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Showing posts with label Design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Design. Show all posts
Thursday, 18 November 2010
Thursday, 11 November 2010
Three Riff Raff web projects shortlisted for regional design awards
Three of our recent web design and build projects have been shortlisted for regional design awards The SMACS, organised by digital media collective Super Mondays.
Although awarded by a panel of industry judges, the competition has a public vote element, so be sure to cast your votes for our design & build work on...
...at the SMACS Awards website. Pints all round if we land a couple!
Although awarded by a panel of industry judges, the competition has a public vote element, so be sure to cast your votes for our design & build work on...
- PokerStars TV (shortlisted for best B2C website)
- Metropolis Pictures (shortlisted for best B2B website)
- Infinite Edge (also shortlisted for best B2B website)
...at the SMACS Awards website. Pints all round if we land a couple!
Friday, 15 October 2010
Has the world gone completely mad!??
If it were not incredible enough that companies like BP and LastMinute.com can register a colour as a Trademark, it now appears that interactivity itself has been patented.
Thursday, 7 October 2010
2010: the year of clipart branding
Seeing the new GAP logo, kindly pointed out to me by one of our lead developers this morning, makes me wonder if Riff Raff are in the wrong business. Brand design is clearly a market with more budget than sense!
I'm not sure if this was a tragic case of design-by-committee or some kind of visionary enigma that only the branding elite could possibly appreciate, but I imagine that someone was duped into paying a vast sum of money for what can only be described as 1990's Clipart!
Tuesday, 28 September 2010
We've been riipped off!!
That's not a typo! I was stunned this morning to discover that, after less than two weeks of going live, the Riff Raff website had already been ripped off by copycats! Our designers invested a great deal of time and effort conceptualising and creating a set of bespoke illustrations for our website, and lo and behold, another 'agency' decided to help themselves to our hard work and creativity.
They even made a laughable attempt to disguise the theft, by tweaking the colours and squashing it up slightly
The Original and Best
I guess we should be flattered!
They even made a laughable attempt to disguise the theft, by tweaking the colours and squashing it up slightly
The Original and Best
I guess we should be flattered!
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
What were Apple thinking?
A murmur of amusement and disbelief swept across the office like a Mexican wave last week, as one of our designers upgraded to iTunes 10, with most of the Riff Raff team huddled behind his monitor. "You've got to see this" he said.
Saturday, 7 August 2010
Recipes for the visual thinker
How recipes should look by Starsammy, on Flickr
This visualisation of a recipe by Starsammy tickled me so much that I had to share it. Inspired design!
Saturday, 13 March 2010
PokerStars online TV portal goes live
Almost a year in the making, from initial planning to final delivery, PokerStars.tv 2.0 was finally unleashed on a hungry public this week, raising the bar for online poker experiences the world over.
Monday, 12 October 2009
Universal principles of design
I often come across the assumption that because daily business revolves around a specific medium, one's design expertise is limited only to that discipline. By day, my primary focus is on designing engaging user experiences for the web, but I don't consider myself to be a web designer. In my mind, design is far, far broader than that.
I recently had the opportunity to design an EPG interface for a television set-top box. To me this was an interesting departure from my day to day work in e-commerce, social media and application design; a chance to look at the world from a different perspective.
When the design was complete, the technical director of the project seemed genuinely surprised that I had understood and adapted to the peculiarities of the EPG, and had designed a user interface that was both intuitive and technically correct. Not bad for a web designer.
He'd worked with many web designers in the past who had attempted to translate their UI design principals to the television screen, and had failed miserably; Delivering a web experience that was neither practical nor technically possible on a television.
The World Wide Web is just one medium that I work with, and I am particularly good at it. But design, for me, is universal. It is about finding a balance between something over which you have no control, and something over which you have no limitation.
On one side you have the immovable truth: The problem, the business objective, the strategy - whatever it happens to be. On the other, you have possibility - a blank canvas. What you put into this space, in order to answer, solve or fulfill the immovable truth, is Design.
Televisions and EPGs have some immovable truths:
Some might see these as obstacles, but I see them as truths; Neither negative or positive. It's just the way things are, and I have to work around them. I have to design an intuitive and engaging user interface around these truths.
