We just completed some invites for the Spanish Tourist Office which we’re really happy with.

But while getting to the final design (which will be on our site in the not too distant future) we did some work layouts and thinking that although not right or selected for the final invite we still really liked and wanted to show.

The ideas are a ‘kinetic’ to capture the idea of being special, being a star; then ‘dynamic shapes’ (colours taken from the Spanish flag) capturing dynamism and movement; and finally the ’shape of Spain’ made up from letter forms of the title, the places that are sponsoring the evening and some of the things you will experience and can consume!

Hope you like them.

We were asked to put a logo together for a charity called Rainworks, run by Anna McDonald, the Control arms campaign manager from Oxfam and a friend.

Rainworks.org is her own charity - outside of her day-job spent ridding the world of landmines and AK-47s - so you can understand why we couldn’t refuse - if she can do all that - we can find the time to do a logo !

The charity, in short, works like this - money donated goes to ensuring that every family in one particular village in Kenya (where Anna spent time before going to University) gets clean drinking water through collecting rain water in water butts paid for by donations.

Simple really.

You donate a little and in return they get clean water. It makes a huge difference to them - they don’t have to spend half the day collecting water (that you or I would regard as un-usabel) to drink and cook with.

With the time saved they can get on with more important things such as farming and education -

That’s where the logo idea came from, a curved font like clouds and water, with a leaf or droplet growing in place of an ‘i’.

Anna’s been working with this village for years and years.

Her next plan is to persuade restaurants in Oxford (where Oxfam are based) to allow Rainworks.org to collect money when diners order tap water rather than bottled water, to allow the price difference to be a donation -

Your own version of making Water work.

There’s also a quizz competition on the site, but all the questions have been kindly donated  by Oxford Dons, making it perhaps the world’s toughest competition!

Good Luck and of course all donations will i’m sure be gratefully received !

http://www.rainworks.org.uk/

We attended the The Future of Web Design in London on 30th April.

Our expectation was to gain some valuable insight into the possible directions that web design may be headed, but sadly the conference really disappointed on this and wasn’t worth the money we spent on this. We won’t be going next year.

With a few exceptions I thought the quality of speakers wasn’t great and was often more a retrospective look at people’s work rather than a considered, thought provoking view of what the future might look like (what we had hoped for).

The main thing that stood out for me was Robin Christopherson from Ability.net whose presentation on “Designing for All in a Web 2.0 World” highlighted what a terrible experience visually impaired people are getting online.

For people who want to produce outstanding websites but don’t know how.

We’ve been designing websites for small & medium businesses and large corporations for over 10 years now, in previous employment and for our own agency. Things have changed significantly from the first brochure sites we were commissioned to design pre the dotcom boom but one thing that remains constant is that many people we engage with find the whole process of designing and building a website difficult to understand.

Here are a few thoughts about some of the knowledge we’ve gathered on our journey that hopefully will help make web design and build a bit easier.

I came across an article in Design Week on 11th Dec 2008 regarding the new BSI draft standard on web design and accessibility. What was interesting was a reference to a microsite design for Save the Children which couldn’t be made completely accessible because “the client wanted a design that conveyed its message powerfully, rather than a completely accessible one”. And the Strategy Director at the agency responsible was also quoted saying how restrictive accessibility guidelines are from a design point of view.

Having had a look at the microsite what seems clear is that the one of the biggest problems with designing accessible websites are the agencies & designers working on these projects.

A conference was held this week in London about VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) which I was fortunate enough to attend.

For those that don’t know VRM is concerned with all of us, our data and preferences and how we as individuals can manage this information to our benefit by controlling how other individuals, government and companies access it and what they are able to do with it. It is the opposite of CRM where our data is held by many different companies and organisations who often use this to send us stuff we don’t want. Or that’s my take on it anyway. Adriana Lukas has written a good introduction to VRM which is worth a read.

I think the aims of VRM are quite uplifting - Doc Searls (pictured above) said something like “VRM is to companies what Christmas is to children: they’ll be surprised” -  and in my mind it is as much about the opportunity for companies/ organisations as it is for individuals.

Today is a good day.

This blog hasn’t gone political but publishing this photograph which I took at a demonstration in San Francisco in 2002 against the build-up to the war in Iraq seems appropriate.

Someone went to a lot of trouble to create this banner which features some of the quotes Bush will long be remembered, for all of the wrong reasons. It might have taken another 6 years but at least from today we will effectively no longer have to suffer any further “Bushit”.

It is worth reading the Guardian where several American writers comment on their perception of “The state of America after Bush“.

Good luck Barrack Obama, the world has been waiting for you.

Lots has been written about whether the Internet is making us dumber or smarter.

Dumbing down society, wiping out history, old media is being forced to play by new media rules, the net is re-programming us, Google is like McDonalds, we’re losing the ability to read are just some of the charges levied at the Internet, Google, You Tube & Wikipedia…..

This is a really interesting subject so I thought it would be worth trying to pull together some of the posts i’ve come across. Hopefully this might help people make their own minds up, assuming you are able to read any of them in any detail

We’d just like to say a big thanks to the following blogs that were good enough to feature our work recently - SeptemberIndustry, The Serif, FormFiftyFive, The Cap’m, Dirty Mouse

For anyone who’s wondering what the point of this is, it give us the opportunity to get our work get in front of more people (who will hopefully like it) and importantly for us some really talented designers have been in touch offering their services (thanks to all that have sent in their portfolios).

I recently visited Seoul, South Korea and was a bit surprised to learn before traveling that UK mobile phones would not work in this country. As an owner of an iPhone 3G i thought that it was bound to work, however on searching the internet there are some conflicting views about this (for/ against) since the iPhone 3G is not on sale in this market.

My experience - the iPhone 3G worked absolutely fine. It picks up a network and can make calls and send SMS’s no problem. I did not turn on data roaming as i’m sure this is expensive, however, since Seoul (and also Cheongju to an extent) is full of free public WiFi the iPhone actually works better here than it does in London. So if you want to use it to email/ upload photos, browse the net etc it works like a dream….