webponce rants

things less interesting than a pigeon walking in a circle.

Archive for the ‘me’ Category

An apple a day

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

An Apple A Day / Randoms at the Bar

I was asked to speak at last night’s “An apple a day” talk, held by the D&AD at the Hoxton Pony. The speakers were asked to consider ‘what piece of technology has truly changed the way you work’. You can see my response in slideshow form over at Slideshare, and preceeding my ramblings were Alex from de-construct, Ranzie from Tonic, Flo from Dare, Clare from The Partners, and a handful of other people with really interesting perspectives on the question.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, everyone pretty much had the same thing to say – remember the human element, interaction and connection within everything you do.

Digital Fetish

Monday, May 11th, 2009

I have an old paperback copy of Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach sitting on my bookshelf that’s torn to bits. It’s missing its cover and the spine is falling apart. When the spine finally disintegrates, I’ll probably just use a rubber band to hold it together. Trying to read the book in this state would be impossible, yet it’s one of my prized possessions because of its connection to a point in my life, like a tattoo made of wood pulp.

I still have this same attachment to offline, in fact, it seems to increase the more and more i spend online. I wonder if its a generational thing, as we maybe the last batch of humans who will make a distinction between offline and online. Can you build the same emotional attachment to a tatty Kindle from your university years? Does content and container seperate? Focus on the story and its meaning, more than the object which contains the words? If we lose the emotional connection to the tactile, will we lose feeling in our fingers? Why hasn’t my coffee cooled enough for me to drink it yet?

Read “The Transient, Digital Fetish”

MK at WK

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

MK at WK

Yesterday, I joined the lovely people at Wieden + Kennedy London, as a Technical Creative Director. I’m already feeling at home, and the sun is shining through the windows at me. I never thought I’d go straight back into a perm role, but I’d always said W+K were the only agency I’d consider a proper job with, and gosh darnit, they invited me in – so looking forward to taking part in the amazing work which they produce. Take a look at their site for the skinny on their clients. I’m now back in the East of London, around Hanbury Street / Spitalfields, so pop by and say hello.

Child’s i Foundation Meetup in Feb

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

Our Child’s i Foundation first meetup will be held at the Old Bank of England on Feb 4th. The main plan of action (so far) is to discuss our current todo lists, and hopefully peddle off tasks to people who are keen to give some time and effort to the cause. We’ll be posting more about what we’re able to divvy out on the main blog in due course, but if you’re interested in giving some time, please RSVP, and come along.

http://www.meetup.com/childsifoundation/calendar/9485663/

Kirsty, Lucy and Julia were at the sicamp last night, collecting business cards and speaking to a whole range of lovely developer and just interesting types, many of who are keen to help out, across quite a wide range of technologies. It provides an interesting challenge, in that we’re eager to receive help regardless of what platforms things are built on. We already have interest from Drupal, Rails and PHP people. Our current site is built on Wordpress and will soon enough be moved to its own box so we’re a bit more able to hack the code – but if we have lots of activity using different platforms, it will be a great opportunity to show how open standards and interoperability technology such as webservices can be used to great a coherant whole. Increasingly, I think the main site will become a portal to aggregate the network activity – which quite neatly reflects our meatspace activity.

Don’t forget to follow us on twitter: @childsi

Child’s i Foundation launches

Friday, December 5th, 2008

Through my work at Yarned, I’m involved in a new charity – Child’s i Foundation, which is building a babies’ home in Uganda on the outskirts of Kampala for 50 infants, from newborn babies to five years-olds. The home will have medical facilities to help with premature and sick babies and children with special needs.

This is happening in two ways:

1. To build a “transitional orphanage” with full medical and educational facilities that provides a safe haven for babies and young children.
2. To place these children into secure and happy families, giving them something we believe every child has a right to – a loving home.

Child’s i Foundation will connect supporters to our work in Uganda in real time. Through emails, blogs and videos, people will be able to see exactly where their money is going, and we will have the opportunity to appeal directly for additional help should we need it.

