So I was going to start off a monthly food blog, talking about how food affects us and the best foods to eat to get those creative juices going…

But instead, I’ve been distracted. By food.

I think we’ll all agree we need food to survive, and to be able to live. But I take a different view – I live to eat! There are very few things that make me happier than good food. Whether planning, preparing, cooking, or eating, I get such a sense of pleasure from it. I love creating wonderful food for people to enjoy. I love how different foods make you feel and how you can derive such pleasure from eating.

We’ve been on a massive economy drive in our house for what feels like forever now, but a few weeks ago we had a bit of a splurge and went out for a few bites to eat. And boy did that feel good.

We indulged in few meals of tapas, some stunning seared tuna and even went all out and had some puds – chocolate and peanut butter fondant (OMG, amazeballs!). But my favourite was the tapas we had. Beautiful cured meats, including some lovely Ibérico Jamon, hot chorizo in orange blossom honey, meatballs, cheeses, olives, caperberries…

When you’re eating beautiful food like this, it’s inspiring – the quality, the skill that goes into making it, and the stunning taste it creates.

And it’s all inspired me to get back to new things in the kitchen. So consequently over the last few weeks we’ve had more great food – I’m in the husband’s good books! We’ve indulged in some stunning pulled pork, with a chunky tangy hot apple, onion and garlic chutney; hot cross buns; tasty cookies and chinese five spice duck. The pork was a winner, six hours in the oven with a rub of hot smoked paprika, cumin, corriander, cayenne pepper and sugar, sitting on top of onions, apples, garlic, sage and water – it just proves that good things come to those who wait! And I’m loving the therapy that making hot cross buns provide. The dough is so sticky to start with, but after some kneading (and a little daydreaming) it soon ends up as a soft elastic dough – they’re going in the repertoire.

However I am picky, critical and precise and if it all goes wrong, I tend to get a bit stroppy – time to take a moment! But just loving what you’re doing is the way to produce something amazing – you want it to succeed and will make it work.

And this brings us neatly back to design…

…Do things that excite and make you happy and inspiration will start to flow. Strive for perfection. Accept constructive criticism and move on.

So I’ve been a bit self indulgent talking about the food I love and how I get my inspiration. I expect we’ll be back on track next month, finding out how what we eat fuels our creativity.

Last month Craig and I gave a talk at Second Wednesday, a monthly Nottingham-based event for creative and digital people, entitled The Responsive Web.

The talk, which attracted a record number of attendees, looked at how websites can deliver both tailored design and content for a truly responsive experience. For anyone who couldn’t make it, below is the script (which we roughly followed) for the talk:

Introduction

Hello everyone, thanks for coming. We’re Craig and Mat. We’re senior developers at Tribe, one of the largest creative agencies in the Lace Market.

We’re going to talk today about the Responsive Web, and how we can build websites, not just for all devices but for all users too.

Best viewed at 1024 x 768

We’ll start with a bit of a history lesson. This is taken from Mat’s personal portfolio back in 2002. It was common back then as the number of different screen sizes was low, and I have to admit I put something similar on a website back then.

This website is best viewed at 1024×768 resolution using Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher.

But it’s just not acceptable nowadays, because there are so many different screen sizes (I have seven just in my house). So we can’t afford to be complacent and expect the user to do the work. Users want it to be easy, and they want it to be quick.

And it’s not like we can aim for one or two screen sizes and that will serve the lion’s share. There a a lot of differing screen resolutions used on the web now and with mobile usage growing fast, we have to cater for everyone.

The Challenge

So that’s the challenge:

How can we keep the user happy, whatever device they might be using?

And we thought of 3 solutions for that:

1. Leave It

The first solution is to just leave it. It’s the easy way out, they’ll be no extra development costs and the device will, to some extent, make it work. And one quite well-known brand that’s doing this right now is Apple. The homepage of their website, super scales down for use on mobile. And it works to an extent, but you have to use the pinch zoom to read anything smaller than the main message.

2. Mobile version

Then the second option would be to build a separate mobile site. Two sites means we can target content to desktop and mobile users, but we have to update content twice every time we want to do it. A lot of companies that go down this route, often strip out lots of content, like National Rail. Their mobile site shows live departures, train times and such, which will server 80% of its users’ needs. But if, for example, you wanted season ticket prices, you would have to use the desktop version, taking us back to option 1.

3. Make it Responsive

So the last option, which is the one we’re going to focus on is to Make it Responsive. And to explain what Responsive Design is we’ll use our old friend Dave.

Dave

Here’s Dave, he couldn’t be with us tonight, but he’s useful here as an analogy. We all like Dave, in whatever capacity he’s in, whether it’s Olympic Ambassador, unpaid Footballer or Forgetter of Clothes, but whatever he’s wearing, or not wearing, and whatever he’s doing, he’s always the same Dave. His content never changes, but the way that content is displayed changes. And it’s always displayed in the best way for the situation.

