Archive for the 'News' Category

Smarter / shorter working

Posted
by
Alastair
on October 17, 2008
in Life, News and Work
. 0 Comments

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.

Bicycle Film Festival 08

Posted
by
Alastair
on October 5, 2008
in Bike, Film and News
. 0 Comments

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.

Jotta

Posted
by
Alastair
on September 25, 2008
in News, Web and Work
. 0 Comments

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’…

dConstruct08: prototyping workshop

Posted
by
Alastair
on September 4, 2008
in News, Web and Work
. 0 Comments
Photo: Andy Budd

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:

  1. visual design (in Photoshop and pdf)
  2. development
  3. user testing
  4. delivery

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.

All Flickr photos tagged dConstruct08.

itv.com: worse than expected

Posted
by
Alastair
on July 13, 2008
in Bike, News, TV and Web
. 0 Comments

From what I’ve read lately, I expected itv.com’s online video service to be a bit rubbish. I wasn’t prepared for it to be spectacularly bad. 

I’ve been trying to keep abreast of the Tour de France since it started on July 5th. Considering it’s the world’s biggest (and best - bike bias acknowledged) annual sporting event, TV coverage is woeful: a 1-hour slot on ITV 4 every evening. But - wait a second - how convenient! You can catch up online on itv.com!

Here are a couple of screen grabs that sum up my experience of watching the Tour on itv.com:

Great!

Just great.

Over the past week of viewing on a Mac (which is supported) in 2 different locations (thus ruling out bandwidth or bad internet connection as possible faults) I’ve encountered a grim catalogue of errors:

  • player hangs or freezes during playback
  • selected video doesn’t play on request (this is not about buffering, I know what buffering is)
  • videos are ‘not available’ for some unexplained reason
  • the selection of Tour videos goes from e.g. 7 (we’re currently on Stage 9) to 2, and now at time of writing, 3 - again with no explanation 

Not to mention incomprehensible error messages, bad player controls and navigation, and having to watch the same advertisement up to 8 times in an hour of playback. And what’s with Silverlight by the way? Having to download and install it before viewing is like some nightmare flashback to Real Player days.

The Tour de France videos must be among the most popular programmes on ITV Catch Up at present. If it was any good, this would be an effective way to promote this service to viewers who perhaps wouldn’t normally use it (from the looks of it most visitors are catching up on Corrie). But it isn’t any good, it’s awful.

Hey ITV! Spend some money and sort it out!

For anyone hunting for a decent way to watch Le Tour online, try www.letour.fr. Here’s a decent video service with daily short clips summarising the day’s action, albeit without Phil Liggett. This content is re-purposed by a number of other news sites (like this one, which plays back using Jeroen Wijering’s very excellent and now ubiquitous FLV Player).

Condor website

Posted
by
Alastair
on July 9, 2008
in Bike, News and Web
. 2 Comments

By now you ought to know that I love cycling and bikes. I’m also pretty keen on web design. So when a bike manufacturer I really like gets a new website, I’m excited.

Condor website screengrab

Condor Cycles, the iconic London bike builder, race team and brand name, had a ‘coming soon’ holding page on its site for most of 2007 - for so long, in fact, that I almost got in touch to offer my services. But I just checked back, and they’ve relaunched!

Here are some of the things wrong with the site:

  • Sloppy code: the visual elements of the site rely on Flash, and there’s no text content, or keyword or description metadata, so it’s no surprise the site doesn’t show up on the first page of Google for a search for ‘london bike shop’.
  • Dodgy user interface: I know what they were trying to do with the ‘virtual catalogue’, but the Flash page turner tool is fiddly to use and doesn’t encourage browsing, even if there are additional buttons for ‘next page’ and ‘previous page’ on certain screens. What happens if I want to download an image of one of the bikes or email to a friend? I can’t. 
  • The ’store opening hours’ page opens in a new window. A minor point, arguably, but the issue that prompted this post. Here’s why you shouldn’t do this on a single domain - or indeed ever.

