After eighteen months of album covers, gig projections and self-initiated projects, we were joined by Casper’s old school friend, and recent MBA graduate, Frederik Cordes. Two years later, we were a full-service web and design bureau, with five full-time staff members and an office near Copenhagen’s Kongens Nytorv central square. Our growth continued through 2008 after I relocated to Zürich, Switzerland to open a new branch and expand our team to ten.

I stepped down from full-time duties in 2009 with David Luisi and Christian Vollenweider assuming the roles of Managing Director and Technical Director respectively. Since then, our client list has grown to include large Swiss, Scandinavian and global brands, we opened a Belgrade office, and have been the recipient of several national web awards, which all culminates in today’s exciting announcement that Spoiled Milk has been acquired by global mobile solutions provider 24MAS.

This deal means I am no longer a member of the board and therefore, after a fantastic seven-year journey, my personal involvement with the company has come to an end. Congratulations to Casper, Frederik, David, Christian and the rest of the team for all their hard work. I wish them continued success under this new era of Spoiled Milk.

Read the official press release.
Find out more about Spoiled Milk.

To mark the occasion, I’ve put together a Flickr photo series of our early work from 2004-2007.

See the whole series.

The nicest colours that were submitted are documented below. Winners will be chosen from this pool and notified by email today. Sorry if you didn’t win.

While I was there I designed and cut six iPad sleeves. The sleeves have a parachutist-inspired quick-out strap and a velvety lining that cleans your screen as you slide your pad in and out.

I had various grand plans to give them away. They were all trying to be too clever and they all never happened. So now, on this very blog, I am giving them away in a simpler fashion.

To enter the draw, you must do the following:

1. Pick the sleeve you would like the most. There are close-ups of each one in this Flickr set.
2. Start a new email to me at ipadsleeves@russellquinn.com with the name of the sleeve. Note that there are no pre-assigned names, you must make one up that also contains enough identifiable information for me to work out which sleeve you are after.
3. Also include your name and send it from an email address that can take replies.
4. I also require to you to send me your favourite colour in either 6-digit hex, RGB or CMYK format. There are three possible formats to avoid discrimination against digital or print designers. If you are not a designer at all and you feel discriminated against, then I am sorry. I like all people, but I also want to see colours. You can still enter, you just need to work out how to use one of the formats. They’re quite simple. It’s like a fun homework assignment.
5. Send the email.

The rules:

1. Each person can only pick one sleeve. No seconds or thirds allowed. I only want people to get their favourites.
2. Only one entry per person. This rule is strictly enforced by the Favourite Colour Security System. It is biologically impossible for a person to lie about their favourite colour, so I will know.
3. Your brother/lover/whatever can enter, but your dog can’t. This is also enforced by the Favourite Colour Security System because dogs have different eyes to humans and can only see dog colours, which can not be represented using either the 6-digit hex, RGB or CMYK formats.
4. The closing date for entries is December 25th 2010.
5. For each sleeve I will: pick my three favourite entries (based on your colour selection.) I will then put these entries in a small, empty drinking glass and randomly select one (eyes closed.)
6. That person will be the winner of that sleeve!
7. I will contact the winners by email to let them know the good news.
8. The winners will have to pay for postage by PayPal. We can work out which type of postage is the best for you. If you live in San Francisco, you can get the sleeve from me in person and therefore skip this charge.
9. No eBayin’.

If you are not lucky enough to win a sleeve, you can buy FREITAG-employee-designed-and-cut sleeves from the FREITAG online store.

The last iOS app I worked on as a freelancer before joining McSweeney’s has just been made available in the App Store. I designed and developed both the app and the server-side portion, which runs on the open-source Casein CMS.

Due to my relocation to San Francisco near the end of the project, Zürich-based Dreipol took over to finalise the design and implement the page-turn effect.

See the promotional webpage.
Watch a movie of the app in action.

The opportunity to work with the great people at McSweeney’s and play a part in determining the future of a publishing company that has inspired me for many years is very, very exciting.

Of course, this means that I am no longer considering any new freelance projects or consulting work. Please direct any enquires of this nature to the awesome guys at Spoiled Milk.

This is their first mobile app and is a digital version of The Annual, a yearly retrospective of the best work in visual communication from the fields of advertising, graphic design, digital media, packaging, music videos and related media. The print version is also released today.

The application concept, design and development was done by me.

The work is arranged by the date on which the project launched or first aired. Those deemed to be of outstanding merit are featured in the Best in Book section. As well as a text summary and full credits, each project includes a selection of high-resolution, zoomable, pannable images. Where appropriate, the project is viewable on YouTube or the web. With a favourites section and option to share via email, Twitter or Facebook, the app can be used to quickly build up a personal inspiration book.

