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.

Robin demonstrated some examples of the barriers he faces when browsing - from things like CAPTCHA on Google preventing sign-up for a Google account to the challenge of navigating pages with 100s of links. Using the web in this way looked like a real struggle.

The one thing I took away from this was the importance of providing a link to a text only alternative version of a website in a prominent place on every web page to give access to something that is as accessible as possible.

The only other thing to add is that maybe there needs to be a better technological solution to this, as some of the sites Robin demonstrated, which seemed to comply with some level of web standards/ accessibility guidelines, didn’t seem very usable with a screen reader?

Perhaps a combination of screen reader software, touch screen technology with some kind of tactile feedback could be used to help improve the online experience for visually impaired people in a way that web designers will never be able to achieve just by producing “accessible sites”.

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.

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.

We would expect a charity like Save the Children to be completely on board with accessibility so its surprising to hear that they chose a powerful design experience over a completely accessible one. But more importantly we would have told them they could have had both a powerful design experience that was completely accessible.

There is nothing on the Save the Children microsite that couldn’t have been made accessible. What’s probably happened is that the agency, designers or both just don’t know how to do this. Here are a few things that might have helped provide a powerful design experience that was accessibile at the same time:

sIFR - rich accessible typography for the masses
This would have enabled the text that introduces what the website is about to be rendered in the same font but in an accessible fashion

Javascript alternatives for image effects
Techniques like these could have been adapted to produce accessible panoramic images with hotspots

Making online video accessible
Some good information here about how to make video more accessible

Alternative text
Strangely, the microsite is missing this too. Oh dear!

As the expression goes, knowledge is power, and this is really true of web accessibility. Of course accessibility has an impact on design and arguably it does create more work, however, it cannot be ignored.

There are many techniques that can be adopted to produce visually engaging website designs that are accessible. If you know about them, that is.

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.

The opportunity with VRM is about how it will enable us to communicate with a whole range of organisations and companies in a much more meaningful way. And how these companies will potentially be able to use this information to our mutual benefit.

Imagine a scenario where I post some thoughts to my blog or write a tweet about my iPhone and how I wish it would let me text or email one of my address book contacts to someone else (frustratingly it does not do this. Are you listening Apple?).

Now because I have elected to share my personal data feed with Apple and because they are using VRM tools to listen to me (and millions of others) they know what we all want, can introduce this onto their product roadmap and rather than sending me the generic email about new iPhone software that we all get they can communicate more personally to me that MY issue has been addressed.

In all human relationships those that are most fruitful are based on listening, sharing and trust. Why shouldn’t we have a similar relationship with companies and organisations we choose to interact with?

For the companies adopting this it will be a big shift in the way they communicate and do business. Some won’t be able to make the journey - those with crap products or who are too arrogant for instance - which will be a good thing.

Also for government, if we all take ownership of our own data, they won’t have to worry about it and we won’t have to read stories about any more memory sticks or CD’s containing our personal information going missing.

For those that listen and embrace VRM the possibilities seem to me to be limitless. I’m sure it will happen, its just a question of when and how.

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

1. Is Google Making us Stupid?, by Nicholas Carr

2. Google: Making Nick Carr Stupid, But It’s Made This Guy Smarter, by John Battelle - some interesting comments have been added to this post both agreeing and disagreeing with Nick Carr’s article. Interestingly Google is compared to McDonalds - “Google is to information retrieval as McDonald’s is to food”,  ”the first bite tastes great, but the rest is empty calories”¹. Much is also written about search terms of 2-3 words which deliver a widely focused result that is shallow (therefore mostly useless) as opposed to something that is narrow and deep (and more beneficial).²

3. Google is making your dumber from The Business Week debate room presents two contrasting views from Jacob Neilsen and David Alan Grier. The argument essentially boils down to fragmented facts delivered by Google mean the web is not a great learning environment (Neilsen) vs access to more information stimulates us and makes us think more deeply about the world (Grier).

4. A briefing paper commissioned by the British Library highlights the skills gap of what it refers to as the “google generation” and the way young people fail to evaluate information from electronic sources. It goes on to report “that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority and children have been observed printing-off and using Internet pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them”.

5. On a similar note, an interesting post by slewfootsnoop about dubious posts to Wikipedia illustrates the importance of questioning what you read online e.g. who’s written it, why and whether its widely held as credible elsewhere before citing it as a source. (Um not sure i did this myself with this blog post so guilty as charged).

6. According to the British Cartographic Society “Internet mapping is wiping the rich geography and history of Britain off the map”³ Not sure about this one. If the British Cartographic Society were that worried about it they could easily produce a mashup using Google maps of the landmarks that have allegedly gone missing…..

7. Carol Ness from UCBerkeley writes about “Web 2.0: Opening up, or dumbing down?” and reports on a debate between two authors from opposing camps, Andrew Keen and Paul Duguid, about whether web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia and You Tube are the “scourge of American culture, laying waste to its 20th-century institutions and dumbing down society?” (Keen) or “is the Internet’s latest incarnation a cultural liberator?” (Duguid).

Interestingly Amazon’s web based reviews give Keen’s book The Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet Is Killing Our Culture a big thumbs down compared to more favourable reviews to Duguid’s book The Social Life of Information.

8. Web design is now having an acknowledged impact in print. Roger Alton, Editor of The Independent wrote on 23rd Sept 08 about a “Bright new chapter in this newspaper’s history” and goes on to explain how “all main section pages have handy, colour-coded sing-posting to make it easier to navigate”. Nicholas Carr cites this as an example of old media having to play by new media rules. I’ve always skim read the newspaper to find what is of interest, so as far as i’m concerned these new devices simply help.

I happen to think that the Internet is a good thing and that if used correctly it can make us smarter. I still read books even if some people don’t, in fact I sit on a packed train everyday where lots of people read them. The internet doesn’t replace existing methods of research it supplements them. With search you have to think about the terms used to make sure you get what you need. And by asking the right questions about the information you are viewing - who wrote it, why, who links to it etc etc, it’s possible to find a balanced view online.

Make your own mind up!

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….

Also the Truphone application works really, really well over WiFi and the call quality is as good as the cellular network so this is relatively inexpensive way to keep in touch with people by phone. I also tried Fring, however, the call quality of this was a bit patchy by comparison (for Fring to Skype calls)

Only problem seems to be with Google Maps which do not seem to exist for South Korea. This would have been really handy since very few people speak English and trying to work out where you are/ get a taxi driver to drop you off in the right place was a bit of a headache. For some reason these are not available - if anyone can shed any light please post here!