24ways.org
Just when you thought, ‘Actually, can’t we just skip Christmas for a year and jump straight to Easter?’, along comes a website to make you giddy about the advent countdown all over again. 24 Ways is running its fourth annual series of articles from leading web designers and developers, releasing one piece daily for 24 days in December. A solid-gold RSS subscription for the festive season.
This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.
I really enjoyed this promotional video for 4th Estate, especially viewing it in Vimeo’s luxurious full-screen HD. The producers used 1,000 4th Estate books and spent 3 weeks holed up in a flat during the summer to produce the movie, which cleverly plays on the themes of the books on display and re-enacts key moments within them (I particularly liked Albert falling off a boat papered with Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections - 1min 02 secs). Only a serious bookworm could spot all the ‘bits’ first time round, but you can read more on Times Emit, the Fifth Estate blog or on the new 25thestate.com website.
London Phoenix home page
I’d like to applaud the redesign of the London Phoenix Cycle Club. The visual design is really bold and striking, the blog is packed with content, it’s got an embedded Google calendar with events up to May ‘09, a forum - is there a better bike club website in the UK?
More on the bike blog.
I’ve been pointed towards Bikeoff a couple of times now. ‘An initiative of the Design Against Crime Research Centre’, and based at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, it’s a laudable venture, and I’m looking forward to reading into it in much more detail. Bikeoff TV in particular looks like a nice Google maps / Flash video project.
However, at least superficially, I really do have to slate the design - especially given the extensive list of design personnel listed on the about page. Here’s what I think’s wrong:
I really dig those business / tech / web / software gurus at 37signals. I like their products (I use Backpack and Basecamp daily) and I like their blog (Signal vs Noise is one of my favourite RSS subs).
About three months ago I embarked on one of 37signals’ workplace experiments: the 4-day work week. At London College of Fashion, I’m lucky enough to be able to take advantage of a flexible working scheme, whereby an employee can work his 40 weekly hours around the 5 available working days. I’ve been working 4-day weeks, 10-hour days, from 8.30am to 6.30pm.
It’s awesome, because it means:
Well, great, but from LCF’s point of view, am I getting as much done? Yes, here’s why:
Jason Fried makes a useful point though - that by adopting this schedule you’re not necessarily talking about cramming as much work into a shorter time. In fact, you’re looking for better, smarter, but shorter working.
I made it down to a couple of screenings at the Bicycle Film Festival this weekend. On Friday night, I was at the Barbican (officially the worst sign-posted location in central London) to see Les Ninjas du Japon, a documentary about a Japanese road racing team competing in the Tour du Faso, a stage race held annually in Burkina Faso.
The bike race is the scene for a wild culture clash: the calm, pale-skinned Japanese battling extreme heat, potholes and herds of farm animals on the rural roads of West Africa. Director Giovanni Giommi cuts back and forth between French-speaking Burkina Faso and the cyclists’ home towns in Japan, drawing out the riders’ hopes and dreams one minute, the next returning to the race, and the lives of the ordinary Burkinabé drawn into the race as spectators, drivers, commentators or soigneurs.
Prior to the main screening, the organisers presented Natali Fabrizio’s short ‘Pantani e “Le Tour de France”‘, a trippy but totally awesome 9 minutes that cut flickery motorbike-cam video of Marco Pantani racing against Indurain in the 1994 Tour, to a pounding house soundtrack. I felt compelled to follow this up with a late-night glut of Pantani vids on YouTube.
Update 8/10/08:
On Sunday afternoon I returned to BFF08 to catch a bonus screening of Road to Roubaix, directed by David Deal and David Cooper. The film is a documentary about the Paris-Roubaix one-day road race, that has taken place every April since 1896 on the cobbled roads of northern France and Belgium.
The opening minutes were a real buzz - lots of gritty black and white footage of tough guys riding through clouds of mud and dust, the whites of their eyes standing out from faces caked in dirt and sweat. An early highlight was the interview with Lance Armstrong, who described the 200km route - the Queen of the Classics, which he has famously never entered - as ‘insane’.
However the 75 minutes included too many talking heads offering similar viewpoints. An hour in, we pretty much got the message that the race was hard. Road to Roubaix was less successful where I hear (not having seen it) that Jørgen Leth’s 1977 documentary A Sunday in Hell was in a class of its own: namely, in offering an up-close analysis of the actual riding of the race, the changing fortunes, the bursts of speed, the grappling for position, the sheer, brutal Darwinism of the event.