Members of the community can be involved on many levels, from community fundraising, making donations and suggestions to actively volunteering at the Home in Uganda.

Interaction and mass collaboration are the keys to building the charity and achieving our goals.

We are creating a Web 2.0 version of a letter from a sponsored child and creating a new way of giving.

I’ll write more about the approach we’re taking from a technical perspective over the next weeks, but in the meantime, please go and visit the website:

http://childsifoundation.org
Also, follow us on twitter and flickr.

Amstel Filtered Gallery

Friday, November 28th, 2008

I’ve not been allowed to talk about this before, but it has just been nominated for an award, so I guess it’s all pretty public now. This was one of the last projects I was involved in at de-construct – a filtered art experience for Amstel.

Visitors would arrive at the gallery space, and be given a personal identity card – which they would take around the exhibit. The first port of call is to a booth where you are asked a series of questions, following the pattern of a multiple choice quiz. The aim of the quiz is to get an idea of your psychological makeup, and see where you sit in one of the three Hans Eysnick scales of neuroticism, psychoticism and extrovertism.

Once profiled, you would enter the gallery where we had about eight different spaces for watching short films and video art. You would arrive at once of the viewing areas (a mix of large cinema spaces, tiny shower like audio showers or plasmas screens with headphones), swipe your identity card, and you would be presented with content to sort your temperament (or to get your N, E or P juices really flowing).

flickr / amstel

We originally built a three screen prototype for demoing to our clients Amstel and 180 (their advertising agency) and then the project culminated in a 200 person event in Amsterdam in the basement of the old Post Office building. The private party was a resounding success, and many of the artists who were also invited found the experience extremely enjoyable. The viewers/interactors in the space found themselves discussing with the person next to them why they’d been shown a particular piece of content, swap cards to see other people’s content, generally discuss and chat over the art – which for any gallery experience is a huge measure of success.

Technically, the system was completely bespoke. Based upon RFID and wireless technology, we created a local network which allowed each unit to communicate to a central database server. Upon profiling, each user was stored and could be referenced upon demand. The swipe at each unit would check the person’s ‘profile’, and display relevant content as required. I was involved from the outset, helping to expand upon the original idea, taking it from a concept to delivery – developing the underlying code for the system itself, as well as the hardware, working with the curator to ensure the experience felt right from a content perspective, and installed and setup the space alongside the production team. It was a solid three days of work once we arrived in Amsterdam to setup the machines (most of which were completely smashed up in transit from London) install the software/hardware, test and the deploy in the live space, not to mention the inevitable problems which plagued us right up until the 11th hour.

I was really proud of this project, especially how deeply involved I was from the outset to completion. It was great working with a very talented team on a unique concept. I’m in the video somewhere, turning on a computer. A prize for spotting me.

I also took a range of photographs for the project which are available at Flickr.

From Turn Off, Tune On: Youtube Live!

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

This post is from my blog over at Turn Off, Tune On, which discusses innovation in the online video space, as part of my work for Endemol.

You can’t have failed to miss the Youtube Live event which is taking place today. If you read even one single tech blog, or use Youtube, you’ll have seen the chatter everywhere.

Celebrities, Web celebs and major artists, including the mad scientists from the Mythbusters crew, will.i.am, Lisa Nova, Michael Buckley, and Joe Satriani will be joining the celebrations, and YouTube will be offering three live streams direct from its Live channel.

Why blog this? Youtube moving into live streaming is an additional string to the monetisation bow, something they’ve yet struggled to really find models beyond simple adserving and partnership deals. It also puts Youtube into the broadcaster space, allowing them to compete with a wider range of other services. It will be interesting to see the next steps they take to push this service with commercial partners.

