May 22
May 21

My colleague Adam (@adamkintore on twitter) worked with his flatmate on this video for the Cannes Lion Oxfam competition.

The competition is live right now on YouTube , the client is Oxfam and it is meant to encourage you to sign a petition to be presented at the UN Climate Change Conference this December. The brief was picked up and completed inside 48hours. We made it deliberately lo-fi by taking over 300 pictures and putting them in an animation.

Check out the video here and be sure to pass it on to your friends for such a worthy cause and to help Adam win! :)

Howard

–

May 6
May 1

I heard something yesterday that I just can’t buy into.

Ok, caveat - I heard a LOT of things yesterday that I have trouble buying into, but this one is the only one that’s interesting and challenges my way of thinking (the other one seems just plain stupid and whilst it may have had some good points, the way it was delivered and “sold” just alienated me and made me feel like I was being told off by a grumpy school teacher).

A presentation was given on the topic of Graphic Design and how it’s actually a solid “Web Standard” with which we can create online experiences for users that will work for all.

This in itself is controversial, as when we often talk about web standard we’re obviously talking about a technical aspect of some kind, such as the way to code HTML or CSS etc.,  but this isn’t the part I am picking up on - in fact, I can see the point that’s being made here (I think).

During the same presentation, however, a lot of comparison was made between the digital design process and the print design process, and how that digital designers can learn from the history, previous and current work being done in the print world - and this is again true - there is some great print work out there and some amazing print designers from the past and working today.

But for me, the comparison went a little too far at times.

It almost seemed to me that in some way’s we were being told that desiging from a digital perspective alone, and treating it as a new medium, with which there are new rules, isn’t good enough, and that unless you truly work with digital in a direct relation to what is and has happened in the print world, you’re missing a trick.

At times, we were even told that as a good way to check if your digital designs are working, you could take them, print them out in a physical format, and see if it works as a printed piece, to check if it’s working as a digital one.

erm….

I’m sorry?  But, why?

What possible good could this do you? aside from reassuring you as a designer that you’ve managed to create a good looking digital design that happens to print out well therefore rendering it almost useless as a piece of solid digital design: catch-22.

I think I know what the problem is with this thinking.

Art.

Design in this context is being judged as art, as an expression of visual design devoid of meaning or purpose or a role in what it’s trying to do.

It’s design in the print context where once it’s put down on the page, or the screen, and then sent to the printers, the involvement by the end user, as well as the people creating it, ends - the job of the designer is the be-all and end-all, and all anyone else does is either bring it to life by activating a machine, or passively consume it.

Digital design is different.

For a start, the designer doesn’t visualise the end product.  they may think they do, and they may work side-by-side other people like IAs and developers as part of a creative team, but they don’t control the end product in anything like the same way a print designer does.  It’s more like the relationship a director has with a good editior - the director has the vision, but it’s the editor who crafts the end result from what is effectively raw materials (can you tell I wanted to be an editor whilst I was studying my degree?)

Because of this interconnected relationship a visual creative has with the other creatives on a digital team (the “interface” creative - or IA, or the “technical” creative - or coder, for example), they can’t produce a single piece of art which they then pass on.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the end user, the consumer in my world, of a piece of design (a website for example) does not passively consume the work - they interact with it, normally, it’s designed to move, to take input, to show video, to play games, to be interactive by it’s very nature.  Print is not.

Printing out your web pages to see how they look is for me a truly amateur thing to say - I don’t know any serious digital creative who would do such a thing (I know plenty of account handlers who do it on a regular basis to present to clients but let’s not go there!).

You’re not even working in a good DPI for print are you? 72 dpi on the page?  come on - i don’t have to explain this one.

I suspect, hope, that the comment was a mistake, that he made it off-the-cuff in mid-flow during a presenstation - and like i say a presenation which was pretty good to look at (if very printy).

Designing for the digital environment is something that exists in it’s own right.  It’s a medium (well, a collection of mediums) which are so intrinsically different to anything that has come before it that you need to treat it as it’s own beast.

