We got an email through to Clearleft from someone pointing out a certain similarity between our website:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/8719586981/
…and the website for a company called Kent Web Host:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/8720710854/
Hmmm …perhaps Clearleft were unconsciously influenced by Kent Web Host!
Just to set the record straight, I gave them a call.
Tagged with phone call clearleft web design kent web host influence inspiration
Celebrated education expert Ken Robinson argues that most "modern" approaches to learning are actually relics of an outdated, industrial-age system. This program was recorded in collaboration with the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival, on July 8, 2010.
Sir Ken Robinson is an expert in creativity, innovation, and human resources. He works with governments in Europe, Asia, and the United States, and with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and cultural organizations. Robinson led a national commission on creativity, education, and the economy for the UK government and was central in forming a creative- and economic-development strategy as part of the Northern Ireland peace process. Formerly, he was professor of education at the University of Warwick.
He has received several honorary degrees, the Athena Award from the Rhode Island School of Design, the Peabody Medal, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Royal Society of Arts. He received a knighthood for his services to the arts. His latest book is The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything (Viking, 2009).
Jonathan is a designer and co-founding partner of Pearlfisher. He oversees a portfolio of award-winning designs, including a high profile list of ethical, entrepreneurial and iconic brands. The outstanding commercial success of many of these design projects has led to Pearlfisher being named by the DBA as the leading design agency for Design Effectiveness in 2008. http://www.dba.org.uk
In this audio interview with Debbie Millman, Jonathan Ford discusses going on eighteen job interviews before being hired by Michael Peters, his belief that a good idea cannot come from a computer, his interest in fear and the importance of doing work that is truthful.
Natural User Interface (NUI), is one of the favorite flavors du jour in certain interaction design and user experience circles. The term signals a change from the Graphical User Interface (GUI), that has been prevalent since the early 1980s. In many ways, that is good - not that the GUI is going to go away (any more than the QWERTY keyboard) - but progress does, as they say, progress. And just because there was a great idea that took hold, does not mean that that is all that there is.
But beyond the name, what is this new thing? The answer depends on who you ask. Ask enough people, and you will see that it can mean anything – which means that it might mean nothing. According to Bill Buxton, the many views means that there is a lot of diverse conversations accompanying them, and he sees that as healthy. Complacency is rarely a worthy aspiration for design. But out of the collective conversations one would hope that there is some convergence, insight or growth.
The purpose of Bill’s talk is to throw his own thoughts into the fray. Taking his cue from the term itself, he’ll start like a good naturalist, and strip the term bare, and build from there. Starting with diving into the essence of the term natural.
Dave Eggers writes about art and music for magazines, his design work has been featured in periodicals including Print and Eye, and in 2003, his design work for McSweeney’s was featured in the National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, and in the California Design Biennial.
In an era of fast-moving markets and leap-frogging innovators, companies can no longer merely “unlock” wealth. Today they have to actively “create” wealth, or end up in the fossil layers of business history. As a result, brand-builders have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play a key role in the next management revolution—the rise of the designful company.
In his session, Marty will explain why design thinking—in its broadest sense—will become the new best practice, and how you can leverage your unique position as a brand-builder to transform the way business does business in the 21st century.
http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/marty-neumeier
Marty Neumeier began his career as a designer, but soon added writing and strategy to his repertoire, working variously as a designer, copywriter, journalist, magazine publisher and brand consultant. Having developed brand identities for companies such as Apple, Adobe, Kodak and Hewlett-Packard. He has also authored three bestselling books (‘The Brand Gap, ‘Zag’ and ‘The Designful Company’) which discuss how organisations can bridge the gap between business strategy and customer experience.
The actual process of design, the path you take on the way to creating something, is in many ways a “meta object” that can be applied to any design problem.
Ever since his first experiences with the humble ZX81 back in the early eighties, Brendan has continued to explore the interplay of people, code, design and art both in his role leading the team at mN and on brendandawes.com, a personal space where he publishes random thoughts, toys and projects created from an eclectic mix of digital and analog objects.