And that’s the basis of Responsive Design. Change your pants, but don’t change your content!

Examples

Here’s a good example. This is The Great Discontent on a large desktop monitor. You can see the large hero image and headline, and the navigation and logo are relatively small at the top.

Then, as it gets smaller, the hero image and headline shrink, but stay full width, multiple columns change to one column and the navigation becomes more prominent when we get down to the mobile size.

And this is the Time magazine website. There’s a lot of content there, a lot of different articles.

But as you can see, when it gets smaller, the top stories and latest articles remain near the top. And the navigation changes from a long bar to a single button, allowing the content to be more prominent. With this site, and the previous one, it’s worth noting that the look and feel doesn’t change either, which for anyone in branding is very important.

How can we respond?

Layout

Let’s start with the most obvious part of Responsive Web Design, which is the layout. Essentially making content fit the width of the screen nicely, removing the need for zooming. We can achieve this by using percentages instead of hard pixels in our CSS and use media queries to add break-points where layouts can snap.

And there are frameworks to get you started. Twitter Bootstrap has all sorts of features, including a 12 column responsive grid.

Imagery

And then we should look at imagery. By the far the biggest zapper of bandwidth, but if you’re on the bus or the train, you don’t want to wait for ages for your image to load. So at Tribe we came up with a solution, showing the user a lower resolution image to begin with, so they think the page has loaded, and then loading the higher resolution image in the background on non-mobile devices and replacing it when done. The image on the left is 89KB, while the image on the right is only 8KB.

Navigation
Navigation is really important too. If it’s difficult to use, users will get annoyed and give up, so think about every iteration of the main nav. Here’s the menu for the WWF in various stages.

At the top the navigation is wide, with space to breath. As the screen gets narrower it bunches together until it disappears almost completely on the mobile version.

Donate and Adopt links are still very prominent, as they are the WWFs most important links, but the menu itself is hidden behind a menu icon in the top corner. Pressing that gets you all the same options as in the desktop site, because it’s the same content.

And remember that as your site layout gets narrower, it’s bound to get longer, which can be a bit of a strain on the user’s thumb or finger. To make it easier, we can add links into sections of the content, allowing us to skip directly to comments, or jump back to the top.

Content is King

Always remember that the content is still the most important element of any website. Content is Still King. If you’re users can find the content they want quickly and easily, they’ll be happy. And they’ll come back.

The Next Level

So that covers a lot of what’s involved in Making it Responsive. Think about layout, bandwidth and images, easy navigation and most of all content, but what else can we do to be truly Responsive?

At Tribe, when we talk about the Responsive Web, it’s not just about these things, it’s also about the user experience and using different triggers like location and age to order content, not just screen size.

So let’s look at the things we know about our users, how we can use them to tailor content, how some websites are already doing this and how some have been doing this for years.

Location

Starting with location. We can quite easily work out the users exact location, using Geolocation. And providing they allow it, we can then give them automatic driving directions to our office. Here’s the automated map from the new Tribe site (currently in production), showing driving directions from Antenna to the Tribe office. You’d be pretty lazy to drive, but you get the idea.

If we know the user is in Nottingham, and our site sells replica football shirts, we’re unlikely to put Derby County shirts on the homepage we serve to them.

And as we already know the users location, we can use this to work out what the weather is like for them. We can then use this to decide which content to push to them. We’ll have a much higher conversion rate if we push our summer holidays to user’s in Manchester, when it’s chucking it down outside.

WeatherFit is an addon for Google Adwords, meaning we can take this concept off our website, and into Google search, showing our ads only if the weather’s right. It’s an expensive option, but if it works, it may be a viable one.

Face Recognition

Face recognition is already something Xbox Live uses to log you in and Smart TVs are using it to recognise who’s watching and serve them the right content. So it might be something we could use online. We wouldn’t use it for internet banking or anything, but it’s a thought.

One good example we saw recently was a site that recognised how far your face was from the screen, and changed the size of the text to suit.

Time of Day

If we know the time of day or week, and we do. We can offer content based on that. For instance, a restaurant could give higher importance to its breakfast menu in the morning, then switch to lunch and dinner accordingly. Or a bar could push it’s cocktail menu on a Friday afternoon when Pam’s looking at what she’s doing that weekend.

And if we’re using time sensitive content on a more global scale, we could always use geolocation to compensate for timezones.

Returning Visitors

We’re sure most of you have done some form of shopping online before. And so you’re probably used to seeing recently viewed items on ASOS, Size? or Amazon. But why shouldn’t we use that concept on non-shopping websites. We can show recently viewed articles or portfolio pieces, and taking another idea form shopping sites, we could say, you might also like this.