For those unfamiliar with the Swiss system: any citizen may put forward a “people’s initiative” for universal referendum if they gain over 100,000 supporting signatures in an 18-month period. Most other nationalities buckle in disbelief on hearing this and it certainly does seem like a utopian dream where true people-power is possible. Surely this form of democracy in its truest sense can only be a force for good?

Sadly, to believe this you also have to believe that people are always unemotional, rational, strong-willed and deeply educated in a wide range of abstract topics.

The first weakness is that politically-charged issues are vulnerable to highjacking by extremist groups. It only takes a cleverly-targeted propaganda campaign to quite literally bypass government and international treaties, and access the constitution.

The second weakness, hopefully the one that can be addressed first, is that some Swiss appear to dogmatically cling to their current system of direct democracy as an immutable, unquestionable, force for good—”it’s better to have it sometimes produce results like this, than not to have it at all.”

Being appalled by the minaret result, but not questioning and challenging the system is unfair. It’s time to admit that a) populations can be brainwashed by extremist propaganda, b) despite its noble intentions, direct democracy is very vulnerable to being exploited by extremist groups and c) steps need to be taken now to stop this from happening again.

If you’re still questioning why the system is so vulnerable and unjust, just consider how flawed the logic is that allows an open vote on whether a majority should take away a minority’s human right. In a historically peaceful country like Switzerland—supposedly full of neutral and thoughtful people—this shouldn’t be a problem, right? A reliance on shared cultural beliefs is toxic. When a cultural shift happens, usually via exploitation and propaganda by an extremist organisation, the system collapses.

While the wording of the minaret initiative focused only on the construction of specific architectural towers, the surrounding far-right campaign pitched it as a chance to clamp down on the encroachment of political Islam in Switzerland, which was neither the subject of the vote nor a concern backed up by fact.

So here we have a 95% non-Muslim majority voting on an issue that takes away a fundamental right of a 5% minority—all based on ugly, warped logic.

The Swiss People’s Party—the largest political party in the country—directly stated voting “no” on the minaret ban could eventually lead to the Islamification of Switzerland with all women being forced to wear burkas on the street and endure genital mutilation. Of course the illogical misuse of women’s rights here is made all the more unnerving by the fact that Switzerland only gave women universal suffrage in 1990—another catastrophic example of a majority sytematically suppressing a minority.

In a court-of-law great lengths are taken to stop the decisive jury from being exposed to this sort of scaremongering and bias. But it’s somehow possible to have a nationwide court of 7,400,000 decide the fate of 400,000 people, while their fears are built and played upon with non-factual evidence. I saw many people being interviewed who believed that minarets were allowed to broadcast the call to prayer in Switzerland (they’re not) or had no idea about the size of the perceived ‘threat to their country’ (the majority of Muslims living in Switzerland are from the former Yugoslavia and Turkey, are secular, well integrated into society and do not practise any of the “faith characteristics” the far-right’s campaign was built on.)

As with most things, the integration of different peoples and cultures is a very complicated task, but leaving it up to what is essentially misguided mob rule is a shocking, shocking tragedy. Just as the initiative for building regulations was symbolic for a whole lot more, Switzerland cannot expect their decision to be viewed as an architectural preference alone. They have sent out a clear message that even the well-integrated Muslims in their country are being treated with suspicion and, far more worryingly, they have helped to legitimise the mobilisation of other far-right campaigns in countries like the Netherlands, Denmark and the UK.

57% of the 53% that voted, plus the 47% who didn’t vote at all (I’m sorry, but non-participation when given a vote on human rights issues is deplorable) have set the scene for a nasty turn in European politics.

A population can easily be manipulated into suppressing minorities when given a legal framework to do so, and it’s time to admit that direct democracy on this scale is a prime target for such exploitation. There’s a reason right-wing groups in other countries haven’t had the same success yet on similar initiatives.

There are, of course, still many differences between this situation and the legally legitimate rise of the National Socialist Party that formed Nazi Germany, but a country even putting one foot on that ladder is something that needs to be battled against and quickly stamped out.

The emboldened Swiss People’s Party is now proposing that the country withdraws from its European Human Rights obligations, while they try to tighten the grip on other Muslim customs. I firmly believe that the Swiss people in general do not want this to happen, but refusing to examine how to make direct democracy more robust and immune from highjacking is only going to make things worse. An investigation into the failings of the system should be presented to the international community as quickly as possible.

