This week saw the launch of The Politics in the Room, a video website presenting a collaborative project by members of the Lux Associate Artists’ Programme. A full project write-up will follow, but for now you can read some background info on the credits page, then browse the latest films.
I love Flickr. It’s quite possibly my favourite website. Here’s how deep I’m in there:
But sometimes I’m mystified by the stuff that becomes popular on Flickr.
Flickr has a feature called ‘interestingness‘, a secret algorithm that ranks images from the millions uploaded every day based on (among other factors) the number of times they are viewed, and the number of times they are ‘faved’ or commented on. I browse ‘interesting’ photos a lot, and have unearthed some fantastic images, many of which have made it into my favourites. Today I stumbled upon this one, by a user called ‘Jerri Johnson (So little time, sorry!)’. It irked me a little.
For me, it’s a really phoney image. It started as unremarkable, and by applying some filters and colour tweaks and watermarking in Photoshop it just got gaudy. But some people like this stuff - HDR photography, which deliberately exaggerates colours to an unreal degree, is all the rage at the moment. HDR-type images (or bad approximations of the style) appear regularly in Flickr’s ‘most interesting’ lists.
Anyway, back to that image - ‘The House of Lifesavers’. It has actually only been viewed 167 times, fewer times than my image of the Bullet girls. However, it has been ‘faved’ 47 times, and has a whole page of comments. Jerri has 881 contacts, and that’s a lot of people being notified when she posts an image, so this isn’t surprising.
But the comments list is a bit suspicious: I can see a dozen people who have commented multiple times, often with invitations to many different groups, with names like ‘The Golden Touch‘. The image has also been invited to some of the same groups multiple times, often by groups that have a policy requiring people who submit images to nominate one or more images by different users.
There’s obviously a bit of sour groups grapes here, since to my knowledge none of my photos has ever made it into the most interesting charts. However it’s clear that some users with a relatively small circle of proactive contacts can push certain images up the interesting scale by effectively fave- and comment-spamming. And I think Flickr’s interestingness algorithm should protect against this, if it doesn’t already. Sure, there’s no accounting for taste, but come on. Come on.
I’m very pleased to announce the launch of www.charliecampbell.co.uk, a portfolio website for my photographer friend Charlie Campbell. Charlie and I started the project back in October, and have worked together to create a minimal website design to showcase her collection of portraits, personal photography and documentary work. The site looks simple, but there’s a fair bit of complexity under the hood. Full project outline to follow. In the meantime, enjoy.
Screengrab from soundcloud.com
I had a great online experience recently with Soundcloud. It provides a beautiful solution for quick and easy music distribution.
Problem: I’d asked my DJ friend Chris to spin some tunes at my birthday. We sort of discussed what I liked, and what he tended to play, but sharing a mixed playlist of tunes that he might play on the night was something that involved either burning discs, or using an FTP dropbox - and I couldn’t be bothered with either.
Solution: Soundcloud. Chris recorded an hour-long mix, and uploaded it to Soundcloud. He then invited me to listen and comment - not just a single comment on the whole thing, but multiple comments attached to different points in the music. I created an account on Soundcloud, so now I can follow other users’ uploads, and return to listen again whenever I like.
The whole site worked really well - it was a totally surprising and seamless 15 minutes on the internet.
I just read a great post by Ben Hunt on Web Design from Scratch, ‘10 Top Skills for Web Design, in order of importance‘. Here is his list:
A couple of snippets I liked:
I’m convinced the #1 most important skill for a web designer is the ability to use words effectively. A truly effective web designer is more highly skilled with writing and editing copy than with producing graphics in Photoshop.
Writing skills are also much rarer in the world of web design, which is good news for me, Ben Hunt and you, prospective client!
Web design is one of the richest, most diverse domains you can choose. It’s a giant pile-on of visual design, technology, psychology, coding, human factors, all that jazz. And the technology doesn’t stand still from one day so the next. That’s what makes it so frustrating - and so fun! One thing’s for sure. If you want to perform well in this mental soup, you’ve got to be capable of learning on a daily basis. You need to pick up new styles, new techniques, and new constraints every time you sit down to work.
I haven’t read a better summary of the multi-faceted world of web design - and the reasons it appeals to me - than the first two sentences of this quotation. It’s exactly this mixing – of business stuff with human stuff, graphic design with code – that means it’s never dull. Most people regard ‘web design’ as one of the following:
But really it’s about providing for people’s appetite for information. The web has grown so fast, and the domain of web design is now so broad, that, as Ben points out, ‘there’s no one who can teach you everything’. As a web designer, the best you can do is to keep learning and share knowledge and expertise with others - in the hope of keeping pace with the pile-on.
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.