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:
Table-based design - in this day and age there really is NO reason to be laying out a website using tables. Tables are for tabular data. End of story.
The bubbles around the chunks of content does work alongside the colour-coding to make it easier to separate bits of information - but it still feels cluttered.
As used (in)famously and stubbornly by Jakob Nielsen, that hyperlink blue is the blue that browsers colour link text by default. In this case, Bikeoff just hasn’t got round to styling its links in the CSS. It looks pretty bad.
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:
Your work becomes something you knuckle down to for a 4-day burst. You can approach it as a block of time and separate it from your 3 days off, and you start to think of your job less as something that basically dominates your life, and more as a temporary activity that you’re going to focus on and get satisfaction from.
Long weekends. Sundays are so much more spacious with a free Monday to follow; alternatively, they can be truly guilt-free if you used your Friday for domestic admin. 4-day weekend trips now don’t require taking annual leave.
More time for freelance web projects - this may seem self-defeating if it means I’m doing more work, but really it’s about the ratio of focussed, proactive working vs wasted, bored time ‘at work’.
More time for biking.
Well, great, but from LCF’s point of view, am I getting as much done? Yes, here’s why:
Longer days mean more hours to really get your teeth into a project. My most productive work arises not from grazing on different bits of tasks but from focussing on a single task exclusively until completion.
I’m on average fresher and more energised (or at least more committed) during 4 days than I am during 5. I can see the carrot of the weekend dangling clearer than the 5-dayers, I’m incentivised.
I get early nights during the work part of my week and save parties for the weekend - hey, I’ve got the time!
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.
