Smart Company has named us one of the Digital Dozen in a recent article. Check out the article here — we’re the next big thing online, so look out!
We’ve also launched the Salt documentary site, which premieres this month at the Adelaide Film Festival. Make sure you check out the trailer and Murray’s timelapse shots, they’re absolutely stunning.
It’s the year of Two-Thousand-and-Fine and we’ve launched two VMware Grid campaigns, created three sexy HTML sites — and it’s only January!
Check out our new work on our updated portfolio.
I’ve been trying to get beyond the first 20 pages of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way for the past couple of months. On a good day I’ll get through 5 pages in the 40-minute morning commute and maybe 3 in the evening commute back home. On a bad day, poor Proust gets put aside for more bite-sized reading (today it was The Economist magazine) or another book entirely.
I have nothing against Proust. He’s a fantastic writer and I love his neuroticism. Most people who have the patience for his stream of consciousness, half-page-sentences writing style enjoy his books and detailed insights into insignificant things.
The problem is that I’ve unwittingly lost the patience to read. Last week I put aside Proust (for the 2435th time) for John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Steinbeck likes to describe as well, but not to the length and detail of Proust. East of Eden had me hooked for a week straight, but when the plot was getting slow I found myself scanning the page for the next big turn in events.
Having done a short web copywriting course earlier this year, it is becoming increasingly evident to me that people don’t read on the Internet — they scan. Maybe its that get-in-and-get-out attitude people have when browsing the ‘net. Or maybe it’s simply the back-lit glare of a screen. Whatever the reason is, eyetracking research has found that Internet users generally read the first sentence of each paragraph and move on.
The reason for this is people are scanning for the information they want; once they find a clue or indicator of what they want, users will slow down and read it. How many times have you tried to find a call to action — the submit button, link to a page on shipping rates — and discovered that you couldn’t find it? You probably also discovered that once you slowed down and methodically looked through every row and column of the site, it was sitting right in front of you. Although it’s also likely that you just didn’t bother and moved on.
What does this mean for web content writers and web designers?
And what does that mean for people trying to read Proust? Don’t read Proust like you’re reading on the Internet.
Here’s a refresher (saw this on Mark Boulton’s blog).
The kid always starts with a forceful, vertical stroke, looks at what dad (?) is doing, and then tries to imitate him by adding an embelishment or two – usually in the wrong direction. He’s a lucky one though, ’cause he’s got a great example of assertive and beautiful handwriting to learn from.
Lots of “aww” moments in there. It’s pretty cute. There, I said it. Cute.
1) Print it out, fold it. Place between two slices of bread, eat. (Spam sandwich, get it?)
Or the Asian variation – pan fry, serve on instant noodles with a poached/pan fried egg. Topped with a crapload of sambal sauce. Mmm mmm.
2) Send it to your spam folder, add the sender to your Blocked Senders list. Happily anticipate your next round of 0nlin3 dEgr33s / make uR boyfriend a g1ft / che4p Rollecks watches from Michavd Nabarrete / Aboshihata Crosdale / Dils Priewe. Or eagerly await your chance to, er, cross the road:
3) Or make it into something ephemeral but pretty – send it to the Spam Recycler.
and the way we spend it has changed a lot over the past ten years.
Colors magazine has dedicated their latest issue on money. They took a 100 dollar bill and sent it to a lab to see what they could find on it. Among others, they found cocaine, feces, ash and ink, and there’s an article devoted to each substance they found.
While this seems like an unabashed plug for a (ridiculously well designed) magazine, every time I look at a bill, or a payslip, it’s becoming harder and harder for me to visualise what I owe / am paid as anything physical. The Internet has changed the way money moves – paying your bills in your pyjamas at 3 in the morning in the comfort of your home being one of my faves – and certainly what it means to people. It’s hard to part with a $50 note, but when you swipe your card it doesn’t seem that heavy anymore – until your bank slaps you a $30 fine for over-withdrawing your account.
A few of the sites we’ve done lately have pointed out how easy it is for data to disappear electronically. If you saw someone physically breaking into your piggy bank, you’d probably be able to act on it quite quickly with a baseball bat (or other spontaneous weapon) and get the jerk arrested. While we now invest more money in physical security – alarm systems, gated communities, tasers – your money is still oh-so vulnerable. A friend of a friend had about $10,000 swiped out of her credit card, but by the time she found out it was too late to reach for a baseball bat.
(Moral of the story: set your credit limit to something not ridiculous.)
I don’t know about you, but if I could see the bottom of my bank account, I’d probably spend my money more wisely. Perhaps banks could introduce a service, where if you’re approaching a particular account balance (that you can set, say $50), it sends you an SMS reminding you that 1) you’ve reached your limit, and 2) you should probably hold back on the card swiping. I’ll save that for when I decide to also pitch my plug-in perculator idea.
Colors is an affordable magazine, but for the cash-strapped, the electronic edition is here: http://www.colorsmagazine.com/money/
* Appendix 1: Here’s a great quote that I couldn’t find yesterday:
If you look at the growth of the economy over the last 25 years it’s an astonishing, escalating upward curve, much of it driven by the Internet. And it’s going to continue to accelerate because virtual worlds are becoming more practical, as if we are sitting in a bar in Berlin.
