Happy birthday dear blog

I can’t believe it’s been a year since I started this blog. I can’t believe it’s been over a year since I left uni. I really can’t believe how fast it’s gone and much fun I’ve crammed in. But anyway no first birthday celebration would be complete without one key ingredient – CAKE!

Recently the CR blog asked designers, “do you blog and why?”. I think I began this blog in order to promote myself to potential employees in a different and more adaptable way than my portfolio site. I also was determined that I would actually write interesting and informative posts, not just endless lists and links to other people’s work, which seems to be the staple diet of many designer’s blogs.

As time’s gone on I’ve found that blogging is sort of addictive. I felt a strange sense of duty to keep updating my blog and coming up with interesting and worthy topics to write about. The simple analytics that WordPress provides also gives me a rough indication of how many people are reading my blog and where they are coming from.

That being all well and good, I’ve now that achieved the primary reason I started this blogging thing (got me a job), so maybe it’s time to shut it down and move on. I’m finding it increasingly difficult to think up stuff to write and to find the time to write it in. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it really doesn’t work out at all well…

But like I said, it’s addictive, and I do enjoy writing. Whether or not other people enjoy reading it I really don’t know, but the more I involve myself in the internet, the more I love it, and if people can use blogs to post stupid pictures of their cats, or to document their emigration to India, I can flipping well use it to unleash my whinging and practice my spiel.

So keep watching this space because hedoesdesign ain’t going anywhere just yet.

“Happy Birthday to me, happy birthday to me” etc.

Design is a meaningless word

In a recent audio post on designobserver.com, William Drenttel said that the term ‘design’ has become “ubiquitous to a degree that it’s almost meaningless.” And he’s bloody well right. When I recently informed someone that I did web design, their response was “surely anyone can do that.”

I blame the internet. It used to be the preserve of a sort of cultural elite, the high powered creative, but now any pleb with a copy of Photoshop can “do design”. I like to think of myself as a sort of liberal minded person. I should be pleased at this leveling of the playing field, the idea that design is available to everyone to create, at the twitch of a mouse pad, the sort of effects that twenty years ago would have taken skilled professionals weeks to produce. You no longer have to spend years at university earnestly copying the styles of past masters, and then, inevitably, spurning their rules and striking out along you own creative path. A couple of YouTube tutorials and you’ve got yourself a career.

Architects don’t have this problem. No-one would ring up their best mate’s cousin and ask them to knock up some designs for an extension, just because they’ve got an iMac. I do feel that graphics is an under valued profession, too often it is dismissed as a last consideration, little better than a fancy embellishment, which inevitably means that people under-estimate how much time, energy (ie. money) it costs.

I feel this applies much more to web design than print, where the printed word still retains some level of mystique and reverence. I expect people from all other professions feel the same way about their jobs, but I bet they don’t have clients constantly questioning their decision making, as if simply looking at a computer screen somehow makes them better qualified to choose fonts than someone who works with type every single day, including weekends (geeek that I am). But I can’t imagine someone turning to their solicitor in a court room and saying, “actually I think I can take it from here”.

I’m all for would-be graphic designers taking the self-taught path up the creative mountain, I even applaud them. It’s not something I could have done; I needed university to give me some basic grounding in design principles and theory. Turns out I could have read it all on Wikipedia in one afternoon.

But unless people start to take web design more seriously we’ll never see the back of shite like this.

Also if you haven’t clicked on the picture of the kid at the top of this post, go and check out that link too.

Countryfile, Alan style

This weekend I have been engaging in one of the most overlooked of countryside pursuits; fruit picking. Namely plums from of of the trees in my parent’s garden.

Here’s a couple of points to bear in mind should you ever decide to pick some plums yourself. First make sure you pick during early evening. This ensures that you have enough light left to see by, but is also the time that flies, wasps and hornets that are inevitably attracted by the fruit which has fallen from the tree, are least active, giving you a better than average chance of escaping a stinging.

Also endeavor to be the one at the top of ladder, as plums that are dislodged during picking hurt/splatter considerably more once they’ve had a couple of metres to accelerate.

Beware the softer fruit; they may be harboring more than a stone in the centre. Wasps love to burrow into plums and lie there, drunk on juice, until your unsuspecting hand closes round them. It can take some force of will to remain clutching a ladder, ten feet off the ground, with a handful of sticky fruit and stingy insect.

