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Suggest a space on Ready for Ten
We’re very excited here at Made by Many to announce the second release of Ready for Ten. It’s got a new look and plenty of exciting new features!
Ready for Ten, a parent-powered website for mums and dads of 6-9 year olds, was created in January 2010. It started as a blogging platform stacked with tips, conversation and support for parents. In the past few weeks we worked on growing the platform, developing new features and evolving the look.
The Skillscape campaign is the most exciting feature of all. The aim of this campaign is to create a map of the UK’s best spaces for kids to play and practise their skills, from parks and playgrounds to sports clubs.
Skillscape homepage
This page gives users detailed information about the campaign. It shows how many places have already been submitted to the Skillscape and encourages users to suggest a new space.
While designing this page I wanted to make it look friendly and inviting. It is important that users feel welcomed and that they immediately get the sense of what they can do there and what they can achieve by taking part.
I’ll go through the design process here: Read full post
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Steve Jobs: How to live before you die
Yesterday I listened to a very inspirational talk on TED by Steve Jobs ’How to live before you die‘. By telling 3 stories from his life Steve is urging people to pursue their dreams and trust their intuition.
Connecting the dots
Steve always followed his intuition. He never graduated from the university. He didn’t know what he wanted to do in his life and didn’t think that college would help him figure it out. He dropped out of Reed College just after 6 months. By dropping out he could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest him and join the ones that looked interesting. For example he took calligraphy class to learn about typefaces, about what makes great typography great. 10 years later when designing the first Macintosh computer he used his knowledge and skills to design the first computer with beautiful typography. Much of what he stumbled into by following his curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Key learning points:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards”
“You have to trust in something, like your destiny, life, karma, etc. Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even if it leads you off the well worn path, and that will make all the difference.”
Love and loss
He found what he loved early in life. He started Apple with a friend in his parents’ garage when he was 20. In 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of them into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. As Apple grew, his visions of the future of Apple began to diverge and he got fired by the Board of Directors. This was a devastating experience for him. What had been the focus of his entire life was gone.
He felt rejected, but slowly he began to realize that he still was in love with the work he did. He decided to start over again:
“The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again”
Now he entered one of the most creative periods of his life. During the next 5 years he started a company named NeXT, and then Pixar, which turned out to be the most successful animation studio in the world, creating the world’s first computer animated feature film ‘Toy Story’.
Ironically Apple bought NeXT, and that is how Steve returned to Apple. The technology they developed at NeXT is now ‘at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance’. Key learning points:
“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.”
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. You’ll know when you find it. Like any great relationship it gets better and better as the years roll on.”
Death
When he was 17, he read this quote: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.”
Since then, he has looked in the mirror every morning and asked himself: “If today where the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m about to do today?” Whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, he knew that something needed to change. Key learning point:
“Almost everything, all expectations, pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way to avoid the trap of thinking that you have something to lose. There’s no reason not to follow your heart.”
When he was diagnosed with cancer, at first the doctors told him that he should expect to live no longer than 3-6 months. He lived with that diagnosis for a whole day, until later that evening when he had a biopsy. It turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that was curable. This was the closest he’s been to facing death. Key learning points:
“Death is the destination that we all share, no one has ever escaped it (…). Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life”
“Don’t be trapped by dogma which is living with the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
I found Steve’s talk very inspiring. I think it’s important that we don’t forget in our everyday life to follow our passions and that we take the time to often look back at our life to make sure that we do what we love. Otherwise we should keep searching until we find the right path. Hopefully we’ll be as lucky as Steve!
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Discrepancy of scale: Ron Mueck
Recently while on holidays in Melbourne, I went to see an exhibition in The National Gallery of Victoria by hyperrealist sculptor Ron Mueck. Having heard about his lifelike but not life-size human sculptures, I was very excited to enter into his world. I was keen to see the way Mueck plays with scale and creates human sculptures presented at all stages of life.
As I entered the room, I encountered the first sculpture of the exhibition “Dead Dad”; a representation of Mueck’s dead father, naked, lying on the floor, only three feet long. The hyper-realism of the model was so striking that I could feel the fragility and the morbid temperature of the body. The fact that he was naked and exposed to the fully-clothed onlookers made him look extremely vulnerable, and I felt a slight discomfort looking at him.