I avoided problematic colours in situations where they might bleed. I used fonts and type-sizes that would shrink gracefully and still be legible when reduced to Standard Definition. I created a grid that respected the 'safe areas' and didn't put anything important close to the edges. I included 'on focus' styling so that the user could see which button they were on, without relying on a mouse-cursor to tell them.
In my world, Design is about solving problems and answering questions. Good Design is about solving problems in new and interesting ways. Great Design is about taking those fundamental principals and applying them to any given problem, regardless of the discipline or medium.
I recently had the opportunity to design an EPG interface for a television set-top box. To me this was an interesting departure from my day to day work in e-commerce, social media and application design; a chance to look at the world from a different perspective.
When the design was complete, the technical director of the project seemed genuinely surprised that I had understood and adapted to the peculiarities of the EPG, and had designed a user interface that was both intuitive and technically correct. Not bad for a web designer.
He'd worked with many web designers in the past who had attempted to translate their UI design principals to the television screen, and had failed miserably; Delivering a web experience that was neither practical nor technically possible on a television.
The World Wide Web is just one medium that I work with, and I am particularly good at it. But design, for me, is universal. It is about finding a balance between something over which you have no control, and something over which you have no limitation.
On one side you have the immovable truth: The problem, the business objective, the strategy - whatever it happens to be. On the other, you have possibility - a blank canvas. What you put into this space, in order to answer, solve or fulfill the immovable truth, is Design.
Televisions and EPGs have some immovable truths:
- They are generally navigated with a remote control, using directional arrows
- They don't have a cursor
- Anamorphic HD will be squeezed into a Standard Definition screen, losing resolution
- There are 'safe areas' to observe, in order to avoid having your interface cropped
- Televisions don't handle certain colours particularly well
Some might see these as obstacles, but I see them as truths; Neither negative or positive. It's just the way things are, and I have to work around them. I have to design an intuitive and engaging user interface around these truths.
I avoided problematic colours in situations where they might bleed. I used fonts and type-sizes that would shrink gracefully and still be legible when reduced to Standard Definition. I created a grid that respected the 'safe areas' and didn't put anything important close to the edges. I included 'on focus' styling so that the user could see which button they were on, without relying on a mouse-cursor to tell them.
In my world, Design is about solving problems and answering questions. Good Design is about solving problems in new and interesting ways. Great Design is about taking those fundamental principals and applying them to any given problem, regardless of the discipline or medium.
Thursday, 3 September 2009
Javascript: A job for designers or developers?
I've come across a number of conflicting opinions when it comes to where Javascript belongs in the website production workflow. Personally, I find working with Javascript both infuriating and rewarding, but is it a developer's job, or is it a design thing?
At first, I thought it was a web developer's responsibility. Afterall, it's a scripting language, right? It involves writing code in order to extend a webpage with some kind of logical intelligence. A web designer, on the other hand uses markup; an instructional language describing the contents of a page to a web browser, with no inherent perception or decision-making capabilities. This seems to make sense, but there is another way of looking at it.
In Defining Web Designer 2.0, I looked at the myriad roles of the new breed of web designer, one of which was that of Interaction Design. As Javascript matures - or should I say the application of Javascript matures - it's becoming more an integral part of an Interaction Designer's usability toolkit. Whether it's providing client-side form validation or visual feedback for a subtle AJAX call, Javascript is very much a part of the User Experience.
Unlike server-side languages such as PHP or Ruby, the quality and application of Javascript code has a direct effect on a user's experience. And I believe it's this subtle qualitative aspect of Javascript that separates it from the rest of a web developer's toolkit.
I know a few designers who would go as white as a sheet, faced with the prospect of owning Javascript development, but I believe that if a designer is to create inspired user experiences, they should have a thorough understanding of the tools at their disposal, and that includes Javascript.
At first, I thought it was a web developer's responsibility. Afterall, it's a scripting language, right? It involves writing code in order to extend a webpage with some kind of logical intelligence. A web designer, on the other hand uses markup; an instructional language describing the contents of a page to a web browser, with no inherent perception or decision-making capabilities. This seems to make sense, but there is another way of looking at it.
