things less interesting than a pigeon walking in a circle.
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.
We’re quite mainstream really.
See more at our last.fm account
New site from de-construct.
A brand piece for Panasonic - Everything Matters
Brandon’s band - The Outside Royalty - and their debut single video on the ‘tube
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).
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.
A new campaign from the football team with some really nice video content.
The new adidas england cricket team shirts.
de-construct launches www.jamesbrownlondon.com today, another project we’ve worked on with MadeThought.
de-construct is six years old (yesterday actually, but i forgot to blog). Our birthday present was a lovely FWA Site of the Day award this morning for the adidas football site.
We recently pitched for, and won a commission to develop the new Crafts Council website. Its going to be a really interesting job, and we’re currently going through the early scoping and UX processes to work out how the site will fit together. Fred talks about our vision for the site in today’s issue of Design Week, despite them not really grasping what he said.
Its our (decon) 6th birthday in September, so we’re in the early stages of planning a party. Themes currently tabled by some around the number six:
0110 (six in binary)
The atomic number of carbon
The number of points on a star of david
Number of strings on a guitar
Six Geese ‘a Laying
A boundary ball in cricket
Six Pack (Beer)
Six Pack (Belly)
Cubes /Dice
Lucky In Chinese
6 degrees of separation
666 (The Number of the Beast)
6 partners
Hexapoda (insects with six legs)
Sugar / Iron (6th anniversary)
The 6th day : God created animals, adam and eve and a nice little garden
…and in 6BC, Caeser Augustus sent ferrets to the Balearic Islands to control rabbit plagues. As you do…
http://www.roadtov.com/profile/11302
Brandon, one of my team at de-con, is the drummer for the Outside Royalty - featured on The Road to V programme on Channel 4 on Thursday. Support him if you can! (But don’t let him get too succesful, I don’t want to lose him from my team to superstardom ;)
Last night was decon bowling night.
Messy, as ever. but lots of fun. Flickr’d here.
we have a tradition at de-construct of creating someone a card when its their birthday, along with a big ass cake (or several), the same for leaving parties. we’ve been doing it since year 1 (birthdays, no-one left that early!), and we’ve built up quite an archive of cards. this is the first time they’re being collated together and put online. alex has posted his, fred is in germany today, but no doubt will get it done soon too. keep watching this space:
http://flickr.com/search/groups/?q=cards&w=411307%40N22&m=pool&z=t
I was at FOWD2007 on Wednesday - Future of Web Design (I’d missed Future of Web Apps) with Rory, Nicki and Joel from de-con. It was an interesting mix of speakers and topics, some more compelling and attention holding than others. Some downright boring and I switched off (sales pitches, or showing sites from 4 years ago?), and some completely engrossing (Ryan Freitas from Adaptive Path was really good, Denise Wilton of moo.com/b3ta and George Oates of flickr were both great, and i had the opportunity o of meeting them over lunch in the sun with a pint).
I have to say - i’m not sure anything truly groundbreaking was said - but many valid points were made - primarily with regards to making a user feel engaged and more importantly ‘comfortable’ in their experience with your app/site. This doesn’t mean everything has to be soft/wacky/zany and say “yay, you’ve saved your profile”, its about getting the tone right for your audience. Lots on the experience is as much a part of the content as the core product/message - which i’m not sure i agree with 100% of the time - you have to consider some things are utilitarian, and work well, unobstrusively, just get the job done, let other things worry about bevelled edges and light language, but everything has its place - choose the right tool for the job - even Florian from hi-res! was saying HTML has its place.
The most interesting aspect was how ‘geeky’ a large portion of the day was. It was not a design conference, it was a web technologies conference, of which design plays a massive part. There was, based purely on anecdotal evidence, and a quick glimpse of namebadges, an equal measure of people calling themselves ‘developers’ as well as ‘designers’. Many of the discussion was around new technologies, such as Apollo and Silverlight, and of course, many of the most popular sites are very much technically interesting, perhaps more than design interesting (i’m sure many people would disagree). Convergance is certainly here now, but i wonder if its more convergance of roles (designer/developer) than anything else. And quite neatly, the end panel debate touched on this topic - is everything moving to fast, do you need to be a jack of all / master of none?