Day 8 in the Big Brother Hoose

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

I’ve recently started working with Big Brother production company, Endemol. They do, of course, make much much more than just Big Brother, in fact, I’d be surprised if you haven’t at some point watched one of their shows. You may ask why someone digital would want to go work in television – the answer is simple – Endemol aren’t a television production company, but a content producer, and are already working with a number of innovative new formats and concepts in interacting with content, so this is a really interesting opportunity. We all love and want great content, whether it be on the gogglebox or internets, and Endemol are perfectly positioned to help television evolve in the right direction.

I’ve started blogging over at turnofftuneon.wordpress.com to get internal and external discussion around new formats and models in the digital content space, you can follow that if you’d like. I’m going to separate out work to that blog, general technology to over at http://yarned.co.uk and more personally interesting stuff here.

Here’s some more Clay which I just posted over at that blog.

Wayback

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

Google have released their index from back in 2001 to celebrate their 10th birthday. It works too, and searching on the name of company i traded under as a freelance back then even works (V2 Design, second link!)- and then linking it through to the Wayback machine gives you the full experience. Apologies for the lack of semantic markup or accessibility.. it was 1998.

Come fly with me

Friday, September 5th, 2008

lv-beta

Huzzah! The Lucky Voice in home private karaoke service has launched in beta. I’ve been involved with the project over the past few months, primarily as technical consultancy, audience insight and some of the marketing activities. As they say themselves, Lucky Voice is a life affirming experience, and we’ve managed to bring an element of their quality and class to the digital space. No longer will you be tied to crappy plastic tape machines, this is karaoke for the 21st Century. Now, if they can start to push cocktails over IP, i’m sold.

If you’d like an invite, email me or post a comment, and we’ll sort you out.

Fancy a pint?

Friday, September 5th, 2008

the prince regent

Another quick build project for Andy at de-construct, who part-owns The Prince Regent, a pub down in SE24. Building this has made me hungry. They’ve just been shortlisted in the 60 under £60 category in the Evening Standard London Restaurant awards, so bravo! Its still a bit of work in progress, as we had to get it live ready for today’s announcement, but I’m sure i’ll tidy up the CSS and add some new content later next week.

Get a haircut!

Friday, September 5th, 2008

scissorhands

A little build project for Endemol went live recently. For the Children in Need programme, an application form to have your haircut by a celeb’. Fancy getting shaved by Rachel Stevens*? Sign up here. The full site (which i’m also going to be involved in) will be launching later this year.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scissorhands/

NB. Rachel Stevens probably isn’t doing haircuts, as she’s doing the dancy thing this year. I’m not sure she’d have time to balance trimming and shimmying in her life.

Number 9 Downing Street.

Friday, August 15th, 2008

I was going to write an article this morning about cheating, cheating and cheating, although i’ve lost the third page i was going to link to through the red mist decending on me after seeing this piece of laziness.

The new Number 10 site launched a few days back. I didn’t immediately visit the site, as I’ve not been online a huge amount recently for browsing purposes, but I fired it up this morning after reading another post about its launch, and oh dear.

I’m not going to comment upon their approach to using social media, as many already have.

What has infuriated me is the ‘beta’ logo they’ve plopped on the masthead, which seems to be used as a ’sorry we haven’t quite finished testing yet’ get of jail free card. NO NO NO!

The current fascination with launching betas confuses me a little. I am a big supporter of releasing early and often, smaller simpler offerings to test the water, and then expand and enrich from there on. Its agile, it means you can get your community feeding back on what they like and what they don’t like, and quite often helps in just getting content out there.

A beta does not mean public release, its an early release for testing purposes. Betas are designed to be opened out to a smaller population than your usual audience for feedback, testing and review. Many ’startup’ type sites or web applications launch in private beta in this way, as well as public beta to gain feedback, and it can be a useful approach if you haven’t yet ‘launched’ your application or site.