In a globalized virtual workplace, you don’t need to worry about visas and green cards and such. Google, Microsoft and IBM all do teleconferencing through virtual worlds. We are almost at the point at which you can create an avatar that looks and moves exactly like the real you – allowing you to enter a virtual world and try on a sweater.
It is so overwhelming that I don’t think most people have come to grips with the change that is upon us, leading us to seeing money more as a representation of value rather than the physical item itself. Modern economics emerged around thinking over what money really is, and the free market economy has expanded the nature of money in ways we never thought of. But perhaps it has freed us in ways we are unprepared to be free.
Patrick Cox // economist and financial analyst
A big part of creating a concept is being able to represent it visually to a client who can’t pry open your skull and see exactly what you’re seeing in your head. Any amount of gesturing, “like”s and “sort of like”s, or crappy metaphors are not going to make your message clear – or worse, it’ll completely distort it.
So how do you take that gooey sticky idea in your head and translate it onto paper or PDF and still have it make sense to someone who’s seeing it for the first time? Here’s a Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods – a handy, and very effective example of information visualisation on its own.
Because we’re working with the web and more often than not have only a day or a few hours to come up with a concept, we usually jump straight to a wireframe and/or look and feel of the website – which can be helpful, but when it comes to figuring out how the site works, or how a user is going to experience the site, that’s when some of the scrambling happens. Notice how both are not on the visualisation table – that’s because a look and feel only suggests what a site will look like, but not a holistic visual and interactive experience.
Of course, if a site has a relatively simple and linear structure, our clients are able to visualise the site flow and outcomes in their heads. However, when a site involves a complex backend, hidden aspects of the site the user cannot see, then we also create a process diagram (a hybrid of a concept skeleton, process event chain, and technology roadmap) is definitely helpful. Outlining and agreeing on your user’s process means a faster, pain-free project build – and no nasty surprises!
While you and I will probably never use a ‘knowledge map’ or ‘heaven n’ hell chart’ in an agency, you could certainly come up with convincing arguments for, say, your partner to do the dishes otherwise you’ll make life a living hell for him/her, or your grandparents to send more money in birthday cards or you’ll drown in the ocean of oblivion…or something.
Interesting South is back again this year, this time at a more convenient venue (Belvoir Street Theatre, Surry Hills) and with a promise of food.
It’s basically a bunch of ppl in a cozy set up with something interesting to say, and saying it in ten minutes. Topics range from interesting stuff to more interesting stuff. Bring something to write with as well, ’cause there’ll be a slew of things you’ll want to Google / Wiki afterwards, or stick around and chat with the speakers.
Tickets to the down-under spin off of Interesting London (with sister conference Interesting New York) are on sale now – $35 a pop for the ‘best seats in the house’. See you there!
Like hypercolour t shirts, margarine butter, transfats antioxidants, the Dalai Lama, and goji berries, the Slow movement is starting to pick up speed (yes, pun intended) in the trend-o-sphere. Everything from food to travel to sex to medicine to town planning, all of this and Life in general needs to be Slo-oh-oh-ow for maximum enjoyment.
In one of his many books on the Slow movement, In Praise of Slowness , Carl Honoré covers a huge range of Slow and rattles off all of their benefits. The recurring theme seems to be that by taking things slow, rather than trying to get things done faster, people become healthier, more productive, more creative, and better thinkers.
In an ideal Slow world, work also needs to be Slow – there’s the sound of managers fainting – with shorter working days and more time given to the blue/white collar masses to stop having lunch at their desks and be home at a reasonable hour to cook, eat dinner with their family, and read a bedtime story to their kids.
In the meantime, there’s a client coming in for a meeting in 15 10 now minutes, a presentation that needs to be completed by ASAP-o’clock, a concept pitched in three hours, and a nagging list of site changes to be made before it can be approved…
My mum’s ’secret’ to productivity:
Do the things you don’t like in the morning when you’re still more motivated and clear-headed, and then do the stuff you like after lunch after the food coma sets in.
That might work if your clients didn’t want everything done yesterday. But when you’re required to be productive and clear-headed all the time, come up with concepts and have them ready by the end of the day, there’s no room to pick and choose what you want to do, food coma or not.
The Slow movement’s secret to productivity:
Live Slow, and work Slow (but be Fast when you need to be).
It is unlikely that the pace of work will slow down (or want to), but we can change to adapt to it. Everyone (in Honoré’s book) has praised, raved or demonstrated that living Slow has helped them:
as well as
Sounds too good to be true? Its not all chakras and reiki (although some of it is, apparently), there are practical and easy ways of Slowing down. Sometimes its just a matter of taking the time to listen – to your clients, patients, your co-workers – so that you can approach problems and briefs clearly, instead of rushing into a job and finding that it doesn’t address the client’s needs to begin with. Other times its being able to relax yourself, so that when you face a hectic situation you can approach it well, instead of scrambling and making silly mistakes.
There’s a whole slew of information on the Slow movement, but here’s a good place to start. In the meantime, some of us have a deadline.
This is a rather difficult font game. And, therefore, I totally stink at it (17 on the first go).
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