Being Blonde

Dundee has long been known as the ‘City of Discovery’ – an identity that has been very beneficial to the city in terms of raising its profile locally, within Scotland and further afield. However this old branding for the city is now more than 20 years old and in need of a new look. Blonde has been working with our sister agencies, Leith and Stripe, on a new website www.dundee.com to support the relaunch of Dundee and its new branding, ‘One City, Many Discoveries’. The new vision, while still reflecting the city’s heritage, has been created to better represent modern, multi faceted Dundee: a diverse, creative and innovative city which is home to world leading research, a thriving digital sector and which offers a fantastic quality of life.

At the heart of our refreshed vision for Dundee are people who are linked to the city and their stories about it. A host of inspirational individuals including figures such as the actor Brian Cox and presenter Lorraine Kelly as well as scientist Sir Philip Cohen and local musician Ged Grimes have shared their personal discoveries about Dundee with us.

Through the website we’re inviting people to ‘discover more‘ about the city but we also want to unearth locals’ stories so we can share with these with everyone else. So through ‘Dundee & Me‘, we want to hear from the people who live or work or study in Dundee and find out what it is about the city that sparks their imagination. A selection of these stories will be published online and also in a new guide book to the city, and one story will be chosen as the subject of a new short film about Dundee.

thesixtyone.com has this lovely little growl style info panel to let you know what’s going on. This gives you great beginners tips , status updates, and also tells you if you’ve buggered something up. Just enough to be helpful and not too much to be a microsoft paperclip style pain in the arse.

Very nice. Very nice indeed.

I presented to the West Lothian eBusiness Group yesterday. The subject was Blogging for Business, based mainly on our own experiences here on the Blonde blog. A nicer, more appreciative audience you’d struggle to find.

It was also an opportunity to road test Prezi - a potential antidote to death by Powerpoint.

Prezi describes itself as the “zooming presentation editor”. It aims to avoid the linear narrative (stuck on rails) progression of Powerpoint by using a zooming approach to navigation. It really is a case of zooming pictures painting a thousand words because I won’t be able to do it justice by describing it here. The site is well worth a visit because the simple visual tutorials will quickly give you a good idea of what it’s all about. Basically, though, it avoids the use of slides by arranging the content of your presentation on an “infinite landscape”. You then progress through by zooming in and out

My Blogging for Business presentation can be viewed here. You can follow the path I created by clicking the next arrow, or zoom out using the magnifying glass and click on any element that interests you.

Based on the interactive tutorials I was able to get up to speed and put a presentation together in less than a morning. The main drawback, as far as I can tell, being that some elements of presentation structure are hard to change retrospectively. There’s an Undo button, but undoing everything after the component you want to change to get back to it can be frustrating to say the least. The secret, as with all presentations, is good planning before you start creating.

I have upgraded to a Pro account which gives access to a desktop version (the first presentation was put together on the Prezi site) and a huge amount of extra memory space on their site.

Well worth a look and a play.

This week we were delighted to be involved in the launch of the 2009 Edinburgh International Festival with the design and build of their new look website. The website showcases the ‘Enlightenment’ programme of events from 14 Aug – 06 Sep. It also showcases the new EIF brand and the newly commissioned (and slightly controversial) Edinburgh Toile by our friends in Glasgow, Timorous Beasties.  (Not the Edinburgh Toilet as one of our developers mistakenly called it throughout production!)

Having worked closely with EIF for the 2008 Festival, we were keen to improve the usability of the site and make searching for events totally intuitive with both a general search and search using a diary mechanism.

The initial response to the new website has been fantastic and we’ve already got our eyes on events for when tickets go on sale on 04 Apr.

www.eif.co.uk

A week ago we set out our stall to provide live tracking of EdTwestival socialising as it happened.

The idea was to do this using a newly created Twitter account @wemet. By sending a direct message to WeMet with the Twitter @names of the people you met, you would help to create a real time database of all the social interactions as they happened.

That was the theory…

In practice in turned out pretty well. The EdTwestival event itself was an unqualified success - well organised, well supported and much appreciated by all who attended. By comparison the live tracking element was more of a mixed bag.

What worked

• Roy, Andy and Fraser did a grand job in a short space of time to grapple with the Twitter API, develop the application and sort out the front end interface.
• Excellent support for the idea ahead of the event from the EdTwestival team and the “community”.
• At the event itself there was a generous spirit and plenty of good intentions to participate in the idea.
• In the end, from a universe of 189, a total of 58 people sent direct messages detailing conversations with 118 others. These “meetings” involved 124 unique names or 66% of the universe. The resulting social graph of the event is shown in the image above and the movie below. You can also view a replay, condensed into 5 minutes, here.

What could have been better

• Despite the best efforts of the EdTwestival guys the venue wifi couldn’t cope with demand for bandwith resulting from the furious content creation of 200 avid twitter-bloggers. We ended up running the application through a 3G dongle that could only manage a 2G connection.
• A design that looked great on screen could have been better optimised for large scale projection.
• Despite the predictably high penetration of iPhones within this geeky group, many people simply weren’t packing the right kind of mobile devices to make participation easy.
• Even with an iPhone, sending a direct message at the start of every new conversation is actually an anti-social act. In the end, an idea that was enabled by technology was also limited by technology. More accurately, and reassuringly, the idea was limited by people’s desire to be socialising rather than technologising.