However, a beta release and a phased release of functionality over time are not the same thing. You can, very succesfully, launch a site with a percentage of your eventual vision for the long term, providing it passes certain acceptance criteria: is it enough for the audience, will it achieve what we need it to in the first release, and so on. Twitter is a good example of this. They launched with just simple messaging, then layered in IM, then added replies, etc. etc. That isn’t a beta. A beta isn’t your first public release, waiting for added functionality, a beta is for testing and review.

What Number 10 have done is released an incomplete and broken website, and sticking a beta label on it doesn’t justify or excuse this. Number 10 is a substantial government landmark, the mouthpiece of the PM, not some 2 guys in their bedroom startup app.

Firstly, it doesn’t validate against XHTML. Why not? It really isn’t that hard to get content validating against XHTML Transitional (they’re not even using strict). As a government who support legislation and penalties on companies who don’t adhere to accessibility guidelines, I’d say this was pretty hypocritical, but ultimately downright lazy.

Secondly, the layout doesn’t work in Firefox. You might have heard about Firefox, it is a pretty popular browser. I’m assuming it was developed and tested on another browser (although assumptions on their testing are foolish). I wouldn’t mind so much if the design was half decent, but wow, it looks like they’ve literally just grabbed the first wordpress theme they found, and vomited it up on the server.

Thirdly, on the day it launched, there were 404 errors all over the shop. A BBC article explains:

A Downing Street spokeswoman denied the site had crashed.
But she said users on some servers might experience glitches “for the next 48 hours”.
“It is just what happens when you launch a new website,” she added.

No, it isn’t. I’ve launched hundreds of sites without layouts breaking and 404 pages on topline navigation. Sure, i’ve had the odd bug crop up which wasn’t spotted in testing, but not topline navigation, and not basic layout issues.

I guess I’m just really disappointed in an organisation as important as Number 10 could launch something without basic checks and balances from purely a technical perspective. I understand that getting social media is a harder nut to crack, and I’m actually glad they’ve started making inroads to that sort of technology, but the fundamentals still apply, and hiding behind a beta label doesn’t not excuse ignoring the basics.

I’d email them, but they haven’t set up their contact page correctly yet. The only option seems to be to write them a letter. How very 2.0

.net

Monday, July 21st, 2008


More stuff from The Vacationeers

Flicking through a copy of .net magazine this weekend at a service station on the M4 revealed my smiling face peering back at me. For a minute, I couldn’t help thinking I was having an out of body experience; perhaps some Harry Potteresque moment where my soul had been captured in print, never to escape; maybe some fiendish teenager had put mirrors in all the periodicals to frustrate and annoy eager readers; or just my short article had been printed this issue. I purchased a copy in any case to do further tests. I hope for my own sake that my spiritual being is not trapped in ink and paper form.

Pod

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

An image of the Young Vic bar's exterior at night.

I was out with CG last night, and we were talking podcasts. I’ve recently become the vaguely proud owner of a new iPhone (in fact, we’re now a two iPhone house, as my wife has also just acquired one), and never really having an mp3 player in my pocket before (I’ve owned them, but always forget to take them out; being my phone however, i have to take it out), i’ve not listened to podcasts that much. Now, however, is a different case. I have lots and lots of time on my hands, and lots and lots of storage on my phone. So, we were discussing good sources. As if by internet magic, Laughing Squid also posted a video of one of the shows we talked about, featuring Ze Frank, The Sound of Young America. I’m hoping they’re not all visually hilarious, as radio isn’t a media for the mime, but its been duly added to my feedlist.

I’m also starting to plan a trip to San Francisco. I’ve always wanted to visit, mostly to see if it really is that hilly; possibly to stalk this guy; but mostly to go visit some interesting people.

Dispose

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

I blogged this over at the Disposable Memory Project, but I think its neat idea, and I know the founders of the festival would love as much coverage as possible, so I’m reblogging with a bit more gusto this time. Eric Slatkin and Carlton Evans started the Disposable Film Festival in 2007 to celebrate the ‘artistic potential of disposable video’:

“Everyone has become a Disposable Filmmaker: directors of Saturday night cell phone videos, actors under the eyes of security cameras, and narrators before their webcams. Let’s face it – we live in an age of disposable film. Now it’s time to do something creative with it.”

