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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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We love awesome stuff: Vote for Policies
Earlier this week, Stuart wrote about viewing our competition as allies. This probably feels a little uncomfortable for a lot of people — businesses want to succeed, and a big part of succeeding is making money, which comes from getting work, which normally happens at another business’s expense.
But who says it’s a zero-sum game? The Web is changing and the world is changing. The biggest gains — monetary and otherwise — are to come from being a part of that change, and influencing the direction of that change so that we — and our industry — become smarter, kinder, and just, well… better.
Today, through the serendipity engine that is Twitter, I found a really clever, thought-provoking site. It’s called Vote for Policies and in addition to being beautifully designed and very useable, it’s also really timely. (Thanks must be given to @RKTweets, who tweeted this little gem in the first place.)
The site helps users compare the policies of the six main political parties. It removes the party branding so people can get straight to the content and make informed decisions based on the policies they want to live with, rather than be nudged this way and that by the faces, rhetoric and theme songs those policies usually hide behind. By pulling out the meaningful content and putting it in a usable interface framed by clean, instructive copy, this site does something really important: it makes powerful information accessible to more people.
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Interview: Stefanie Posavec, beautifier of literature
This is the second post in an ongoing series of interviews with ‘interesting’ people that the Made by Many crew find either inspiring, exciting, confusing or otherwise of note.
Stefanie Posavec is a designer, artist and data visualiser. Her site at www.itsbeenreal.co.uk is a veritable feast of lovely interestingness. If you had to sum her up, it might be beautifier of literature as this is a key focus of both her ‘real’ job and some of her data projects (which include visualisations of things like Kerouac’s On The Road and OK Go’s latest album cover)
Sit back and enjoy an intimate (email) interview with Stefanie:
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We might be living in the wrong experiment
One of the many very enjoyable and inspiring talks I attended at SXSWi was on Design Fiction.
Here’s how it was billed.
Design fiction is an approach to design that speculates about new ideas through prototyping and storytelling. The goal is to move away from the routine of lifeless scenarios-based thinking. We will share design fiction projects and discuss related techniques for design thinking, communication and exploration of near future concepts.
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The iPad: one step forward, two steps back?
The commonplace view within magazine publishing is that the iPad is going to save the industry. Will it? And in the process, will the iPad become a force of reaction, enclosing a free, open and infinitely connected internet within a landscape of small fences and high walls – the tallest being the ones around the iTunes store?
I had a short talk to give last week at ‘What’s on your iPad”, a well-attended event organised by the British Society of Magazine Editors and the Editorial Design Organisation. I adopted the role of sceptic and these were my questions.
What sparked them off was a couple of conversations with @bobbyc and @malbonster against the background of a loud hum of optimistic speculation buzzing up from the magazine industry on both sides of the Atlantic. You can see it here, at Conde Nast, busy iPadding up with Wired and GQ; here, with Sports Illustrated (you’re not allowed to watch the swimwear section**); and here’s Interview on iPad, a magazine of pages on a screen (see four below from the iPhone app), with a little video thrown in.
It’s like going back to 1990 in the days of the CD ROM and the ‘electronic magazine’. So what is it about the iPad that sets editorial lips aquiver?
I think there’s five key things:
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Content design with cojones
Or so I tweeted whilst watching the recent Apple keynote. A month later and I don’t think I could have been more wrong.Immediately after the iPad’s reveal, the interweb rippled with an argument between two tribes, those that want a computer that allows them to tinker under the hood, and those that don’t care about getting their hands dirty – they just want to email, surf, watch and listen. For me, this isn’t the interesting debate. It’s how the speed, screen size and controlled environment of the iPad now means that content design on screen can finally come of age and grow some balls. Big ones.
Or so I tweeted whilst watching the recent Apple keynote. A month later and I don’t think I could have been more wrong.
Or so I tweeted whilst watching the recent Apple keynote. A month later and I don’t think I could have been more wrong.
Immediately after the iPad’s reveal, the interweb rippled with an argument between two tribes, those that want a computer that allows them to tinker under the hood, and those that don’t care about getting their hands dirty – they just want to email, surf, watch and listen. For me, this isn’t the interesting debate. It’s how the speed, screen size and controlled environment of the iPad now means that content design on screen can finally come of age and grow some balls. Big ones.
Your content isn’t the same as my content
There are some sites that people check two or three times a day. BBC News is one of them for me. However, out of the 50 or so articles on their home page in the morning, I’ll probably only read around ten stories. As I check back during the day, there’s a law of diminishing returns, in fact every time I visit I usually end up reading half as many stories as I did the previous time.
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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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Time for a reassessment of the human-computer interface
A great blog post by Lukas Mathis has been floating around Twitter for a few days now. In it he talks about the removal of features in software development. Specifically:
If you don’t pay attention, what started out as an elegant, simple application that perfectly solves a single problem, can quickly turn into a huge behemoth of an application that solves a ton of problems, but solves all of them poorly.
This, and some other tweet comments, got me thinking about the iPad (who isn’t?) and how I believe it’s a glimpse of the future for how we interact with personal computers.
In the 35 years since the arrival of the personal computer we’ve been on a continuous upward trajectory of feature enhancement and specification bloat. It’s not just the software, it’s infecting the very machines that we run the bloated software on.
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Delightful punctuation
As an erstwhile pedant and ex-employee of a major dictionary publisher, I have had my fair share of run-ins with punctuation. So I chuckled to see this brilliantly illustrated explanation of how to use the semicolon.
By the way, if you’re looking for something to delight you on any given day, head over to Maria Popova’s site of wonder Brain Pickings (or follow her on twitter), which is where I stumbled across this little gem.
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Persuasive signup
Signup forms are always a pain in the arse. For a long time, the volume of email addresses captured (as if they could get away) has been a pointless little metric. It allows brand managers to own something – “so we can write to them in the future”. But with open rates and click-throughs so terribly low for emails and the cost of sending bulk emails so high (remember when sending emails was free?!), we’ve seen implementations of single sign-on more and more common.
I came across a page on lifeblob.com via search results which required me to log in to view the content.
It’s a little annoying that it asks me to sign in to see content that is displayed in search results, but ignore that for a second. What I like here is the hierarchy of the three services, placing lifeblob’s own below the rest. The reason for this will become clear.
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