As I continued my journey throughout the exhibition, i found that each sculpture had it’s own story to tell. Mueck’s depiction of different emotional states, such as isolation, fear and tenderness, made me feel like I was observing the human condition through a magnifying glass. I felt trapped in an enclosed space surrounded by emotions.
However the most powerful story was represented by the “Wild Man”, a nine-foot sculpture of a bearded man clutching stiffly the stool he was seated on. Despite the monstrous size of the man, he seemed so vulnerable and the fear and anxiety emanated from his eyes. It felt like as if he was terrified of us – the audience. I could strongly empathise with the feeling of intimidation that was brought to life so vividly by the sculpture.

Every sculpture looked so realistic that it was hard to resist the temptation of touching them. However as I got close and reached out my hand, security approached me immediately, and so my desire was left unfulfilled! I still wonder if they feel as real as they look.
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Protect The Human – new designs for Campaign pages
Protect The Human is Amnesty’s International UK site. It’s designed to engage people to stand up for humanity and human rights.We’ve recently redesigned and launched new campaign pages on Protect The Human. The aim of the redesign was to improve the user experience and usability, which would lead to the increase in numbers of people getting involved in the campaigns for human rights.
Campaigns play a crucial role on Protect The Human. They are designed to highlight the ongoing problems happening in the world. Each campaign has a range of actions for people to take in order to fight the injustice.
To improve the campaign pages and increase the number of people taking actions, we’ve done some major changes. We started with the campaigns index page.
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LOVEFiLM homepage redesign
We’re very excited that the new LOVEFiLM homepage we designed has been released in beta!The previous home page had grown organically over the last few years and hadn’t keep up with how the business has developed. Since the last major update LF have launched a new magazine section, cinema listings and video on demand – none of which were highlighted on the home page very well. Many pages of the site have also been updated to a new, more visually appealing look and feel, which now needed to be echoed on the homepage.
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Goodwood Festival of Speed
We’ve recently launched an activity dashboard for Audi at Goodwood festival.
Goodwood Festival of Speed is the world’s biggest and most diverse celebration of the history of motor sport and car culture. Audi UK has had a significant presence at the event for 14 successive years. The 2009 festival took place on the 3 – 5 July.
Last month Audi asked us to design a dashboard that would bring this and previous years photos, videos and tweets taken from behind the scenes by Audi and their loyal fans at the Goodwood festival.
It was a very quick project to embrace, and I was assigned to design it!
The brief was to create a premium product using Audi brand guidelines in a way that feels approachable rather than corporate.
To fulfill the challenge I did the following:
- With obsessive attention to detail, I designed features like soft gradients, delicate textures, hover states on buttons, images and tabs, gentle strokes that help make the design look premium and expensive
- Made it look simple – use of white space, a clean layout and light typeface makes the page look legible, improves readability and creates a feeling of sophistication and elegance, all which help enhance the performance
- Kept it user friendly – soft edges, rounded corners and smooth gradients makes the site more approachable and encourage the users to upload their content
Here’s the design. Have a look!

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OolaMoola
Recently we’ve launched a blog OolaMoola for our client Hearst Digital.
The blog is about how to live a fabulous lifestyle on a low budget. It consists of challenges that are taken by our creative and very determined editors StylishMoola and BirdyMoola, who know exactly what they want: get the best for less!
As a Made By Many designer, I’ve created more than a few blogs so far, however designing OolaMoola was a new & fun experience altogether.
Ok, so I guess the best part of it was that there was hardly any brief. There were no major constraints nor specific requirements. All I was asked was to create something inspiring, something that looks fresh and fun, and something that gives users a positive experience.
To get some inspiration I looked at creative magazines (i.e. 4Talent, idn) and some design websites (i.e. designspongeonline.com, weebirdy.com). I started collecting together all the interesting elements that I found: images, textures, graphics, illustrations, fonts etc.

At that point, I knew what sort of look and feel I was after. I wanted OolaMoola to have a magaziny, crafty, hand-made look. To achieve it, I did the following:
- Logo – cut out letters from magazines

- Background colour – scanned magazine page to achieve the paper texture

- Illustrations and graphics – collages of photos of my friends and hand-drawn/mouse-drawn graphics

Here’s the final design I’ve come up with:

I really enjoyed designing it, and I love reading the blog now. You can’t get any better than that!
















