Posts Tagged ‘conference’

  • What I’m hoping for from SXSW

    I’ve been to loads of conferences over the years. Most of them have left me feeling ‘whelmed’ at best and at most other times frustrated.

    I blogged last year about one conference I attended in London last May. There was a general feeling that the speakers offered nothing new, virtually no excitement or insight and most of the talks boiled down to a personal retrospective. That’s fair enough you may say, but the conference was billed as being about the future of the industry.

    It felt as if the speakers had just been asked to turn up and speak about anything they wanted. No vetting by the organiser and seemingly very little brief to the speakers.

    As such I’ve given up on any conferences this year. Apart, obviously, from the biggy. The one we’re all off to.

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    Simon I'Anson By Simon I'Anson

    8th March 10

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     Conferences

  • SXSW countdown: one week

    And lo, ready to roll a full week before we take off for Texas, here it is — our Twitter-powered SXSW people-tracker:

    sxsw_d15

    For those who haven’t been following the posts and discussions around this project, here’s the story…

    Just about all of Made by Many is heading to Austin, Texas for SXSW interactive. Several weeks ago, we decided to build something onto our website to bring our SXSW experience to life for the people who aren’t going to be there with us. We thought this project would also be the perfect occasion to throw the doors open on our creative process and actually share the journey we go through as we work an idea through to a final execution.

    This series of posts started with shots of our original approach. We then showed how this idea was refined a few different ways. The third and final instalment in this design journey is above.

    The idea for the page is very simple: all of our most recent tweets on one page, updated in real time as it happens.

    The design started out as a series of coloured panels, one for each person, laid out on a very regimented grid. However, we all felt that this was a bit strict – it neither reflected our personality nor the event we’re going too.

    So we loosened the design up, taking the hand drawn style of our avatars as inspiration. The page is a series of speech bubbles, laid out in a seemingly random and slightly haphazard way. Connected by lines, doodles and graffiti, the speech bubbles change colour with time: the freshest tweets are dark, the stalest white. The page will be darkest when the conference sessions are going on and we’re tweeting non-stop, but completely white in the middle of the night when we’re all sleeping. Except for @malbonster’s bubble. He never stops.

    As well as pulling in our tweets, the page also pulls in the latest photo in our Flickr stream, our latest blog posts, even twitpics. You’ll be able to see more tweets from each person by clicking on their avatar or simply going through to their Twitter stream.

    The idea for the page is very simple: all of most recent tweets on one page, updated in real time as it happens.
    The design started out as a series of coloured panels, one for each person, laid out on a very regimented grid. However, we all felt that this was a bit strict – it neither reflected the personality of us or of the event we’re going too.
    So we loosened the design up, taking the hand drawn style of our avatars as inspiration. The page is a series of speech bubbles, laid out in a seemingly random and slightly haphazard way. Connected by lines, doodles and graffiti, the speech bubbles change colour with time: the freshest tweets are dark, the stalest white.
    We imagine that the page will be dark red whilst the conference sessions are going on and we’re tweeting virtually non-stop, but completely white in the middle of the night when we’re all sleeping. Except for @malbonster’s bubble. He never stops tweeting.
    As well as pulling in our tweets, the page also pulls in the latest photo in our Flickr stream, our latest blog post, even twitpics. You can see more tweets from each person by clicking their avatar or simply going through to their twitter stream.

    We like the sketchy style and the playful execution. We also think the design has some dynamism to it, that it tells a story and carries your eye through that story fairly easily. All in, we think this is really close to who we are.

    This whole ‘designing in public’ thing felt a little strange at points (sort of like being naked in front of a lot of people, I reckon) but we got some interesting feedback here and on other blogs, which was cool. And it’s practice for us to be more open in the future — something we are really committed to doing.

    Our SXSW special will be live on Made by Many as of Thursday 11 March.

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    Sara Williams By Sara Williams

    4th March 10

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     Made by Many

  • SXSW countdown: two weeks, one day

    We’re still keen to open up our creative process by sharing the evolution of our SXSW project.

    As mentioned last week, it’s a Twitter-powered execution that aims to give an as-it-happens update of what the Made by Many folk are up to, as we’re doing it. This week we’re sharing three snapshots to show how the design is coming together.

    Here’s where we were in the middle of last week:

    colours

    This was our first attempt in Photoshop. Each person gets a panel that shows their avatar and latest tweet. We’ve colour-coded the boxes to show recency, with the freshest content (hot colours) at the top, and the stale content (cold colours) at the bottom.

    However, we wanted the page to update in real time, which would mean people and their panels moving around the screen. We figured that was going to get far too busy and complicated… Onwards!