And so many websites have a welcome message on their homepage. But if I’ve visited it before, I’ve either already read it, or I wasn’t interested. So why not tweak that message slightly?

Login with Facebook

And this is the holy grail of information on our users. If we have a site that allows users to login, we can make it easier for them to sign up by adding a Connect with Facebook feature. It’s a bit of work for us as developers, but the benefit is huge. We can know everything about them… age, gender, relationship status, hobbies, favourite films and music.

What if we logged into Ticketmaster and it told us “We know you like Arcade Fire and they’re playing at the Ice Arena next Wednesday, your calendar says you’re free.”

Finally

The more we know about the user, the more we can structure the content to suit them. And while Responsive Web Design is a great idea, being responsive can be so much more than that. Hopefully this has given some insight into the thinking behind building a truly responsive website, on all levels.

And remember that

“Devices don’t use websites, people do.”

Although it was a nerve-wracking experience, the response we received was overwhelming (below is a selection of the tweets on the hashtag #secwed) and everyone we spoke to seemed to have enjoyed it, especially the game and the reference to David Beckham in his pants.

Got a spare couple of minutes?Then can we suggest you check out Croation web designer Marko Dugonjic ‘s responsive typography. 

Using a webcam to detect the viewer, Marko’s concept shows how type can be responsive based on how far away you are from your screen. Using the headtrackr javascript library for real-time face and head tracking, it tracks the position of a your head in relation to the computer screen, to allow the copy to respond to your distance. Head tracking has been used in the gaming industry for a while now but we can see real commercial potential in this fun, but practical device.

Just a little gimmick or a genuine way that we can encourage users to interact with out content? Judge for yourself over at

http://webdesign.maratz.com/lab/responsivetypography/realtime/

A sneak peak into our “most complicated shoot set up ever” – in the words of Rob from Scene Photography. More behind the scenes action coming soon.

I recently wrote a feature about responsive email design for Creative Bloq, an online magazine covering 3D, graphic design, illustration, web design.

You can read the full blog post at Creative Bloq.

I came across the site www.thetweethereafter.com (via The Next Web), and didn’t quite know what to make of it. On the one hand it provides a couple of minutes of distraction, but on the other, it’s a strangely macabre insight into the last few hours (sometimes minutes) of someones life before they die.

Maybe the most arresting thing is that the top posting at the moment is from Reeva Steenkamp, the model who died at Oscar Pistorius’ home yesterday. The tweet reads:

“What do you have up your sleeve for your love tomorrow??? #getexcited #ValentinesDay”

Does this feel a bit weird to read? The excitement of the tweet makes her untimely death seem all the more sudden, but then isn’t it this way for the majority of us? What flippant comment will you post into the social ether before you leave?

It reminds me of a recent episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/4od for you UK readers), in which the main character loses her husband but can communicate to him through software that mimics him by analysing his online activity.

With so much of our lives being shared digitally, how many of us consider how this will remain after we head for the big sleep? Or how it could be used?

Powerpoint is dead. Well, to some clients anyway. To engage with their employees British Gas Business have ditched the endless pages of Powerpoint presentations in favour of creating short films to inspire, motivate and help train their employees.

We were asked to create 3 engaging films for the BGB team for an internal training seminar. With a tight deadline and a challenging brief – see how we delivered three films in three days…

Pre planning

Scoping the brief, questioning and finding solutions is the crucial first stage of the project.

Working collaboratively with our client, cameraman (the excellent Chris Pavey) and an assistant we set out on the best creative approach to fulfill the brief, deadline and uphold the client’s strong brand values.

Production. Day One

With the creative direction approved, planning could really start  – sourcing locations, booking the people and props to fit the 3 different film messages. After many conversations, emails and location visits, we finalised our BGB clients to star in the films.

Meanwhile scripts were being developed – these had to outline key messages but not be prescriptive. We wanted real, not posed reactions – to get a natural video your subject needs to be relaxed and use their own phrasing and tone of voice. To give confidence in front of the camera, use large boards behind the camera which highlight the key words and themes.

Don’t forget, there is also the legal processes which has to be done, no matter how tight the deadline – location release forms and model releases. All which need filing post production.

Filming. Day Two

We aimed to film in one day – with a regimented time plan and strict location order to make the most of the time we had at each location.

A little time before filming needs to be spent creating a rapport with your ‘star’, helping them relax and ease into the time we had to film, this time is always well spent – be diplomatic but direct to achieve the best from the time you have. Work closely with the cameraman and share ideas to best implement creative – collaboration is the key to getting the best results.

Things rarely go to plan, there were several last minute changes – even on the days shoot, so no matter how much you plan, always be ready for a last minute change.

Editing. Day Three

The final day in our three days, this was dedicated to getting the right edit. Finding the right music, best shots and getting the sharpest, tightest edit to deliver the message. Try to be strict, edit, cut it, and cut again to get the most convincing and powerful results.

