cardboard robot ninja pirate monkey

the campaign for real management

it only took me 3 years to finish it...

virtual pitch strike

I reckon we should all sign up to this - starts at http://www.saatchi.be/

...apart from everything

apple on hi-res! on apple

link: http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/hi_res/?sr=hotnews

including a funny picture of me in the studio - to be found in the gallery section.

fuck style?

today i was sent a link to this article:

link: http://www.ideasonideas.com/2008/02/fuck_style/#more-161

its an interesting piece i have to say. i think there will be a lot of people all jumping up and down clapping their hands with joy that someone has piped up and spoken out about functional design vs superficial style. someone even left a comment that was as follows...

"Spot on with design not being “art”. This is what I keep telling various people involved in projects. Design is a tool to communicate a message and how effectively a message is communicated should define how good a design is and not how pretty it is."

but this takes the premise that art is merely superficial...

dolce & gabbana

link: dolce & gabbana collection site

just a quick note about what i have been up to at work of late. the main thing among some other stuff has been the start of the redesign of the D&G web content. as part of an ongoing set of work, the first thing that we have done is to rehouse the DG collection label images and content into a nice, clean, minimal and functional site. there are still a lot of 'finishing' to be done on it, but as it goes, im pretty happy with how it came out and not meaning to blow my own trumpet, i think its a lot better than most of the other fashion brand websites that are out there. but then again, if youve looked through as many of them as i have had to, youll realise that that isnt actually a hard thing to achieve. nevertheless...

love-r 1.2

it wont be too long now.

user centered content

bbc now playing website

there was this site that barny sent around work the other weekend. on first impressions i thought it was good. but the more that i have been thinking about it, the more i really think its taking a step in the direction of where i think the internet and all this web 2.0 malarky should be going.
the site is an aggregator of other web content, all centred around the currently playing tracks off 4 bbc radio stations. as something is playing it pulls in gig information, album and tracklisting information, background on the band, presumably using last-fm, background on people who like listening to that artist, and also videos and interviews off youtube for you to watch in one place. all this content stays for a couple of minutes till the track changes and then it all refreshes to the next artist playing.
pretty cool. and a good use of content that is already there and ready for appropriation. but what it did remind me of is that its pretty much exactly the same idea that my brother and i had about a year ago for a possible direction for the main radio 1 website. the whole conversation came from us being somewhat tired and bored of the 'user generated content' aspect of webtrends these days and wanting to get back to something that is more useful and experiential and exciting for people to use on a day to day basis.

we thought about having the site be totally geared around what was currently playing - NOT letting users create their own playlists or streaming in music that you know your user might like already from their last-fm playlists or whatever. chances are that people have already heard those artists or that unless youre going to plumb the pandora databases for "you might also like..." suggestions, the things that you can recommend to people may probably be totally off the mark. i know it happens to me all the time. there is a lot to be said for similar styles of bands, but at the end of the day, what sets your heart racing with music can go from a justin timberlake track one minute, to a piece of opera the next. if you limit people to the same genre for ease of comparison, youre sort of forgetting the unexplainable thing in music that makes people love it so much.

sooo, with radio, i want to the djs to play me things that i might hate. i dont have to like it. i dont have to go out and buy it. its good to have an opinion, even if its a negative one. but then, on occasion, there will be something that you have never heard before or that you never thought you would like but it stops you in your tracks and changes your life for a few short minutes. a website that then made it easier for you to find out about that track and put you two clicks away from seeing that band live or buying the album can only be a good thing. especially for most people of my generation who grew up with radio before the days of internet music on demand, and constantly walking into a room to hear a track but having missed the bit where they told you what it was. then spending the next 3 weeks trying to figure it out. its about discovery. its about someone else's take on music and you can share in that. thats why john peel was so great. he'd play the orb after cat power, belgian hardcore after the ramones. it didn't matter what it was, aslong as it was good. when radiohead stood in for zane lowe recently, im sure there were a lot of their fans who were listening to the show, still wondering why thom yorke just wanted to play MIA and dubstep. "but this isn't guitar based rock??" although maybe im being harsh there.

user generated content has made the internet a more useful place in a lot of areas, but i also think that it has killed a lot of opinion. people have blogs, but are getting more and more afraid of saying "this is what i like" because of the amount of people that will then return comments saying "youre an idiot". recently on andrew collins' website - http://www.wherediditallgoright.com/BLOG/, he stopped writing posts because of the disparaging comments that people were leaving. lets let people voice their thoughts please. if you don't agree, then thats fine, write your own blog instead of just arguing on other peoples.

lets not try and dilute the population, lets celebrate differences, talk to someone on last-fm whos music compatibility rating with you is low. you know, they still might be a nice person.
all this neighbour thing is doing is to herd people into little boxes of likeness. sure its a world where you can talk about your similarities, but isn't it also a world where you might miss out on being surprised.

good to know that people like it

link: http://reformrevolution.com/dolce-gabbana/

you know nothing...

...was the title of the 'she says' evening which i made a cameo appearance at a little while back.

basically the nights entertainment was centred around innovation and future thinking. how to spot trends and how to get in the right mindset to be more progressive in your own creative. the whole idea of doing a talk on innovation - while it sounds pretty good - is actually a lot harder than youd think. when chatting about the structure of the evening with lady lariu, we quickly realised that there may be people coming to this night thinking that we are going to tell them about a bunch of technologies that are really groundbreaking which then they can go and exploit in their next projects.

this was not what we wanted at all.

its hard to explain to people how much work it takes to remain 'at the cutting edge'. its not just having a passion for what you do and a keen eye, its being willing to sacrifice sometimes all of your spare time to doing extra research/learning/thinking off your own back. for commercial gain or not. sometimes its a very lonely place to be. when youre sitting in bed on your own reading about MVC design patterns for as3, or whatever your current obsession is, it doesnt leave much time for a social life. ive been trying hard for a long time to strike a balance, but i still find myself coming back from work, having something to eat, and then getting into another 6 hours of general constructive dicking about on my computer. it is and will always be a mystery to me why my brain is at its most productive between the hours of 12pm and 4am.

maybe i should become more nocturnal.

but anyway, after the talk i promised some people that i would put the presentation i gave up somewhere, but as it goes, most of it is in brief notes for my sake, not slides that people could read. sooo, in an attempt to make amends, i thought id write it in a nice long post on here for all to ignore as they please...