Noisy Decent Graphics

We Make Stories

We've just spent a very enjoyable hour listening to The Boss and playing with Jeremy's new project We Make Stories.

It's the latest in the excellent We <verb> Stories series and follows on from the multi award winning We Tell Stories. It's a story making thing for 6 - 11 year olds. My kids are younger but they still enjoyed it.

You can build comic books, treasure maps and even a pop up book which you can print out and make pop up! It's really simple to use, a 6 year old could do it alone, and it looks great.

The interactions are nice. Playful, cute and well done.

If you have kids and you're permantly attached to the computer, you should combine those skills and make some stories this weekend. After you've been outside playing with the organic carrots etc etc.

Jeremy found 3 of the designers used in the project via Noisy Decent Graphics. ico who made remixit, comic creator, and Telling Tales. Studio Tonne who made Pop! and Willow Tyrer who made Tom Mouthy.

Further proof that reading this blog can seriously help your career.

Redacted scores

I was always led to believe that the great innovation Sky had brought to the world was displaying the score in the top left hand corner of the telly during football matches. Which is good and very useful, especially if you turn the TV on in the middle of a game.

So why, dear listeners, do the BBC not do this for Wimbledon? It's especially annoying as a game of tennis has a lot more scoring than a game of football. The score changes every minute or so and therefore when I come in from the terrace with a glass of Pimms I like to know what the score is.

The BBC only seems to show the score when the camera is on this view below:

but not any other view. Maybe that's the only camera that has the little graphic on it.

My bow tie matches my wife's dress

Last night seemed to go really well. I enjoyed myself, although I was more nervous about hosting than I ever have been about speaking. All the speakers were fab and did a brilliant job of sticking to 8 minutes.

Rather than me blather on, let us let Twitter do the review for us.

6pt Hellicar and lewis = fantastic.

withassociates the geek shal inherit the earth. Jamie from @Airside rules. Must talk more with him about sciencey things.

iaintait Having a bow tie that matches your wife's dress! Shits all over my trainer / jumper combo

tollerton "Damn fine inspiration" from Vaughn Oliver.

antiquote Just left #8x8. Damn fine work by damn fine people.

Futurefabric Nice evening out at 8x8 (http://www.ilovedesign.com/...). John Bateson stood out for me. Online video apparently coming soon...

Wagit went to the #8x8 ilovedesign event last night. Was very good. Better then your normal boring conference... and free beer! brucey bonus

And many more via the #8x8 twitter tag. Apparently they could have sold out several times over. I hope they do it again.

Joke update

There's no way to be nice about this. Your jokes were awful, all of them.

I was sent a million, <insert font> walks into a pub, barman says "Why the long face" and a thousand "How many graphic designers does it take to change a lightbulb?" "Does it have to be a lightbulb?" very lame. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Still, winners have been chosen and notified by email.

I'm getting pretty excited about tonight, it will be very different hosting and not speaking. Still if Richard E Grant can do it, then I'm sure I can.

If you're coming tonight use the Twitter hashtag #8x8 during the event and I'll read out the best ones in the breaks. Should be a great night, the mightly Iain Tait is up first and look what he did at his last presentation...

Design jokes needed

 

This Wednesday it's 8x8 London an event I'm hosting. Yes, hosting. 8 brilliant creatives are speaking and I'm going to try and hold the whole thing together like Terry Wogan at Eurovision with only an air horn and some poor jokes as props.

Due in no part to me the event is sold out, but I have some a handful of tickets to give away on the blog.

But I need something in return. I need design jokes. So email me your jokes and the best 4 will win a ticket. Email rather than comment as I don't want to give the punchlines away!

My email address is over here. That's kind of an initiative test.

FREE INSTRUCTIONS

Found, as ever, via The Design Disease flickr pool.

Redacting the office

There's lots of talk at the moment of redaction.

My Latin is a bit rusty these days, but redaction comes from 'the act of reducing' or more accurately compressing, or editing a work or an act. So you could have a redacted version of a piece of writing.

Or a redacted version of an official document, which is what's being causing all the grief at the moment.

For those not in the UK, MP's expenses have been published for the first time by Parliament, albeit heavily redacted. So redacted that it's almost impossible to glean any new information. Luckily we have the Fourth Estate to take care of that.

Anyway. We had some clients in the office the other day and before they arrived I spent 15 minutes redacting the office. You've all done similar things. You dash around hiding any scruffy old jumpers, putting the porn in a dark cupboard and taking down any revenue targets that may have been pinned to the wall. This is the kind of stuff that happens in every agency up and down the land. In this age of transparency and friendliness is this really necessary?

