-
The Kingdom of Awesome
We were milling about at @LenKendall’s @the3six5 meetup at The Ginger Man here at SXSW last night when Greg Christman, aka @reelspit, came over to say hello. Greg had recently taken part in a creative workshop we held at BBH NY to generate ideas and test thinking for the next phase of Metrotwin, a site we created and run for British Airways. What a dude.
The place was packed with South By’s itinerant freak scene of start-up makers, innovators, journos, digital and new model advertising folk. I was hanging out with Utku from Mint Digital and, in jest, we discussed how awesome it would be if this group could be a country or city-state. This prompted Greg to whoop loudly that we should call it the Kingdom of Awesome and design our own awesomeness flag, and run the whole place using Foursquare. As an aside, I’ve heard a few people recently suggest that the word “awesome” is over. My friends, you misunderstand the meaning of awesome if that’s what you think – but that’s another blog post.
The idea of a Kingdom, Republic or Nation of Awesomeness – depending on your political persuasion – is funny (especially after quantities of booze on a warm evening), but it reminded me of a tweet I’d seen earlier in the day from Jeff Jarvis:

I don’t want to get carried with all this but I think The Kingdom of Awesome is real – real in an allegorical, Utopia sense: a metaphorical ‘State’ of hive-mind.
-
Battle for Your TV: The Big TV Smackdown at SXSW
I made bad choices for the first two time-slots at SXSW, so I had high hopes for the third, PayTV vs Internet – The Battle For Your TV, featuring Mark Cuban of HDNet and Avner Rosen of Boxee.
It was good to see a debate between two people who genuinely disagree by 180º on how the future of TV will pan out, even if some of the argument was basically dick-swinging.
Cuban believes that the future of TV is basically the same as the present: subscription services over cable or satellite, with a light dash of so-called ‘Interactive TV’. Rosen believes, as I do, that the future of TV is on the web. To be clear: everyone sane accepts that we will continue to have a dedicated large screen in our houses on which we watch video. I just don’t believe that broadcast TV has a future that looks anything like the present, if it has one at all.
-
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.
-
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:

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.
-
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:

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:

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:

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.
-
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.

-
SXSW’ward, ho!

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