But for those lucky enough to survive the avalanche of plums and swarms of lethal bugs, the rewards are great ie. free fruit! Stick that up your seasonal aisle Tesco!

This just in: shock tactics still effective

In the last couple of weeks the powers-that-be (in this case the UK Department for Transport) have released two very different videos about the dangers of young people driving. Or something to that effect. The two videos take totally opposite approaches in their attempts to scare us troublesome adolescents into “not doing really bloody stupid things whilst driving a car.”

The first was a PSA which implied that police-persons (who presumably have all been trained for long-range drug-detection) can spot a mile off if you’ve been getting all high and stuff, AND THEN PUNISHMENT WILL ENSUE. It’s a much more softly, softly tactic then the traditional spraying of children across pavements with family saloons.

The reaction has been pretty luke-warm from what I can gather. The responses over on the CR-Blog ranged from snorting disbelief to outright derision.

The other video was interestingly enough created with the help of students from the International Film School in Wales, which also provided the young actors. It takes what might be seen as the more traditional approach to road safety ads (and I’m not talking about David Prose, the Green Cross Code man either). The result is a 4 minute epic.

And the reactions were as opposite as the styles of the videos themselves. Here’s a comment wall from Facebook, which, whilst hardly being a broad cross section of the target audience, does seem to suggest that the way to get through to people like myself is to scare the shit out of them.

Reading too much into it

Recently I’ve been looking at house shares in Norwich, with a view to moving closer to where I work and avoid the soul-sapping commute in and out of the city. This has involved a bit of me asking everyone I know if they’ve “heard of any rooms going”, but mostly it’s been trawling Gumtree online.

It works like this; someone has a spare room going in their house. They can’t find/can’t agree on anyone they know moving in, so they decide to throw it into the arms of fate and place an advert on the internet. They spend (possibly) hours constructing a short description of the available space, taking photos of their living room from fifteen different angles, then moving the pile of laundry and retaking the photos, then plonking the whole lot online so prospective tenants can indiscriminately click through them. And competition is fierce. For the house-hunter (ie. me) there’s no a lot to go on. It seems everyone has a “Lovely Large Double/Single Room within 10 mins/30 mins/Walking Distance of the City Centre.” The pixelated photos, taken at ‘artistic’ angles are no help whatsoever in judging the size of the room.

So I’ve donned my finest Sherlock Holmes headgear, waxed my Piorot-like moustache, and raised one eyebrow, Columbo style, in order to undertake some detective work and unravel the clues left in the style and tone of written description of each property.

As the following examples show, you can tell alot about a person from the way they write.

I would argue that gender actually matters quite a bit, gay or not. Needless to say I did not contact them.

Now I found this advert much more appealing, full of actually useful information and charm, especially the bit about nice pots and pans. Though I found it a bit surprising that the first advert and recieved double the number of viewings as the second, despite being posted only three days before.

By the way I blurred out those people’s email addresses so that I can beat you to viewing the house. So long suckers!

Free Tea for all at the Boomtown Fair

Last weekend I was over in the Forest of Dean for the first Boomtown Fair, a fairly small, but really fun festival populated mainly by the best kind of cider swilling West Country folk. I had an absolute blast and, judging from the bleary eyed expressions of fellow campers, so did everyone else. Aside from the traditional bands-playing-music-on-some-stages, there was a circus troupe, small fun-fair rides and more cider than you could shake a stick at. However one stall was so unique it deserves a the rest of this post dedicated to it.

A group of lovely girls set up a trolley in between the camping and stage areas. They were dressed up in their finest aprons and summer dresses and were serving tea and cake to festival goers from china cups and saucers. They had home-baked iced biscuits, chocolate and sponge cake and buns and spread a table cloth on the grass to encourage people to sit and enjoy their tea in the sunshine. But the most fantastic thing about their set-up, was that they were offering tea and cake for free. Totally non-gratis. I think this was a brilliant idea that perfectly captured the spirit of the festival, although it seemed to take people a while to grasp that yes, it’s free, no, there isn’t a catch and you can have more than one biscuit.

Here’s some photos of Roxanne, Megan, Nikki and Jasmine in action with their Mobile Tea Party. Thanks girls; you made my festival!

Lovely, lovely alan

Remember Chris Elkin, the chap behind Otherside designs?

