1. Geek in the pub

    Recently, I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak in Leamington Spa at the regular Geek in the Park event. The event is split into a friendly picnic during the day, leading into an evening of talks on various web-related topics in a local pub.

    James Willock Presents

    Also leading discussions during the evening were freelancer Andrew Disley, Clearleft visual designer Paul Robert-Lloyd and content strategist Relly Annette-Baker. Topics ranged from the blurring of the lines between web and native apps to the Large Hadron Collider.

    My talk, entitled 'Brain science, not rocket surgery’ briefly spoke of some of my personal mantras when developing interfaces on the web. I spoke of designing good perceived affordances (citing in some detail Donald Norman’s thoughts in The Design of Everyday Things), crafting realistic user journeys and the benefits of sensory feedback.

    I was very pleased to receive feedback from attendees who appreciated my perspective or believed that I articulated some of their feelings. Speaking publically is always a valuable experience, and I went away with plenty of ideas to implement for my next engagement.

    Special thanks go to Trevor Morris and Anthony Williams for organising a fantastic event and inviting me along.

  2. Responsive Web Design: Review

    Up until I read Ethan’s new book, Responsive Web Design, I wasn’t very excited about the concept at all. I liked the idea behind it, but the way people were talking about RWD made it seem like child’s play.

    “While y’all are off resizing your browsers and tweeting about your oohs and aahs, I’ll be making real websites”, I’d chuckle to myself from the toilet seat. Laptop in hand.

    Responsive Web Design, the book

    Yesterday though, my mind was changed completely and this is something I’m genuinely excited about. It’s the first thing web-related thats really got me going since I “made” my first site in Dreamweaver. It’s why I slept 4 hours last night. I’ve completely jumped on board and I’m having a boat party, y’all.

    This doesn’t mean all the projects we build should be responsive, but the foundation can be laid by developing our websites more logically, with flexible fonts and layout baked in.

    I believe there’s still quite a way to go on the best way to implement RWD, and there’s hundreds of use-cases we probably haven’t even uncovered yet— but that’s what I’m most excited about.

  3. Manchester Design Symposium

    A couple of days ago James and I headed up north for the Manchester Design Symposium. The lineup was pretty diverse; including talks from John Walters (Eye Magazine), Bruno Maag (Dalton Maag) and Johnathan Barnbrook (Barnbrook). The best thing about the event for me, was listening to the sometimes opposing views of very different designers on the value of their craft. It also left me feeling a bit nostalgic about my days as a student.

    Hopefully it’s the first of many similar events.

  4. Tweet Your Wisdom

    I guess you could call this a marketing exercise, but it certainly didn’t feel like one. In January of this year we screen-printed 120 posters featuring wise Tweets we’d collected through our Tweet Your Wisdom website. These posters were given to attendees of the New Adventures in Web Design conference, which took place in Nottingham in January.

    One of our Tweet Your Wisdom posters

    Over 200 Twitter users tweeted their apparent wisdom, and through an internal, anonymous voting process, we selected the following six Tweets to print, all of which subscribed to the ethos of the project.

    “It will all be okay in the end. If its not okay, its not the end.”
    –@robeam

    “Sometimes the best plan is not to have one.”
    –@mattberridge

    “Never wrestle a client. You both get dirty and the client likes it.”
    –@replete

    “The person who never made a mistake never made anything.”
    –@andyharris

    “Do something you’ve never done before.”
    –@gregwood

    “I went to naconf and all I got was this awesome poster.”
    –@greenboyroy

    These Tweets were then set in Akzidenz-Grotesk, and handed over to Norm & Alex at Waste Studio down the road from us. They did a great job of helping us select appropriate inks and paper stock, not to mention actually printing the posters for us. They’re a talented graphic design team as well, so do check them out. Thanks guys!

    The end result was 120 prints that felt, smelt and most importantly looked great. I really hope they’re all in nice frames above desks somewhere, so if you’re having a bad day you can look up and be comforted, motivated or maybe just amused.

    Type & texture detail.

    Sometimes the best plan is not to have one.

    It will all be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.

    I went to @naconf and all I got was this awesome poster

  5. Links for week ending 16th January

    Here’s the first of our weekly list of links. This may not happen every week, but we’ll collect together everything the team found interesting during a given 7 day period in order to share it all. Hopefully you’ll discover something you find interesting!

    Design/UI

    Front-end development

    Development/version control

    Browsers/devices

    Misc