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.

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

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.

Grolsch is sponsoring Original Comedy on Channel 4.

In support of this, Leith have produced a series of sponsorship idents, shot in Amsterdam and featuring a couple of guys on a grass-roofed barge. Quirky things happen around them as they make their way along the canals - these involve a zebra, a mole, Amazonian indians, a visit from on high by a Japanese businessman, an unusual pizza delivery and some “wild” grass.

We’ve developed a new Grolsch site which is being referred to internally as the “immortal” - part immersive brand experience, part portal. The new site is designed to make the most of the increasing amount of dynamic content that Grolsch/we are generating - much of this obviously arising from the C4 sponsorship.

An example of this dynamic content is the Codebreaker competition. Within the action of each sponsorship film we’ve included a Grolsch-related number. These numbers pertain to facts about the brand, its history, its locations, its products, its packaging and to beer drinking in general. The numbers are “hidden in full view” in that they’re pretty easy to spot if you know to look for them, but you probably won’t notice them if you don’t.

Competition entrants have to identify each of the six numbers between now and the end of March and enter them on the Grolsch site. To successfully break the code they have to enter the sum of all six numbers. Winners get their own centrally located houseboat in Amsterdam for three nights, plus a two day trip to the Grolsch Brewery in Enschede.

Getting this competition off the ground has been a properly integrated effort involving forward planning and great collaboration between Blonde, Coors, Channel 4, Leith and their production company. Hard work but good fun.

Mark Wong joined us recently as a developer in our London office (aka Blondon).

Talking of aka, it’s Mark, aka “Wonky”, aka “Wonkenstein”, aka “the Wonkenator”.

In a previous post Fraser talked about developers being machines that turn coffee into code.

Wonky is clearly a machine that turns beef flavour Hula Hoops into code.

(Plus the occasional banana).

Back when the web was young (and we all walked uphill through snow both ways to get to work) we web monkeys got by with good old “view source”. If a problem was extra-tricky we’d make a copy of that source and tinker till it worked.

Unfortunately nowadays just viewing the source doesn’t often help - sometimes all you get is two divs and a javascript call to work with… (which then goes on to use XMLHTTPRequest’s and the like to populate the page, generating the document on the fly, rebuilding entire sections by importing a google-maps-flash-GPS-mashup into a floating div… you get the idea)

So we need something better than just “view source”.

Enter Firebug:

This allows you to view the document structure in real time - even if it’s being changed constantly by a bit of Web 2.7 AJAX/Jif^[1] Magic. You can also see what styles are being imported from what stylesheets, you can right click and “inspect element” on the webpage and firebug will show you the appropriate bit of code.

Even better - you’re not just limited to looking at what the document is - you can tinker: add new elements, add attributes, change the styles (even with all these fancy toys, ‘border: 1px solid red;’ is still my favourite CSS debugging tool ;)).

After using firebug for a few hours it’s hard to imagine ever debugging a web page without it… and that’s its one problem…

See, Firebug only comes with Firefox - and unfortunately we poor web monkeys have to debug for IE6 and IE7 too (something to do with world+dog using IE still). Having played with Firefox and Firebug I’m now spoiled - I don’t want to look at that page in IE6 because I know something is going to be out of alignment and I’m going to have a much more painful time of tracking it down than if I could just Firebug it…

However, this morning in my inbox I have an email linking to an IE equivalent - the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. Its name isn’t quite so snappy and it doesn’t have all the handy network monitoring tools Firebug has (very useful when debugging some Flash apps), but it does let you view and tinker with the document and the stylesheets.

Hurrah!

So, my fellow web monkeys - if you’ve not discovered either of these tools yet - check the links below, they’re just too good to miss out on. Give it a day or two of using them and you’ll wonder how you ever lived without.

Firebug add-on for Firefox

The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

^[1] I can’t help it if people name the latest nifty web-fad after a popular brand of bleach can I? Give it five years and we’ll be talking about using “Toilet Duck” to empower “The Nappy Framework” or something.