I was even 5th at one point! But I can totally understand that it's very annoying seeing all those balloons when you arrive at this site.
On the internet some people seem a little confused by it (I was at first) and some people seem very annoyed with it all. What do you think?
I've made a list of what I think are good and bad points.
Good
It's genuinely fun when you start playing. It takes a while to get into it but once you do it's quite addictive. And I've never seen anything like it before.
It doesn't seem impossible. A lot of online competitions feel like you've got absolutely no chance of winning, this one doesn't feel like that.
The techie stuff is very, very clever. If you stop and think - what they're doing is pretty amazing and it's being done well and pretty slickly too.
It looks gorgeous. By that I mean the craft, the edges of the balloons, the little balloon loading bar, the detail on the strings - all fantastically well done.
Bad
There's no getting round the fact that basically it's annoying when you visit a site you love and all these balloons are there. I know you can click it off and I like it when I'm playing the game, but it's not hard to envisage people getting annoyed at this.
It's a little clunky. I mean a teeny, weeny, weeny bit clunky. Because what they're trying to pull off is so complex I can forgive a bit of clunkyness. But still, the clunk is there.
Sometimes it repeats that "your balloon has left this site" thing twice. I refer to my point above.
There's my site with a token on it!
I've had some decent traffic from playballoonacy.com today and I'm not writing this so that people from Orange or Poke come on and defend Ballloonacy.
I'd just like to know whether you, my beloved listeners, find the balloons annoying on this site. Should I take them off?
This a picture of my Rodchenko notes, my meeting notes are all a bit longer but a bit more confidential.
In my continual quest to become uber organised, I have recently ditched Moleskine's in favour of note taking on my Jesus Phone.
This has several advantages.
1. Less stuff to carry around.
2. When it's done, it's done. No typing up the notes.
3. You can email the meeting notes to the client as you leave the building. When they arrive back at their desk, it's in their inbox. Trust me, this impresses clients.
The only problem is that I have to start every meeting with "Sorry, I'm not txting, I'm taking notes" which makes me sound like a wally.
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