Is Gordon Brown still Prime Minster?

An idea that came out of nowhere in the office between Isaac and myself late yesterday evening, launched this morning and seems to have ‘gone viral‘ on Twitter in the space of a few hours. Now that’s agile!

A simple answer to a simple question. Is Gordon Brown still Prime Minister?

When design becomes less about design and more about decorating

Eric Karjaluoto over at Ideas on Ideas has written a great post about how design as a skill and profrssion has become a great mimic-fest. How there’s a race to the bottom of faddy design whipped up by very talented people who are extremely adept at mimicry but very much lacking in methodology and discernible design skill.

I’ve found this many times when interviewing designers. Lots of style over substance and surface gloss. An impressive portfolio of expertly executed Photoshop effects but lacking when it comes to reasoning, process, rigorous thought or any of the other traits or skills that mark a true designer out from the stylists. Anyway, enough from me, I’ll leave it to Eric and his post - Drones at the karaoke lounge of design.

“The newest design blogs are particularly telling of this as they largely seem to concentrate on a steady-stream of eye-candy and visual masturbation. Seemingly, the past year has played host to the superseding of actual writing and reflection on design to vapid graphical lists like “25 Great Green Websites”. Easy to create, bookmark, and subsequently mimic, it’s as though we’ve collectively walked into the great karaoke lounge of design–all of it somehow comforting but unlikely to result in anything of substance.”

Made By Many just got one more

After seven months freelancing I’m very excited to announce that I’ve resumed the position in the Creative Director’s chair.

I talked last October about wanting to search out the new, the innovative and the exciting. At the time I felt I was being ground down by the ordinary. Creating marketing sites for average companies wasn’t, and indeed isn’t, what I wanted to do.

I’ve spent the last seven months doing all sorts of things. I’ve written some HTML, done a bit of affiliate marketing, done IA wireframing work for clients, sharpened my knowledge of PPC and a whole host of other things – including some service design. And I’ve loved every minute of it.

Over the last couple of months, however, I’ve been spending more and more time with a group of people who are doing some extraordinary things with technology and creative in the digital space. The more time I spent working with them, the more I realised their approach and ideas were very well aligned with how I felt a digital agency should be both structured and run. It was a very comfortable fit for both of us.

As such, the approach to take up a permanent position at Made By Many came a few months ago and I’m pleased to announce that I accepted at the end of last month.

Made By Many don’t do websites in the traditional sense. They build platforms, utilities and services. They use creative and sketching to articulate complexity and build services in whatever technology is appropriate using agile process. (I should mention at this point that the founding partners of Made By Many have been colleagues historically / friends for years.)

It’s a very big position and what I hope will turn out be a tremendously exciting opportunity. I’m already ensconced and working on a whole suite of services in the youth volunteering sector. But more on that at another time.

In the future, you’ll be able to see me blogging over on www.madebymany.co.uk though I’ll still pop up here from time to time.