A quick shout out to Jotta (formerly Fifzine), the creative arts portfolio website that has recently relaunched. I like the new design: it’s certainly more navigable, and the lightbox widget seems to work well. Generally though I think Jotta are OK because they’ve featured one of my photographs on the home page!
However… I could do with more ways to browse other profiles - that big ‘advanced search’ box in Explore feels at odds with the idea of browsing freely. This is something we in the University of the Arts London web team thought a lot about when designing Showtime. We modelled the site on FFFound, because we liked the way you can casually browse without having to think of search criteria or narrow your search in advance.
I’d also like to see Jotta plugging in to some APIs - Flickr and Linkedin for example - to lift it above being ‘just another (closed) network’…
As a cyclist who regularly fritters away his surplus cash on cycle ‘accessories’, I quite like Wiggle - or at least when they’re cheaper than top-dog Chain Reaction Cycles. Recently, however, their wasteful packaging has put me right off. Check this out:
Wiggle package arrives. Cue oohs and aahs around the office.
The package looks empty, but wait...
The true scandal revealed.
Four replacement Campagnolo Veloce brake blocks in a box that could have contained 400 of them. Run out of Jiffy bags Wiggle?
Photo: Andy Budd
On the train back from a workshop in Brighton for dConstruct, a programme of events and a conference hosted by design agency Clearleft. The theme of this year’s dConstruct is “Designing the Social Web” - and my workshop was Wireframing 2.0: Designing for Definition.
Wireframing isn’t a design technique I’ve personally used before (although I get the idea), so I was keen to learn more. Or rather, from what I’d been reading online about designers debunking old-style ‘grey box’ wireframing in these days of AJAX and complex, multi-state user interactions, I was keen to know what methodology I should be adopting in its place.
Rich Rutter and James Box from Clearleft presented the differences between wireframing and the approach they preferred - interactive prototyping. Prototyping is essentially building a clickable website, using HTML, CSS and Javascript (mainly in the shape of jQuery or another Javascript library), that closely resembles the layout of the final design, but with the minimum of visual adornment. A key stage in the web design process, prototypes follow on from the early stages of brainstorming and basic sketches (Clearleft’s mantra is ‘Identify > List > Cluster > Sketch’).
Prototyping expressly dispenses with the model of:
Naturally, flat visual layouts are often reshuffled and reconfigured during development; testing, again, frequently throws up surprises. The logical way to build a website is through a series of iterative prototypes, that puts user experience (or ‘UX’) at the core, instead of shoehorning it in later; users can feel the way the site behaves, and feed back on their experience of it, before any visual design decisions are made. Prototyping also ideally draws input from both designers and developers, as opposed to having a rather cagey back-and-forth relationship between the two.
So - I’m sold. Hand me the stickies. I’m particularly chuffed that Clearleft have provided a zip file of the prototyping code framework they presented. If you’re a UX-er you’ll be interested in their Polypage tool, developed in collaboration with Rails developers New Bamboo, that allows prototypers to manipulate user states (e.g. logged in vs logged out) by adding classes to their HTML elements.
My trip to Cornwall on Dopplr.
Not many of my friends have signed up on Dopplr, the ‘online service for intelligent business travellers’. This is a shame, because I think it’s a great website. Well, it certainly feels like a great website. The one thing Dopplr does really well is convince me that I should spend more time on the site, just doing… something. Only after spending hours exploring am I beginning to get the real value of the application.
Dopplr is beautifully designed, socially networked, functional. It appeals to me on the same level as Facebook, in the way it allows me to organise my travels, experiences and friends. Basically, you add trips, go on them, then write tips in your journal for fellow travellers. Photos you upload to Flickr that you took during the trip are automatically added to the trip page (as above). You can also connect with people travelling to the same places in advance, and then browse their trips and journals. Naturally, it’s better when you share trips with more people.
Personally, I’m not so keen on the ritzy ‘Mr and Mrs Smith‘ hotel recommendations - but then I guess the site is targeted at business. It never felt like a business site until I read the about page info though. I think Dopplr would link up perfectly with Lonely Planet. If you had a site that combined that tripadvisor Facebook app ‘Cities I’ve Visited’ with tips from the LP Thorn Tree forum with geotagged Flickr photos - well that would be a website.