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Probably a really easy one – but, being a command-line newbie, I had to guess this after several fruitless Google searches.

When using Terminal to navigate your folder system, you will occasionally run into a folder with a space in its name, like /Application Support. Trying to access a folder, e.g.:

[Alastair-Mucklows-Computer:~/Library] alastair% cd Application Support

will trigger the error:

cd: Too many arguments.

The solution is to wrap the folder name in quotes, like so:

[Alastair-Mucklows-Computer:~/Library] alastair% cd "Application Support"

About a year ago I decided my cycling blog Legs Feeling No Pressure needed a spruce-up. Since I started writing it I had always planned to design it properly, and was inspired by some nice-looking US-based bike sites, Velodramatic and Half Acre Cycling. Somehow UK-based cycling-related websites tend towards the less visually dynamic end of the spectrum, and I wanted to buck that trend.

The starting point was a visual identity for the blog. Legs Feeling No Pressure isn’t a brand as such – it’s just a slightly cryptic statement about what I get out of cycling – but as a name it needed a design that somehow communicated more than the name itself could do.

David Hardy, who is our LCF graphic designer and similarly a bike-nut (he’s into scooters), agreed to help me out, and we started knocking around some ideas. In a nutshell, here was my brief:

• bold, sans-serif typeface (although I do like some serifs used in the bike world’s, notably Rapha’s)
• no need to include cycling-related imagery like wheels (old hat)
• maybe a colour
• I like fancy Italian bikes but I also ride around town on a filthy hack (style vs grittiness?)

David got his head down, and a few thousand furious mouse-clicks later he supplied a suite of 18 draft logos.

Logo design drafts #1 sheet 1

Logo design drafts #1 sheet 2

Logo design drafts #1 sheet 3

I emailed the designs around a few friends to see what they thought. Perhaps predictably, this wasn’t a very useful step in deciding on an initial direction; some preferred N (the C-shaped design on sheet 2), but equally, others liked the tag styles, and quite a few actually liked the distressed font (B on sheet 1, which I instantly dismissed).

At this point we rejected a few, and moved forward with some others, exploring further the tag style as well as adding in a cheeky wrench-head / Pacman design (N, below):

Logo design drafts #2

Personally, I was leaning more towards version I – a rounded, surfy, retro tag with a mixture of bold sans-serif and ‘classic’ serif that I thought echoed the masterful pairing of typefaces in the Rapha Condor logo. However, as so often happens with logo design, hours of close examination had made the words ‘Legs Feeling No Pressure’  themselves practically incomprehensible as a phrase. We needed some distance.

A couple of days later we arrived at a final three:

Draft #3 option 1

Draft #3 option 2

Draft #3 option 3

It was David who swayed me towards option 1: he reasoned that a) I took cycling quite seriously, so I ought to have a solid, bold logo, instead of a tag more at home on a pair of board shorts; and b) that the crisp edges of option 1 would look better in a blog header anyway.

The next question was that of colour. David prepared a fourth suite of options, which introduced a red element, and also offered some variations on the solid serif, just to make absolutely sure we had the right one:

Draft #4 sheet 1

Draft #4 sheet 2

One final touch was the addition of the tagline ‘What I think about when I think about cycling’, which I borrowed from Haruki Murakami’s book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Now I could see that our original bold serif was still working really well, and that it was now perfectly finished by the red ‘No’, with the patterned gradient within it suggesting all kinds of training-related things like hills, heart rate, and precision.

We had it – the finished logo:

The finished logo, including tagline.

New look Curzon Cinemas website.

A couple of years ago I blogged about the Curzon Cinemas website, which I criticised for its unnecessary use of Flash. Well, I’m not sure how long ago it happened, but Curzon got a redesign, and it looks great:

• Classy, unfussy typography and black and white core styling
• Nice colour-coding for the 5 different cinemas
• Nice, logical 3-column layout: listings on the left, description and video in the middle, stuff to catch your eye in the far right
• Cufón custom font replacement
• Stacks of javascript for Flash-like fade effects, AJAX-loading and showing/hiding elements

I also love the fact that each new release has a trailer embedded in the page. Excellent stuff.

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’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.

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.

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’…

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.

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).