Nonetheless a big thank you to all who did “technologise”.

To retweet this post, copy and paste the text below into Twitter, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Twhirl, or twhatever.

Results of Wemet live tracking at #EdTwestival -  http://bit.ly/yblG3

Hi all,

I thought it would be nice if we stuck our feet up for 5 minutes for a little chat about one of my favorite subjects – Typography.

Come on, you love it! You do, you do, you do. You just might not know it. But what happens when it goes bad? How do we know if it’s bad?  How many times have you been tripped up when reading your favorite publication (For me it’s Gardeners weekly, bushes and shrubs special edition) when, out of nowhere good crikey, a tricksy letter leaps out of the page and says “hi there, I’m down here being all out of place and ugly among all these pretty other letters”, or a rogue ‘O’ sits too near / far from a ‘P’ (or other straight sided character for that matter) and you just want to tumble dry a beaver in despair! And it’s not just the fake crappy ones like ‘comic–sans’ that are at it either, oh no! It seems that even the really really brilliant typefaces can have their own equivalent of ‘Christmas Jumpers’ tucked away at the bottom of their little typey closets. Ever noticed the disastrous Question Mark in Futura?, the odd protrubance and bulginess of the ascender on the lower case ‘f’ of Adobe Caslon Pro? or the, and my personal worst offender, descending Tail of the capital ‘R’ of Bembo (however, this point of view does sometimes upset people).

However, lovely people, help is at hand! Love him, really love him, hate him, entirely ambivalent of his existence on this good earth, or just plain don’t know him from a squished dormouse – Massimo Vignelli has published an amazing 96 page book on better understanding typography in graphic design – It must be stated that this book comes entirely from Mr. Vignelli’s opinion of a ‘better understanding of typography in graphic design’, and for those of you who do know Massimo from a squished dormouse will of course appreciate that he has rather opinionated.

The book gives specific details on Vignelli’s methodology and approach as well as how he decides on typefaces, grid systems, paper sizes and stock – Which is slightly ironic as the book is not out in print, but available as a PDF download here. It is well worth a peruse over a nice hot cup of tea, I assure you – Do make sure to look out for typos.

Bye Bye

Thanks to @guykawasaki for the Tweet that brought this film to my attention. It features Barry Schwartz talking about how too much choice can lead to paralysis and dissatisfaction - why more is less as he puts it. Well argued, amusing and thought-provoking, especially if you work in an industry that concerns itself on a daily basis with how choices are presented to people.

We’re thrilled to have been appointed by Dilettante to handle their Phase 2 site design and development.

Dilettante is a classical music social network and we’ll be developing a range of Web 2.0 consumer-facing tools, boosting the site’s usability and finessing its look and feel.

The finished site will integrate social media mechanics, e-commerce and expert content.

Dilettante visitors will be able to chart the  progress of Phase 2 development via series of video diary posts on the site.

Dilettante adds to our niche expertise in using digital channels to promote the arts - we already work with Sadlers Wells and the Edinburgh International Festival.

Josh showed me this great Flickr set – Always being up for a bit of experimentation we thought we’d have a crack ourselves – Here are the results kids! Enjoy.

Edinburgh

London

We’ve just launched the all new IRN-BRU brand website. The launch coincides with that of the new “IF” TV commercial, which, not surprisingly, features prominently on the site.

But there’s a lot more to it than that.

There is other advertising based content, housed in two sections named Favourite Ads (ads that did run) and Ads That Never Ran (ads that didn’t - in case that isn’t clear from the title). These sections will be the subject of separate posts.

From a digital strategy point of view the most interesting section is one that we’ve called the Community Centre. The idea behind this is to give a platform to the healthy number of consumer fan clubs and IRN-BRU communities that exist in social media. They are doing a good job of spreading the word about the brand. Now, via the Community Centre, the brand can return the favour by spreading the word about them.

Fan club and brand group administrators can upload details of what they stand for, a link to their site or page and a representative visual. The result is the digital equivalent of a customer ad display in a newsagent window.

We’ve also provided access to a range of visual assets that can be downloaded and used on these sites.

So, rather than jumping in feet first and setting up official brand spaces on the likes of Bebo, Facebook and Myspace, we’re hoping to help grow the membership of unofficial communities. These have more credibility and tend to express their pro-brand views in forthright ways that would make even a brand like IRN-BRU blush.

As well as there being a lot of active IRN-BRU communities out there, there is plenty of IRN-BRU news and chat, not to mention a good smattering of colourful interesting blog posts. Via a Google News feed we’re pulling this news into the site. It’s a good way to introduce dynamic content on a daily basis, and it confirms the impression of IRN-BRU as a talked about, happening brand. The vast majority of comment is positive.

Watch this space for news on results.