What's the worst thing a client could see? In fact, let's ask the listeners, what's the worst thing you've moved out of the view of a client?

A few more

Graphic Photo Experiments

We went to the British Grand Prix today. Had a brilliant time. But I forgot my Nikon.

Which was a bummer because I had a little experiment planned. Oh well. I had to make do with the iPhone camera. Which was OK.

I wanted to shoot some pretty standard GP photos, take one pixel and stretch that across the whole image. This is nothing new of course, Saville has done similar things (among others) but I thought with the colourful livery of a Formula One car you might get some interesting effects.

It feels like you need some of that classic red and white kerb in there. So I tilted the picture a bit.

 

Might end with an anyway.

Excel Spreadspeech

This morning I did my little thing at Designer Breakfasts. (As previously discussed.)

They asked me if I wanted a projector and I said no.

I'd like to move away from the crutch of PowerPoint. You don't see Obama using funny slides, do you?

Anyway. I still had points to make and I still had words I wanted people to remember. And seeing as I was sort of talking about business models and the like I toyed with the idea of using plastic figures. Or little gifty things. But that didn't feel quite right.

So I made some spreadsheets in Excel.

I'm pretty fond of them, so I'm uploading them here for you to enjoy. Obviously these slides won't mean anything to you unless you were at the talk, so just sit back and enjoy the pictures.

Restrictive choice as a design virtue

Recently I've been thinking about designing something that will allow other humans to create another thing. And still keep it looking good.

The best way seems to be restricting their choice.

People don't need to make every part of a thing to feel like they've created it and by restricting choice you're guaranteed to get something good out of it.

And I'm not just talking about the design of documents or graphics. Yet.

Flickr for example are very good at letting you play around with your page, but ensuring that the actual webpage still looks great.

You can edit the text on your page, but you can only edit the yellow bits:

That's smart. It makes you feel like you're editing your personal page, but you're not allowed to choose colour, font, font size, position of headline and so on.

Apple are good at this too.

All you designers think those photobooks are too restrictive, but remember, these services are aimed at people who aren't designers. That's the point. That's why they're using these services. It's very hard to make an ugly photo book, that's because of the restrictions they have made. Or, if we change the word restrictions for design choices, that's because of the design choices they have made.

Here's an example of how you could give people a little too much choice. A few months ago, Jeremy was making a book, in front of my eyes, in the pub. Suddenly he asked if Garamond was a good font. Instantly, Harriet and I, the two designers present, said, "NO!". All designers know that Garamond is not a good font and maybe Lulu should have taken that out of their list of options.

And, seeing as this post gets sillier as it goes on, here's a pub bench.

Everyone loves these benches. You see them in dirty brown pubs and posh back gardens. They're nice to sit at, they always work. You never arrive in a pub garden and find the table bit missing. They restrict choice in a good way.

There will be more.

Putting a donk on the day

I've had a bad day.

Nothing to worry about, just your classic "below par" as Tom described it. One of the reasons is that I've been trying to finish an article and I've been struggling with the ending. The reasons I'm struggling is that I'm ending by talking about The Web Of Things and Fanufacture and Thingfastructure, clever things I know little about.

I've written articles like these before, or course, but the previous one was written by Adrian Shaughnessy so my one needs to be, proper. You know. Good. (In my head) I know the point I'm trying to make. It's just a struggle to get it down on paper.

And then I get home and these things arrive in the post.

Firstly these little notebooks I've made.

They are lulu books. Nothing that unusual about that, we all know what they are. But they are also cheap, ultra limited edition, bespoke notebooks for a new project.

And then there's this.

Loïc has been telling me about this for ages. But, if I'm honest, I never 100% understood what he was getting at. Loïc is French and although his English is a thousand times better than my French, I got lost in the translation. But now everything is clear.

He's taken this talk and printed it as a limited edition of 1,000 booklets. One side in English and one side in French. Which is pretty humbling and flattering. Thank you, Loïc.

And, lastly, the third thing. Less serious than the other two. There were some emails flying round today after Thursday night. Bearing in mind that we didn't really know each other before Thursday, someone said, "I just could not have enjoyed myself more. I felt completely relaxed within minutes and just had a blast."

All of these three things point to how the internet makes collaboration and remixing easy and fun. And how it lends itself to that kind activity. But more importantly it's how various bits can become more than the sum of their parts. Which is sort of key to how success happens.

More seriously, the first two hint at the new world we're entering. A world where people can take your work and build on it. A world where people can make things quickly and cheaply. And sometimes they might make your things.