I couldn’t agree more, and I love it! This new world in which we live of such throw-away-able technology is truly awful – I can’t remember the last time i got something repaired over just buying a replacement, but the low cost of these devices (and increasing quality) also brings with it a generative side which is wonderful, and projects like the Disposable Film Festival bring the more talented homebrew film-makers to light. Being disposable and often low quality (in terms of their technical capability: grainy, blocky, jerky, poor zoom, poor focusing) often forces the producer to abandon all hope of making their work glossy and polished, and focus on the content and narrative. Whilst the ‘realness’ of the format has always given this sort of content a voyeuristic feel, which often seems to engender a certain type of story to be portrayed, increasingly talented people with nothing more than just a great idea or narrative they want to capture are doing just that. I think it helps bring forward the soul of the story. Surprise surprise, simplicity creates something special, yet again!

I went to listen to Clay Shirky yesterday afternoon, who very kindly signed my copy of ‘Here Comes Everybody‘ and I managed to have a brief chat with until Bill Thompson careered in and gave Shirky a bearhug. The majority of his discussions were over topics covered in the book, of how the cost (in pure economic terms) of creating groups or group activity has been so substantially lowered in recent years, that projects like this are bound to spring up. The rule for most is failure, perhaps only a half baked idea, or even just a great idea which doesn’t reach the audience it deserves, following a rough power law that only a tiny percentage of these generative and collaborative projects will succeed. Well, here’s hoping for success for the Disposable Film Festival, and any of its film-makers.

In other news, its the second week of my underemployableness. Last week was intentionally empty and devoid of activity. I took delivery of my new coffee machine (yom), played hours of XBox, watched all of the first season of Arrested Development, even went for a swim and ate copious amounts of food (in that order). This week, I shall mostly be doing ’stuff’. I was planning on taking a trip to Brighton (ice-cream, The Werks, the beach, and I like being on trains) this morning, but the weather is looking a bit crappy. Oh, and my iPhone needs charging after only a day of use. Lame.

Google vs Flash

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Adobe have announced today their partnership with Google and Yahoo in order to advance their ability to index flash websites. Everyone seems rather excited by the prospect, but I’m less so. Why? Well, I think its potentially a bad thing for people in my industry.

“If our flash is indexable, why create an HTML alternative?”

I can’t help thinking this question is going to be asked, and decisions based upon this will be made. Building an HTML alternative is not only for SEO, it is primarily for the sake of accessibility, and users who don’t have, or choose to have Flash installed. Many people often used SEO as the reason to create an accessible site. I never mind this approach, as at least we can build the HTML alternative. There are approaches to building flash using screen-reader technology, but nothing does the trick like some good ol’ semantic HTML in this case.

Not to mention, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Clients will read this tidbit of information from Google, and expect their flash site to suddenly appear at the top of Google. Wrong again – most enterprise or substantial sites are not built using static SWF files, but utilise on-demand loading of assets and database calls. These sites will not magically appear in Google’s index.

I’ve yet to see how this integration works, but what about precedence, level of importance and semantic data? Those who will automagically appear in the listings are those developers who built their content in static SWF – and are less likely to have marked up the content in any sensible format.

Who gains from this the most? I think Google, in being able to inspect the content of flash sites, rather than users who are looking for content rich flash sites, are the main beneficiary. I hope I’m pleasantly proved wrong.

Watch out, Valencia.

Friday, June 27th, 2008


View Larger Map

The decon crew are on their way to Valencia this afternoon for a weekend of sight-seeing, sunbathing, cultural persuits and maybe a drink or two. If you hear any stories of this lovely coastside town being invaded by helvetica clad warriors, don’t worry, we’re leaving on Sunday, hangovers in tow. I’m (frustratingly) not taking a camera as my digital compact is dead. I might buy a couple of disposables and go old school.

de-construct’s music taste

Friday, June 27th, 2008

We’re quite mainstream really.

