Portfolio up and running. A vision in brown.

For those of you that it affected, thanks for putting up with some poor styling and a constantly changing masthead graphic last week.  I think I’m largely happy with the final blog design. It’s pretty straightforward and sits well with my portfolio site and my business card designs.

Talking of the portfolio site. I just want to say a couple of words about the rather fine piece of software that is Indexhibit. Aimed at designers, artists and anyone wanting to put together a simple gallery of work it’s easy to install, use and skin up to your requirements.

The new portfolio site

For any designer, it’s always a hassle putting up your own portfolio site. Resizing screenshots of work, hand coding html, hacking CSS to get it to work in IE6 – the usual stuff. Indexhibit allows you to concentrate on curating your work and preparing images. Once the main template is set, it’s a very quick process to reorder navigation items, rename pages and drop images in. It’s also more likely to be kept up to date as it’s so quick and easy to add content.

Indexhibit admin page

It’s been so good, I think I’ll use it to show my archive of work from the retrospective project.

The retrospective project: Scottish Power

This is the (very belated) second installment in the retrospective project.

The design and development of ScottishPower.co.uk happened hot on the heals of the jamjar.com launch in summer 2000.

Scottish Power wanted, for the first time, to offer the sale of domestic appliances on their site. Couple this with the ability to switch energy suppliers and view and pay your account online, it was a pretty powerful proposition.

Some of the initial design concept work was done while I was still working on jamjar.com but I had the opportunity to design and artwork the flash movie on the home page and some of the product illustrations throughout the site.

The concept was the ‘Scottish Powered Community’. By creating a small village on the home page consisting of residential, commercial and small business premises it created both a means of navigation and communicating who the site was for. Some, for the time, creative Flash development tied it in to the user’s PC clock allowing the sun to set on the village and it become dark – complete with street lighting, drawn curtains in the bungalow and lights going out in the office block.

The illustrative style of the village was carried through to product illustrations on the shop pages which really lent the site a personality. The initial intention was to create interactive rooms within the house to both shop for appliances and fact-find about energy usage. Looking back at the kitchen illustration for the first time in 6+ years, it looks beautifully naive. Unfortunately, however, the budgets didn’t stretch to such involved interaction design and flash development. Shame.

The copywriter on the site was ex-Saatchi. A good thing you might think. But the fact he had spent his entire career up to that point writing tag lines and end lines he struggled when it came to writing compelling passages of copy to sell products and services. Hence such shockingly bad lines as “Welcome to our ohm page”, “We’ve got watt you want” and “Come windows shopping”. I kid you not!

The site had a very short shelf life. Scottish Power repositioned their business in 2001 which involved the closure of all their retail shops and, as such, the e-commerce part of the site. Couple this with some poor maintenance and brand guardianship by the client and the polished, slick look of the site started to wane, looking a shadow of its former self within 12 months and becoming virtually unrecognisable by the end of 2001.

Here’s what it looked like at launch though…

Home page

Energy landing page

Product sub category browse page

Village designs – day and night

Domestic appliance illustrations

Kitchen illustration – first draft

Modernista – aggregation in the extreme

Whilst browsing Business Week’s Best and Worst of the Web this morning there was one particular site which really struck me as something new.

We’ve all been using sites such as flickr, YouTube and del.icio.us for a while now to host our portfolios. I myself have a bunch of (badly organised) stuff on flickr which, somehow, persuaded my current employer to give me the gig. Having a blog or one-page portfolio site with links or aggregations of all these things is one thing. Overlaying your site over the rest of the web and navigating between the relevant pages is something totally different.

If I visit the site of Boston-based ad agency Modernista I am confronted with their wikipedia entry but overlaid with a small navigation in the top left corner. Using their navigation you skip to their ads on YouTube, their print work on flickr and their digital work linked from del.icio.us. What they’ve effectively done is ‘brand’ each of the sites with their own little device. This removes the age-old tyranny of the agency having old/outdated/stale site content.

I love this. It may be a bit gimmicky. It may have been done before, but never as effectively and elegantly. In fact, I’ll stop trying to explain it, go and have a look for yourselves.

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Oh no! I haven’t posted for weeks. How bad am I… My blog will have lost ‘Google juice’ (whatever that is), my technorati rating will have dropped through the floor. Whatever! I have a feast of things to come. Sometimes these things just take time.

Announcing The Retrospective Project

Crap name I know!

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been interviewing candidates for a senior designer role. I saw a guy who had work in his portfolio from probably the last century which, on reflection, made me consider how much stuff I’ve done myself over the last decade.

With this in mind, I’ve decided to try and collate everything I’ve done as a professional designer into one portfolio space. I’ve got work on CDs, zip discs (remember those), hard drives, portable drives, paper and God knows where. I even think that there is a whole bunch of work on an old G4 machine I gave to my parents a couple of years ago that isn’t backed up (dangerous I know!)

There are a whole load of things to consider as well – number of screens / images for each project, how do I best show print stuff etc etc.

So, now that I’ve announced it I’ve got to do it. I need to think of a suitable online vehicle or service which will carry this work and allow easy updating and viewing.

On the name. When trying to think of a suitable name for the project I could only come up with the obvious and so I’m calling it what it is. If anyone has any better ideas…

Right, now where’s that old machine with a zip drive? Proping up the office assistant’s desk I think.