Well he’s got a new blog up and running; for some interesting and unusual inspiration check it ouuuuuuuuut.

Daniel Sturman – well worth a look

Once in awhile a site comes along that is just brilliant in every way, design, themes, writing. See now the witty works of composer Daniel Sturman, built using iWeb whatever that is, with copious use of Comic Sans and “optional soft edges”.

Check it out here.

Battling the Undead on the World Wide Web

I’ve been doing some research this week on online games for a possible project at work and whilst trawling through the confusing pile of acronyms that this throws up, I came across Urban Dead, an HTML text based wonderfully low-fi MMO (massively multiplayer online) game.

The premise is that “you play the survivor or victim of a zombie outbreak in a quarantined city centre, alongside tens of thousands of others”. Intrigued I investigated further.

Whilst the game is overseen by a number of dedicated admins, it’s mostly shaped by the players, all 1,162,854 of them, and as the game is based on descriptive text rather than flashy graphics the scope and depth as much about the collective imaginations of the players, as it is about a planned and contained game engine. The interaction with people within the arena of a role playing game appeals to me, I really want to see how people react to what is essentially a chat room set in a George A Romero film.

Further delving revealed a whole wealth of information written by participants on subjects ranging from best tips on game play, a lexicon of zombie communication (Grh. – Sometimes used as a casual greeting between zombies) (http://wiki.urbandead.com/index.php/Zombie_Lexicon), through to a complete history of the town where the game is played pre-zombification. It seems that a lot of people really get into the part of post-apocalyptic survivors/zombies.

My favourite piece so far is this WordPress journal written by a games developer from the perspective of his character. The level of involvement the players have with their characters seems to be the secret of the game’s success, as well as adaptability to the actions the players take. Urban Dead has just celebrated it’s 4 year anniversary.

Urban Dead is free to join in and play so that’s exactly what I did. When first you sign up you’re confronted with a number of choices about what type of character you’d like to become, ranging from a well armed soldier, through to nerdy scientist. I opted for the “realistic” approach, selecting a Consumer character, with no particular special skills apart from shop-lifting. Selecting the name Argus Mcphee, I was dropped into the forbidding city of Malton.

Despite rather enjoying fantasy action/horror as a genre (well who doesn’t love a good zombie movie?), I was ill prepared for my first foray into the world of MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing games).

After using my ‘Action Points’ to wander around the neighbourhood a bit, I found myself in an isolated part of town and unable to get inside ran out of AP and my character promptly fell asleep. This is a cardinal sin, leaving yourself stranded outside leaves you easy prey for zombies, and so it proved when I logged back in to check on my character a few hours later, he’d been torn to pieces by a pack of flesh-hungry ghouls.

Bugger – I hadn’t even survived a whole weekend.

I really got drawn into the world of Urban Dead and, albeit briefly, I really cared for the fate of young Argus Mcphee, and despite the fact it was a text based game I got quite involved, seeing in my mind’s eye the ruined buildings and rubble strewn streets of a fictional city.

Apparently my newly zombified character can be returned to human status by a scientist with the correct injection, so I’m going to log in and shamble off in search of one. Now how do zombies go again… ah yes… “Grrrrrhhhhhhhhhh!”

UPDATE: changed post header but still check out Timo Grubing’s zombie-a-day blog.

Boom, boom, boom

What with the festival season being well underway and my thus far being a bystander to all the carefully fenced frivolities, I’ve made the rather spur of the moment decision to buy a ticket for the Boomtown Fair, formerly known as Recydrate the West.

Last year me and my brother made the epic journey from Norfolk over to Bristol, then on into the heart of Wales in an overloaded Ford Ka. As any festival-goer will blub on about if you ask them, a music festival is a memorable experience, partly due to the close grouping of so many half-starved, over-tired, drugged-up ‘young people’ into fields. Everyone has there own tales of festival survival of when the going got really tough, when the metaphorical port-a-loo of fate was overflowing with the excrement of early morning desperation. These stories are as much a part of the fun as the actual bands themselves. I’ll never forget (I’m scared by the experience) of staying up the whole night at Reading making sure no-one tried to set fire to our tents. Great times.

Obviously I can’t freaking wait for a new adventure, a mere week away!

Actually, I’d better go find my tent. And my wellies. And my festival hat.