Attempting to write a novel has been something I wanted to tackle for a long time. Although I’ve done a lot of writing before, it has always been in the factual copywriting arena. The attraction of trying to produce fiction is that the methodologies and processes involved seem so scattered and, for good reason, are vastly different from writer to writer. Unlike ‘crafts’ that involve either teamwork or close client/manager communication, the different ways in which a writer can choose to structure their workflow is seemingly infinite. This coupled with the appeal that no complicated or expensive equipment is necessary—one surely just sits down and writes—I imagined it to be a no-holds-barred way to push one’s cerebral matter to its limits; an open highway of discovery about the inner-being and world we all inhabit!

Right?

Well, apart from getting heavily sidetracked in the months that followed with various enjoyable projects, I have managed to keep up a semi-sustained attack on this idea of writing fiction. I’ve tried just-sitting-and-writing, analysing other works, composing shorts to keep myself warmed up and walking in the woods hoping the next plot twist lies amongst the leaf mulch.

What usually happens is I get so far with a new approach, before realising something profound regarding how my mind works, then scrapping everything I’ve done and starting again. Most of the time this feels like a progressive step and something I expected when I started this with no clue what I was doing. Interestingly, the part that has surprised me most is not that I need to gradually self-educate via trial and error, but rather that I need to combat procrastination.

I’ve not had a problem with motivation for years. This is partly because running a startup company with staff, client and project responsibilities leaves no time to consider anything else but working every spare minute of the day, but also—as I’ve come to realise—because I no longer have my old, faithful work-reward cycles to rely on.

For a long time the immediate reward of focussed working was that the company didn’t crash and everyone was paid at the end of the month (a big incentive believe me), followed very closely by feeling a strong personal responsibility to every client we were working for and wanting to believe every deadline was achievable. Those are the obvious, big things and in this new environment without deadlines, other people or any concrete expectations (my goal here is to attempt to write a novel—I hope that it’s a success obviously, but right now I just want to push myself and see where I end up) it’s easy to see why the words don’t always flow when I sit at my laptop at 9am on a wintry morning.

However, I started thinking more about why I can almost endlessly concentrate on other tasks—things such as software development for example. It didn’t take long to realise that during the 20-odd years I’ve been programming a computer, my brain has become wired up to the short create-result cycle that is involved. Whether one is creating a desktop application, or writing markup for a website, the iterative development cycle of:

1. write some code,
2. compile-and-run, or refresh-the-browser,

provides instantaneous results many times an hour. A successful compilation is the mini pat-on-the-back encouragement that drives me to continue—eagerly seeking the next visual reminder that progress is being achieved.

My partner Lucy and I often discuss the differences in cycle length between software development and the laboratory experiments she conducts as part of her PhD. Her world is fixed partly by the length of time it takes to perform necessary mechanical tasks, but more importantly by the time the biological processes she’s monitoring take to express themselves. Some clumsy syntactic mistake in my code can usually be remedied in minutes, followed by the hit: “0 errors, 0 warnings”. If Lucy makes a mistake, that’s days that have been wasted (I’m sure they’re not entirely wasted, but for the purpose of illustrating the zero-wait, fervour-cycles a programmer can get into, that’s what it feel likes).

The very reason that I’m sat typing this blog post right now, rather than completing the short story exercise I set myself this morning, is because I know in a few minutes I get to push that big “Publish” button and see my work live on the Internet. I’m sure this modern urge for instant gratification is a major reason blogging is a dying trend while Twittering is on the up (I’m still grappling with the reality that a 140-character summary of all this would have probably yielded a better effort-to-satisfaction ratio).

So that’s where I am with this experiment. For all the research, discovery and opening paragraphs I’ve drafted in the last few months, I still need to take a big step back and examine how I can either shoehorn a project as epic as this into my addict-esque requirement for instant feedback, or fundamentally remove the need for those micro-motivations.

Or in a Tweet: “Struggling to stay motivated. Thinking of rewarding myself with a dog biscuit for each paragraph written.”

Firstly, I have launched a whole new version of my personal website. Hopefully it provides a better representation of what I do than my previous blog-only based site. I hope you like it!

www.russellquinn.com

Secondly, I have been working with McSweeney’s, the indie US publishing house, on an iPhone application. It has just launched and you can find out more about it here:

www.russellquinn.com/mcsweeneys

Full information at www.wespeakenglish.ch.

Please sign up at the Facebook event. Follow us on Twitter for further details about the schedule and speakers. The event is free and all films and speakers will be in English. Please arrive promptly. There will be a bar.

Thursday, 17th of September 2009, 8pm
Bombay Bar, Neufrankengasse 16, 8004 Zürich
www.bombay-bar.ch

Science vs Art logo design by Holly Wales.