A world we can control less than at any other point in time, but a world that needs designers more than ever.

Social and Commercial

We've talked about Designer Breakfasts on this show before.

They're small design meet up, where you can get a lot closer to the action than your usual conference. And they tend to be more focused on the business aspects rather than typography and the like. As they say in their blurb, they're social and commercial. Which is good.

Probably the best one I went to was John McConnell a few years ago. He gave some good, simple, down to earth advice. The kind of straight forward stuff you could actually take away and do.

Recently they've had, Michael Peters and Mat Hunter from IDEO. And now they've got me.

They've been asking me for a while and I've always said no. I don't know why, really. But I met Pippa and Amanda for breakfast the other day and they convinced me to talk about some of the stuff I've been working on over the past nine months or so. Particularly the differences I've found in working more with non-designers and as a partnership rather than as a limited company. I've had a post brewing for a while about all that sort of stuff but it hasn't worked it's way through the tubes yet. So I thought it might be better to chat about it with some humans.

We're about to start a cool thing with Penguin in this vain, and of course there's the 4ip thing - so I'll talk about that and other fun things. You should come along. Tickets available here and there's only a few left.

Colourful Kite

Kites are good. Colourful kites are even better.

What a D&AD Award means

D&AD Awards 2009 Winners from D&AD on Vimeo.

If anyone has any doubt about the value of a D&AD Pencil, or if anyone doubts how hard they are to win, take a look at this video.

Here are the winners, most of them speechless with pure delight. It's charming and refreshing and it makes you feel good watching it.

Well done to the D&AD who've been cranking out the digital output today. Flickr pics, videos and the results. Good stuff.

D&AD Awards Ceremony 2009

Well, that worked.

Last night was the D&AD Awards Ceremony. You may remember a few of us who half know each other arranged to sit at the same table. In truth we don't really even half know each other. More like quarter know each other.

This has been said many times before, by cleverer people than me, but the great thing about the internet is how easy it makes all that. We had a brilliant table, full of great company, randomly arranged by people who don't really know each other. As Chris Doyle mentioned, he could have flown all the way from Australia only to be a stranger on a table of 11 wankers. Instead, we had a great time. Lots of laughing and drinking and more importantly, winning. Thanks, internet.

Chris won a yellow for his Guidelines.

Nick won a yellow for his Corpoetics.

Troika won a yellow for their Cloud, and, of course Matt won a Black Pencil for his coins.

That's really the story of the night. Especially for design. Lots of people reckon Matt is probably the youngest ever Black Pencil winner (in design). To get an idea of how incredible that is you need to know that there have been about 5 Black Pencils, in graphic design, in the last 20 years. Advertising is a bit more generous, but in graphics that's a seriously hard award to win.

Well done everyone.

Creative Review have a full list of list of winners here. The only one I want to comment on is Coca Cola. As I said before, Coke describe their much improved graphic style as "No more bubbles, no more drop shadows, no more extraneous detail". Well, thank fuck for that. It's called common sense and when it's beautifully executed it should win awards.

Now, inevitable moan.

It was a great night, well organised and I'm sure someone will leave a comment saying the food was shit. (Don't ask me - I hate food - but every year people say the food was shit.) But why oh why was Richard E Grant the host? I will never understand why the awards need a celebrity host, for an organisation as infamously perennially financially challenged as D&AD surely paying Hollywood actors wages is not a good idea.

I will also never understand why the President doesn't do the hosting on his/her own. I've seen Tony Davidson, Simon Waterfall and Garrick Hamm speak to theatres and pub crowds and all of them could present the awards. And do a fantastic job. You don't get to be D&AD President if you're a wallflower.

Moan over. The D&AD are a great oganisation and we'd be poorer as an industry without them.

And before you moan in the comments, 'It's a bad year for UK / design / advertising / DM / digital / vegetarians' remember that if no DM projects won, that's probably because no DM work was good enough. If no UK projects won, that's probably because no UK work was good enough. It really is that simple.

Onwards.

Matt's Coins win black!

Youngest black pencil winner ever? Maybe.

So Far - On Our Table

Chris' personal guidelines have won a yellow, Nick's poems have won a yellow, Troika's Cloud has won a yellow and Matt's coins have won a yellow.

So far.

Willy joke

Terrible typography. Spotted by minxlj.

D&AD Awards

It's the D&AD Awards tonight. We've got three nominees on our table; Matt with his coins, Chris with his guidelines and the Asburys with their poems. Should be a good night.

Come and say hello. I'll be the one looking knackered after cycling 18 miles today.