So why use Flash, really? Can it be easy for Condor staff to update details in their catalogue? No - there’s no product database feeding into the site. In 2009 when their new bikes are launched, they’ll have to start over.

What Condor needs, to do justice to their excellent store, solid reputation and superb bikes, is:

  • A clear, accessible site designed in standards-compliant HTML and CSS, to boost its search engine rankings and improve navigability.
  • A better catalogue system that displays pages to the browser transparently, with unique URLs per product, and which the store staff can update easily.
Next time I’m in to pick up new inner tubes, it may be time for a quiet word with the manager…

Mashed

Posted
by
Alastair
on June 21, 2008
in Life, News, Tech and Web
. 0 Comments

I’m spending the longest day of the year in a darkened hall at Alexandra Palace. Mashed is an event for software and web developers. The general idea is to get together with like-minded coders and ‘hack’ or build some kind of application in 24 hours. We’ve had some presentations from the BBC, Yahoo, Lonely Planet (who are today releasing their API exclusively to Mashed attendees before it goes public in 48 hours) and others, and there are prizes on offer for the best hack that utilises some of the data or APIs on offer.

These people are serious. There are around 300 guests, lots of whom have come from across the country and brought sleeping bags. The BBC is here, and several film crews are roaming around. Microsoft is here, but everyone’s on a Mac. It’s a recipe for productivity: geeks have been left alone in a room with their machines (and free food and coffee). There’s even a soldering iron in one corner.

Personally, I’m a little confused, being a bit of a front-end fairy. But Si is having a good time. He’s planning an app that mashes the Lonely Planet image library with data from the Hadley Centre for climate research. I might go for a lie down in the ’soft zone’.

Castle Gibson online catalogue

Posted
by
Alastair
on June 13, 2008
in News, Tech and Web
. 0 Comments

For the past month or so I have been working on a big project for Castle Gibson, the restored furniture retailer. Castle Gibson have decided to close their bricks-and-mortar treasure trove on Upper St in Islington and move their business online.

In collaboration with Sheridan at Wall Creative, who designed the visual layout, Simon and I built a catalogue and shopping cart system. The user interface is clean and simple: browsers can click on an image from the thumbnail grid to view larger images in the main window, or use the catalogue menu. If they’re interested in an item, they can add it to their enquiry, then click submit.

The user-friendly admin area is arguably the pièce de résistance though. It makes the business of uploading images to the catalogue and choosing how to display them a breeze.

Full project profile.

Tumblr

Posted
by
Alastair
on June 13, 2008
in News, Tech and Web
. 0 Comments

Probably when we should have been working, we were tumbling.

A tumblelog is essentially a blog without the baggage. You set it up for free in seconds, then publish your links, images, movies, quotes, whatever. For me it comes into its own by serving as an RSS feed aggregator: you can publish your del.icio.us links into it, as well as your Flickr photostream and loads of other bits - then feed it all back out again.

Projectionist is reliably offered as the daddy of the tumblr, while Max Wheeler’s Penguin Classics tumblr had many of us wishing we’d tried it first. For the record, here are mine (which switches between colour-riot and ultra-minimalist about every 5 days) and Si’s.

Fiona Campbell Shoes

Posted
by
Alastair
on June 13, 2008
in Fashion, News and Web
. 0 Comments

A few months back I pulled off another against-the-clock website build. Last-minute seems to be a trend among fashion designers. MA student Fiona Campbell needed a site in advance of her forthcoming exhibition at London College of Fashion. Fiona specialises is sustainable footwear, and wanted to use a website to promote her expertise online and offer consulting services.

Thankfully we had some great photos to work with, and after a bit of to-and-fro we settled on a calm, muted visual feel with a mix of blues and slate grey. While I put the structure together, Si came into play with an easy-to-use blogging tool so Fiona could publish news snippets and keep the site fresh.