In this session Brendan talks through his three step process: boil—filling your head with many ideas and possibilties, simmer—taking time to consider, and finally reduce—removing things till there’s nothing left to take away.
http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/brendan-dawes
Brendan Dawes is Creative Director for magneticNorth, a digital design company based in Manchester, UK. Over the years he’s helped realise projects for a wide range of brands including Sony Records, Diesel, BBC, Fox Kids, Channel 4, Disney, Benetton, Kellogg’s, The Tate and Coca-Cola.In 2009 he was listed among the top twenty web designers in the world by .net magazine and was featured in the “Design Icon” series in Computer Arts.
Have you ever had a spontaneous creative triumph, perfectly in sync with your team?
A passionate believer in improvisation as a design skill, Hannah’s session will talk about the importance of this technique in her own design process and what lessons can be borrowed from improvised music.
From the jazz masters to the humble basement band practice, musical concepts such as timing, structure, rolls and expression have many lessons for designers creating an off-the-cuff interface.
Hannah will explore how the methods of music translate for a design/development team, as well as sharing personal stories and techniques for those times when you need a bit of a jam session.
http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/hannah-donovan
Originally from Canada’s icy north, Hannah Donovan is creative director at Last.fm, where she’s worked for the last four years. Before moving to London, she designed websites for Canada’s largest youth-focused agency, working on brands such as Hershey, Heineken and Bic. Hannah also plays the cello with an orchestra and draws monsters.
Freud popularised the term, “The Narcissism of Minor Differences”, to describe how adjacent villages—identical for all practical purposes—would struggle to amplify their tiniest distinctions in order to justify how much they despised one other. So you have to guess how much he would have enjoyed design mailing lists. And, Perl.
Truth is, to the untrained (un-washed, un-nuanced, un-Paul-Rand’d, and un-Helvetica’d) outsider, discourse in the design community can sometimes look a lot like a cluster of tightly-wound Freudian villages.
So, how is the role of design perceived by the people who are using the stuff you make? What role (if any) should users expect in the process of how their world is made and remade? What contexts might be useful in helping us turn all of our obsessions into useful and beautiful work?
Can an Aeron chair ever be truly ‘Black’? Will there ever be a way to get Marketing people to stop calling typefaces ‘fonts’? And, when, at last, will the international community finally speak as one regarding the overuse of Mistral and stock photos of foreshortened Asian women?
By leveraging his uniquely unqualified understanding of design, Merlin will propose some promising patterns for fording the gap between end-users and the unhappy-looking people in costly European eyeglasses who are designing their world.
Is there hope? Come to Brighton, pull up a flawlessly-executed mid-century-Modern seating affordance, and we’ll see what we can figure out together. One village to another.
http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/merlin-mann
Merlin Mann is best known as the creator of 43folders.com, a popular American website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.
In an age of high-speed living and info overload, visualized information has incredible potential to help us quickly understand, navigate and find meaning in a complex world.
The use of infographics, data visualisations and information design is a rising trend across many disciplines: science, design, journalism and web. At the same time, daily exposure to the web is creating a incredibly design-literate population. Could this be a new language?
In his session, David will share his passion for this merging of design, information, text and story to unveil some of the interesting, unexpected and sometimes magical things that happen when you visualise data, knowledge and ideas. And, admitting that his book is as full of mistakes as it is successes, he’ll also explore some of the common pitfalls, traps and FAILS that dog this young design form.
Using examples from his book and blog, he’ll share thoughts on what makes a successful information visualisation and journalistic tips, especially for designers, on how to zero in on interesting data and subjects—and how designing information can expose your own biases and change your views about the world. Oh yeah!
http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/david-mccandless
David McCandless is a London-based author, data-journalist and information designer, working across print, advertising, TV and web. His design work has appeared in over forty publications internationally including The Guardian and Wired. He champions the use of data visualisations to explore new directions for journalism and to discover new stories in the seas of data surrounding us. His blog and book ‘Information Is Beautiful’ are dedicated to visualising ideas, issues, knowledge and data—all with the minimum of text.
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