Having said that, can we learn from print? From TV? From Radio?  From Games?  of course we can - we’re multi-media - we can take any of these other design environments and learn from that they’ve been doing in them for a lot longer than we have with pixels and flash - take as much as you want and create something beautiful with it - but don’t confuse the mediums.

Don’t think that you need to prove yourself n a job-by-job basis in the print world in order to rule the digital one.

They’re different things with very different ways of executing for both the consumer and the creator, and whilst they do cross over, and have similarities, they really aren’t the same.

Learn from them.

Don’t wish you were working in them if you’re not.

@howard_scott

ps - I still don’t get CMYK for colours.  How can there be FOUR?  4 colour ffs. there’s only three! RGB. and why isn’t it CMYB?
–

May 1
Apr 24
Apr 21
Apr 17


loved this wide sweeping statement in a print ad for mobile broadband I saw last week.  am assuming it was done tongue-in-cheek (hope so!)

more than enough internet!

more than enough internet!

Feb 18

Jan 8

Yahoo!'s connected TV platformA lot of buzz going on right now about Yahoo! and it’s several hardware partners (which include heavyweights like Sony and Samsung) moving closer and closer to the launch of the “Yahoo! Connected TV” platform - a combination of HDTV hardware (like you probably have right now in your house) and some extras, seemingly from Intel and Yahoo!, which allow the TV to display widgets, pulling in various snippets of internet content, right on the TV screen itself alongside the usual programming and shows.

Since Yahoo! purchased Konfabulator some years ago, I’ve not really seen them do anything outstanding with the engine that the likes of Microsoft and Google were not doing with their own Widget and Gadget platforms.

This to me seems like the first major step in widget evolution since apple really decided to build it right into the OS with Dashboard, making it common place for all mac users and then windows users as MS followed suit and built it into Vista.

What is exciting about this though is it’s not a PC.  It’s not a Mac.  It’s not some techy “add-on” perceived by the masses to be geeky - it’s built right in there to the TV.  The device most people interact with on a daily basis for several hours.

Yahoo! connected TV has some heavyweight hardware partners alreadyBecause of this, Connected TV is designed to be user friendly by the average Joe consumer from the ground up.

Use your remote to bring up the TV Widget Dock, select all your favorite TV Widgets, and connect to popular Internet services and online media, while you watch your favorite show.

Making it hopefully as easy for users to get access to widgets as it is to switch over to Celebrity Big Brother.

As digital marketers we’ve been trying to capitalise on the wide distribution, easy development, and very focused audience groups that widgets provide for some time - with varying degrees of success - but the big problem has always been that widget use is restricted to a niche audience who are generally highly technical.  It’s never been a mainstream media channel.

Connected TV could just change all of this, and if it becomes a standard, built in to all TVs that the likes of LG, Sony and Samsung create (I don’t think it will be initially - it’ll be an added cost extra for sure) then people will hopefully get as used to using widgets (even forgetting that they are widgets and simply regarding them as part of TV) on a normal daily basis.

If that were to happen, then as digital marketers we would have a huge new environment with which to target consumers.

I also wonder what this connected platform would mean for segmentation and targetted advertising?  Maybe nothing - but I wonder if they’ve thought about pushing ads to people?  Hopefully not - thinking about it it would be amazingly intrusive to get an overlay banner for the new series of Lost popping up during the latest episode of Heroes!  Scratch that - it’d suck :)

But -widgets are good - they’re user accessed when they want them.

We like that.

Upon launch it looks like the platform will contain content, naturally, from a key selection of Yahoo! properties like Flickr, and some other 3rd party partners like Blockbuster, Ebay and Twitter (how cool is that!).  But, there’s also an API that any developer can tap into to make widgets for the platform - meaning it’s open to all of us - which is just great from the start (So, Apple, missing something with the AppleTV yet??)

Yahoo! - please please deliver the goods on this.

Oh, and Microsoft?  You might want to check out the sweet user interface that this platform has compared to WIndows 7 Media Center (which isn’t being shown AGAIN at CES? We get no love in the Media Center community??)  Yahoo! makes you look stupid in terms of visual design and usability over a TV interface!

Howard

« Previous Entries