  1. The Beatles
  2. Various Artists
  3. Red Hot Chili Peppers
  4. Massive Attack
  5. Jay-Z
  6. Groove Armada
  7. Air
  8. The Killers
  9. David Bowie
  10. Zero 7

See more at our last.fm account

Open Rights Group, Zittrain and Facebook Regulation

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

Flickr image from arcticpenguin used under a CC License

I was in the audience for last night’s debate between Professor Jonathan Zittrain and Bill Thompson, on the subject of his new book “The Future of the Internet and what we can do to stop it“, hosted by Becky Hogge and the good people at the Open Rights Group. Having not read the book yet, there was fortunately a primer into his concerns over the “inevitable” reduction in freedoms we currently enjoy online, whether those freedoms come from threats such as malicious cracking, viruses and spam, tethered platforms, regulatory bodies or walled garden / happy valley situations like Facebook. Its a very interesting topic of debate, and I look forward to reading the book when the postman brings it next week. I can’t help feeling that some of Professor Zittrain’s points were a little ‘fear culture’ish to make people aware of the issues – in the same way that the instigator of the Y2K stories played up the significance of the problem to make sure it reached a wider audience (but of course turned into a media/social frenzy), but there is definately a great deal of truth in some of the points raised by both Bill, Johnathan and some of the questions posed by the audience. I’m not going to say anything more until i’ve read the book though, and he was an extremely interesting speaker – I can’t help thinking it will provide an interesting follow on from Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody which i’m reading currently.

As if by some form of perfectly organised timing though, RWW and the Guardian are running articles today about the public’s desire for some form of regulation into social networks like Facebook. I realised last night that regulation does not always have to mean restriction, and Sir Christopher Meyer of the PPC’s comment that “There is a need for public awareness about what can happen to information once it is voluntarily put into the public domain,” is absolutely correct, but I’m not sure that means OFCOM need to step in.

‘Public’ conversations in real life are aimed at the person or people you’re standing next to in your social circle and they can be overheard, but social norms mean we tend not to listen too intently to a mobile conversation taking place next to you. However, online, the flawless reproducability of digital conversations which also take place in this “public” arena added to the thought that a conversation online is therefore for “public consumption” make for bad juju. You wouldn’t photograph or record someone sitting opposite you on the train, but you might happily link to their twitter conversation, and that is quite a social disconnect. I think that might, in time, change, but whilst we’re learning new social mores to deal with this public/private dichotomy, self regulation is far more practical and relevant.

If you don’t want people to see it, don’t post it – even if you have privacy turned up to 11. That’s the rule. There are enough channels to privately get something from A to B without resorting to Facebook or similar, and that is about education. Teens are extremely savvy when it comes to privacy and posting on their social spaces, us adults are less aware. The Guardian article mentions journalists facebook doorstepping and whilst I can totally see how invasions of privacy are upsetting, if you’ve posted something on Facebook and haven’t considered who can access that, is that really private?

If regulation is placed on the social networks, it should be security focussed, imposing penalties for flaws in the code and the ability for crackers to get in and show supposed ‘private’ content, not user regulation.

Update: You can listen to an audio recording of the debate over at the Open Rights Group site. You might even be able to hear me ask about sewers.

sunday chores

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

proverb.

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

“Tell me and I’ll forget
Show me and I’ll remember
Involve me and I’ll understand”

I love that.