    Here’s the next stop on the journey:

    Flash

    Here we’ve brought in a bit of alpha-order to give everyone a spot on the page and keep them there. This solved the busy problem, but when the coloured panels are shown in a non-spectrum order, it looks confusing. We trimmed the colour back to what you see here but found that they meant less.

    Standing back a bit, we worried that this design was actually a bit boring and unemotional… just not MxM enough. Next!

    Finding the right conversational note:

    bubbles

    Here we’ve started to play around with something that’s a bit more conversational and has more personality. There’s still more work to go, but we think this could be fun. Now we’re moving in the right direction.

    We agreed this design and we’re taking it forward even as we speak.We’ll preview this project again next week, but in the meanwhile, feel free to tell us what you think.

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    Sara Williams By Sara Williams

    24th February 10

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     Made by Many

  • SXSW countdown: three weeks, two days

    Plans are still afoot — and are growing more evolved by the day — for our big trip Southwest.

    As mentioned the other week, we’re working on a little project to bring our Texan adventure to life for the people back here — our friends, clients and industry colleagues. Our primary aim is to put together something that shows off what we’re up to at SXSW, and does it in real time.

    Here’s one of our initial sketches. We think it’s a fun idea, but we also think it might be a slightly formal execution.

    MxM in Austin sketch1

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    Sara Williams By Sara Williams

    16th February 10

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     Made by Many

  • SXSW’ward, ho!

    Austin

    Big news, little doggies…

    Flights have been booked, passports renewed, and Tim’s brought his ten-gallon out of mothballs. Yes, that’s right — Made by Many, the entire company, is going to South by Southwest! Read full post

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    Sara Williams By Sara Williams

    29th January 10

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     Made by Many

  • Highlights from Mark Boulton’s presentation at FOWD London 2009

    Mark Boulton was one of the speakers at this years’ conference Future Of Web Design (FOWD) in London. His presentation ‘Typography’s not on the Web, it IS the Web’ was the highlight of the day! It was very well prepared and very informative talk on the state of typography today.

    Here are the following highlights:

    1. What is typography?

    Typography is a language on the web. It conveys information in writing. A lot of data on the web is information. Language is information, therefore typography is a language.

    2. Designers role

    Authors have a conceptual model of what they write. Readers have their own conceptual model of how the information should be presented. It is designers’ job to interpret authors’ information. Understanding of the brand values and knowing the audience will help designers to bridge the gap between the authors’ and readers’ conceptual structure.

    3497042351_9cab8ba8881

    Photo by Vectorfunk

    3. Typography is information design

    Typography goes much deeper than just making things look pretty. It IS information design. A lot of typographic design is involved in splitting up and structuring the information. Typography is about conveying the information in the best way.

    4. Everybody can be a designer

    Not just qualified designers but everyone has the ability to be a designer with the tools that are available nowadays. People create newsletters, write blogs, use content management systems to create their websites, etc. These ‘amateur designers’ face a choice dilemma. They make bad design decisions because the tools that are available make it easy for them to make bad design decisions.

    Drupal.org is a good example of how to make bad design decisions. It is a content management system that Mark is currently working on to improve the user experience. 6 out of 7 sites created in Drupal are ugly! And that’s because the tools that are given to people make it hard to make the site look beautiful, i.e. users are left with the choice of 82 fonts (most of the fonts are not right for the job, i.e. Comic Sans). It would help users to make the right decision if the number of fonts was reduced and if they were given with the choice of two good fonts like Georgia and Helvetica instead.

    3497043997_894466cb76

    Photo by Vectorfunk

    5. Examples of bad typographical choices

    Typefaces are designed for a reason. 99% of typefaces have been designed for print.

    Comic Sans – 9 out of 10 times is a wrong tool for the job. It’s often used out of contexts and that’s because tools that are available for everybody make it easy for people to make bad design decisions.

    Meta Sans – is not a great font for the web. It never was designed for the web. It was designed to be used by German post office in print (i.e. postage stamps)

    Times New Roman – designed for print. Looks good on the web only in large size. Serifs are sharp and small, on screen become almost invisible in small sizes.

    So why not use Georgia instead? It was designed for web. Has got big, fat serifs that look good in small sizes as they don’t vanish.

    Web typography is limited, and we have to think hard before we make the right decision. While it might be easy job for designers it isn’t necessarily easy for the users. Our role as designers is to help users make good design decisions. We have to hold them by hand!

    It is also useful to go back to the fundamentals of good typography and raise the awareness among those who don’t know them.

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    By Julia Wojcicka

    11th May 09

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     Conferences

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