In Defining Web Designer 2.0, I looked at the myriad roles of the new breed of web designer, one of which was that of Interaction Design. As Javascript matures - or should I say the application of Javascript matures - it's becoming more an integral part of an Interaction Designer's usability toolkit. Whether it's providing client-side form validation or visual feedback for a subtle AJAX call, Javascript is very much a part of the User Experience.
Unlike server-side languages such as PHP or Ruby, the quality and application of Javascript code has a direct effect on a user's experience. And I believe it's this subtle qualitative aspect of Javascript that separates it from the rest of a web developer's toolkit.
I know a few designers who would go as white as a sheet, faced with the prospect of owning Javascript development, but I believe that if a designer is to create inspired user experiences, they should have a thorough understanding of the tools at their disposal, and that includes Javascript.
Thursday, 2 July 2009
Defining Web Designer 2.0
A few years ago, the emphasis for web designers was on versatility and multi-tasking. Only those who could do everything themselves would survive, but this seems to be rapidly changing as the web matures. We're beginning to realise that the web, and those who live in it are becoming too sophisticated for a single jack-of-all-trades to properly understand.
Some might attribute this to a post-bubble downsizing, as regional web agencies shrank along with their budgets in the nineties, leaving an entire generation of freelancers fending for themselves. The broadcast television industry had suffered a similar blow a decade earlier, when the arrival of digital TV tipped the budget-to-airtime ratio and studios shut down over night.
The ability to single-handedly carry a web project through from concept to launch was essential to survival for the late nineties web professional, which gave designers like myself a significant advantage later in life. But no agencies meant no strategy, which triggered a torrent of ill-informed web monstrosities, conceptualised by zealous entrepreneurs and marketing directors with no understanding of the medium.
These days, our business is very different. The sector is healthy again, despite recent economical difficulties, and the agencies are enjoying something of a renaissance. Our understanding of the web, and more importantly, those who engage with it is growing all the time. The term 'design' is beginning to take on meanings that were previously overlooked, or misunderstood. These are exciting times.
So what is the modern definition of a web designer? There may be many more, but at Riff Raff, we see design as a combination of the following disciplines in mixed measures:
I'm not going to go into great depth about what each of these roles involve; They should be fairly self-explanatory. The question I am forced to ask as I recruit new designers to join our band of Riff Raff is: Where can I find the super-human capable of all of the above? Does this person exist?
If so, let me know. I've got a corner office and reserved parking space with their name on it! careers@studioriffraff.com
Some might attribute this to a post-bubble downsizing, as regional web agencies shrank along with their budgets in the nineties, leaving an entire generation of freelancers fending for themselves. The broadcast television industry had suffered a similar blow a decade earlier, when the arrival of digital TV tipped the budget-to-airtime ratio and studios shut down over night.
The ability to single-handedly carry a web project through from concept to launch was essential to survival for the late nineties web professional, which gave designers like myself a significant advantage later in life. But no agencies meant no strategy, which triggered a torrent of ill-informed web monstrosities, conceptualised by zealous entrepreneurs and marketing directors with no understanding of the medium.
These days, our business is very different. The sector is healthy again, despite recent economical difficulties, and the agencies are enjoying something of a renaissance. Our understanding of the web, and more importantly, those who engage with it is growing all the time. The term 'design' is beginning to take on meanings that were previously overlooked, or misunderstood. These are exciting times.
So what is the modern definition of a web designer? There may be many more, but at Riff Raff, we see design as a combination of the following disciplines in mixed measures:
- Information Architecture
- User Experience Design
- Interaction Design
- Brand Design
- Graphic Design
- Presentation Layer Development (HTML/CSS)
- Javascript Development
I'm not going to go into great depth about what each of these roles involve; They should be fairly self-explanatory. The question I am forced to ask as I recruit new designers to join our band of Riff Raff is: Where can I find the super-human capable of all of the above? Does this person exist?
If so, let me know. I've got a corner office and reserved parking space with their name on it! careers@studioriffraff.com
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