Unclephil and the thousand images

Monday, May 26th, 2008

Well done to unclephil for passing the 1000 images mark. He’s been a long time supporter of the visual dictionary, so a few months back we interviewed him:

  1. How did you first find the visual dictionary?
    My friend Paul Burgess, the illustrator, sent me the address, knowing I had an abiding interest in recording lettering.
  2. I assume you’re into photography?
    I have always enjoyed photography, but this is more about the word itself. My earlier interest (still ongoing) is in finding and recording interesting and unusual examples of lettering from wherever, especially examples of vernacularity, such as hand-made signs.
  3. What keeps you coming back to the visual dictionary?
    The challenge of finding new words. Now that I am a contributor, sometimes the most ordinary word will jump out at me from the midst of a sign. Yesterday, while my wife was buying a ticket at the railway station, I spotted ‘approach’, ‘stay’ and ‘disabled’ all in the space of two typographically unremarkable signs.

  4. You and minorbug are going head to head at the moment. Have you any strategies for domination?
    That would be telling. I am flattered that minorbug’s contribution remained dormant for about a year until I began assailing that third place in the pantheon. It all helps in the finding of words, though. I am sometimes less likely to go for words than I should be, simply because they don’t make interesting images: I will have to get over that.
  5. What is your favourite word and why?
    Palimpsest. I like the way it bobbles around the mouth and engages many parts of the speaking process. I also like what it means: a re-used parchment, erased and containing a new message. This notion of a second layer of meaning within a sign or a word is a crucial one to me as a typographic designer.
  6. What is your favourite image on TVD, and why?
    I have many. A favourite among my own is ‘bookseller’, painted on a silver globe in a bookshop window in Brighton. In the TVD as a whole it is a difficult question to answer, but I enjoy the contributions of scannedinski, particularly his commentary. I made a comment on his ‘grand’, but I think my favourite of his images is ‘pain’, about which he says: ‘I love France: you can buy ANYTHING.’
  7. And finally, anything you’d like to see the visual dictionary do as future functionality?
    It does bug me that somebody is daft enough to enter 38 images of the word ‘Madrid’ and they all get put onto the site. Perhaps there could be a block on multiple images of ‘exclusions’ only (multiple images of every other word is a good thing). Although on reflection, it does make the look of the A-Z ‘cloud’ more interesting!

Thanks to Unclephil for his time chatting to us, and of course, his effort in building up the dictionary.

Quit for cash.

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

“If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” If you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for.

US etailer Zappos have a number of positive and refreshing approaches to running a business, being an employer and customer service. Their take on “you’ll love working here, or your money back” is an interesting method of weeding out those who just aren’t right for the company. Filling your organisation with like-minded (and that’s in terms of passion, enthusiasm not picking people who agree with you) people or even just individuals who have excitement and energy is a hard task no matter what your group does. Being open like this is just one of many ways to help find the right colleagues.

everything matters

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

everythingmatters

New site from de-construct.
A brand piece for Panasonic – Everything Matters

http://everythingmatters.eu/

Outside Royalty

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

Brandon’s band – The Outside Royalty – and their debut single video on the ‘tube

Run CBBK, Run!

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

My wife is running two (count them, two!) Race for Life 5K runs this year in aid of Cancer Research, something which has affected, and is affecting both of us. Give her a little cash to help her towards her £10 target. Who said she has low ambitions?

Barefoot

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

I’ve been walking around the office barefoot for almost ten years – apparantly I’m not mental, but doing myself some favours.

http://nymag.com/health/features/46213/

Three Sites / One Day

Friday, April 18th, 2008

Honestly, you wait for a site launch for a couple of months, and three come along at once. Big shout out to the team for the launch of three sites last night (in order of project length and blood/sweat/tears).

Vitra

vitracom

This project has been a couple of years in the making, and the passion and effort put into the site shows. Chris, the lead developer, has pretty much worked on it single-handed since he started, and its a testiment to his dedication.

adidas Dream Big

dreambig
A new campaign from the football team with some really nice video content.

adidas Cricket

cricket
The new adidas england cricket team shirts.

disposablememoryproject.org

Saturday, April 12th, 2008

For those of you not following the disposable memory project blog, we sent the first two camera bags into the wild today. Squeak!