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….

We’ve been exploring the “blogosphere” for sometime now. There’s a load of stuff on it. And sifting through it can take a lot of time.

One thing that is consistently excellent is We heart stuff an online lifestyle magazine that seeks out what’s cool and delivers it straight to your RSS reader or inbox. As they say “We do the work so you don’t have to…”

There’s been lots written about how brands should use social media. We will be sharing some thoughts about that soon but one thing I do know is that any brand which thinks it has some cool stuff should send it over to We heart stuff and let them be the judge.

There are a huge number of online resources about the most effective way to design a website.

Research by Jacob Neilsen and Steve Krug into usability has undoubtedly influenced many of today’s web designers. A recent post by Smashing Magazine entitled “10 Principles Of Effective Web Design” suggests that the “usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a website”.

Usability principles are important but our experience would suggest that a website’s credibility is arguably more influential. The Web Credibility Project at Stanford University has published some useful information about how to boost a website’s credibility, all of which we would agree with.

Our experience though suggests that there is one thing above all others that is all important in ensuring a websites success…

MPs have been suggesting that film style age classifications be applied to video content uploaded to YouTube. And that a TV style watershed be in place for content containing violent or pornographic images.

Why? Videos involving school children from Hertfordshire fighting and a woman being raped have rightly been removed from YouTube following complaints from the public.

Using Wordpress via a browser and the new iPhone application really illustrates the importance of usability in software applications in today’s hectic world where time is at a premium and patience is in short supply.

Wordpress is well designed, easy to understand and most importantly easy for non-technical people to use. It can be learnt in a few minutes. For a free application I think that is remarkable.

If you contrast this with some open source software (and many, many paid applications), which are difficult to install, let alone use there is perhaps a valuable lesson to be learnt - more design, fewer features.

Welcome to our blog.

Writing this the funny thing is I know it isn’t going to be read by many people to start with as creating a good blog takes time and it needs to have really good content.

With that in mind Structure is a design agency based in London. We come across lots of interesting things every day so this blog is going to be our way of sharing our ideas, thoughts, comments and anecdotes about what’s happening in the world of design, the internet and beyond…

Let us know what you think, good or bad.

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