I’ve always felt specialising is a more sensible route - yes, new technologies and tools crop up, and its important to stay aware of them, but in the inevitable shakedown, knowing how to do something really well will always stand you in better stead than being second-rate at many things (of course depending on your job, if you’re consulting, or overseeing a wide range of people, your speciality is knowledge of a wide range of areas perhaps, rather than hands on practical syntactic knowledge).
Dave at work is pure South African MAN. He eats meat whilst its still attached to the animal, and has been longing for the grey British skies to open and let through the golden warmth of the glorious sun. Okay - its only Easter, but I’m not in the least bit surprised he’s the first guy I know to be going to a barbecue this weekend.
Straight from the horse’s mouth, Dave provides us with the SA BBQ etiquette. Watch, listen, learn, and get your coals out!
tonight is curry night, tra la la.
15 dirty ‘meat’ curries, and bottle of cobra please.
if you see a rabble of de-constructors wandering around the streets of E1 tonight, don’t be scared. come up, say hi. we might buy you a poppadom.
We’ve been busy at work recently. In just the last two months, we’ve launched the following sites:
http://www.madethought.com - design lovelies
http://www.adidas.com/iin - impossible is nothing
http://www.adidas.com/football - gooooooooal!
http://www.180degrees.co.uk - pole to pole, man powered
http://stpancras.eurostar.com - the eurostar’s moving to north london
http://www.lso.co.uk - london symphony orchestra
Needless to say, it took us slightly longer than two months to make them.
Alex and I were discussing at lunch whether Top Gun might have homo-erotic themes or not. I think it does, he thinks it doesn’t.
Case closed:
I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone like Viacom brought litagation against GooTube for copyright infringment, but I have to say I’m not surprised they’ve waited until now. You choose, taking two guys in their twenties to court for £500m (and expecting to get anywhere near that), or taking an Internet giant, with deep enough pockets that they paid $1.65bn for the site itself, which do you think is likely to make Viacom more money?
Its fair to say that Viacom feel threatened by Google, who doesn’t? Television figures are decreasing, due to a wealth of other sources of on-demand services: download services, YouTube, Tivo, VOD such as Tiscali (nee Homechoice), and 4oD, and for many audiences sectors, other sources of entertainment such as gaming consoles. Having the small ‘interesting’ bits of last night’s “I’m a Celebrity Chef, singing in the jungle for tricks, get me out of the house”edited, uploaded and thrust in front of you by discerning viewers - rather than trawling through the hours and hours of late night telly for a 30 second amusement, is always going to be more relevant for a time pressured audience, but where Viacom are missing a trick as probably best summed up with the old saying “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”.
Google’s YouTube service is about small clips, selected by the greater internet populus, and for watching in bite size chunks, not about ripping off entire episodes of Lost, or House MD. No-one is going to sit at their monitor squinting at a 400px square grainy flash file for an hour of Jack Bauer running around LA. The content which is being posted is probably benefitting the original content producers - after watching a few 30 second clips of some new show, its possible that the user will be interested enough to watch the full program through usual channels. Viacom should embrace YouTube’s ability to quickly and cheaply get what are effectively trailers for their content out into the wild. If they’re proud of their programming, the content will be good enough that a user will go and watch the full thing - hey, its been working for porn cable channels for years ;)
The concern that users will be switching off their television sets, therefore the networks will lose advertising revenue is understandable, but the pressure should be on organisations like Viacom to produce quality content which users still want to watch on their telly. Partner with Google to shout about their great new content, don’t bite the hand which has the opportunity to actually bring new viewers to your channel.
Viacom.. psst, if its a good enough idea for the BBC and NBC…?