The Final Cut

With such a tight deadline, the client had to trust that we would create only the best for them. The quality of the films say it all and they have now commissioned us to create more to share with their business.

An art director visually creates a story which the audience engages with, but fundamentally is a good leader with great organisational skills. If you’d like more details on how a film could help your business or more tips on how to get the best from your direction we’re here to help…

There are always buzzwords and phrases going around the industry. It used to be Web 2.0, and more recently HTML5, which I still have to explain to people is simply the latest version of the HTML standard. Anyway, one buzzphrase you will hear cropping up more and more over the next year will be ‘Responsive Design’. So what is it and what’s the big deal?

What is Responsive Design?

Simply put, Responsive Design is an approach to digital design which ensures websites (and emails) are easy to use, load quickly and look good on all devices. That’s your massive desktop screen, your laptop, your iPad, even your smartphone.

But why is it necessary? Well, with internet usage on mobile phones growing all the time, it will soon be more likely that your website will be viewed by someone using their iPhone on the train, than by someone using their desktop PC at home. Perhaps more importantly, we’ve found that, for some broadcasts, more people read their emails on their smartphone than on their desktop/laptop.

So it boils down to this:

If you don’t use responsive design, you could be alienating over half of your target audience.

So what’s our experience?

This is something we take quite seriously at Tribe, and recently took the decision to change our design process to include responsive design as standard. We changed our own site to work across as many devices as possible and since then every site we built HAD to be responsive in some way.

MGC Hayles website looks good on a variety of devices.

For our most recent website we went the whole hog. MGC Hayles were formed as Chartered Accountants and Business Advisers MGC and Hayles merged and as part of their branding we also designed and built their new website. We made sure that all desktop users had a nice experience regardless of their screen size, by putting in ‘break-points’ where the layout would change if the screen was too small or too big. We also changed ‘click’ events to ‘tap’ or ‘touch’ events, so smartphone and tablet users had a better experience. There’s much more than that, but I won’t bore you with the details too much.

HTML emails can be responsive too.

Then we went a step further.

What if HTML emails could be responsive?

This is probably more vital, with the uptake of mobile email being higher than that of mobile web and the fact that e-marketing campaigns still have the highest ROI of all forms of digital marketing. So we had a go.

Our first attempt was with a simple, one-column layout, our Christmas campaign email. And it worked. It had the highest click-through and open rates I’ve ever seen, and with 1 in 4 people opening it on mobile devices, it was definitely worth the added time investment.

Our ‘world record’ click-through rate

The next attempt proved a little more tricky. A double column layout, which on a smartphone, switched to one column. But we did it, for our Tribe Latest email and, I think you’ll agree it looks great.

So…

If you’re thinking of having a website or email built and you’ve not thought of responsive design, it’s time for a rethink. It’s that, or get left behind.

Barcelona based music festival Primavera Sound created this great animation to announce the line up for this years festival.

A series of small animation leads you seamlessly from one act to the next and the minimalist design lets you quickly identify your favourite bands at a glance.

This is one of my favourite pieces of work I have seen this year and I will be definitely making an appearance at Primavera… one day.

Probably the best programme on TV at the moment, definitely the strangest, is Utopia.

I won’t give too much away, but it follows four enthusiasts of a graphic novel, called The Utopia Projects, who find themselves in possession of the manuscript for the sequel and are subsequently hunted by The Network, who will do (literally) anything to get the manuscript.

It’s not only dark, disturbing and funny, it also has some awesome styling and cinematography. Over-saturating blues and greens in outdoor shots to build on the bleak feeling of the storyline and using tight close-ups to pull you further in to the drama.

I’m hooked on the storyline, I’m hooked on the styling, I’m hooked on the direction and couldn’t recommend this series enough.

Utopia is available to watch on 4oD and the series continues on Channel 4, Tuesdays at 10pm.

This campiagn was to raise awareness of the destruction of the Amazon rainforest for the US based charity Rainforest Action Network.

These beautifully crafted monochrome images where produced by photographer Giles Revell.  Not surprisingly, he’s won numerous awards for his work, which has been published and exhibited around the world.

I love the use of clean, bold typography against the fineness of the imagery.

Shortly after Marissa Mayer left Google and became CEO of Yahoo! last year, the website dearmarissamayer.com appeared, and simply asked her to make Flickr awesome again. She’s definitely made a start.

I used Flickr to store and share all my photos until a couple of years ago when I realised it hadn’t developed since I originally signed up. Facebook took over my photo storage for a while and when I was shown Instagram I never looked back… Until this happened.

You may have heard about it, you may have heard that Instagram quickly moved to clarify that ownership or photographs always remains with the user, but the terms still allow them to sell photographs without compensation or royalties.

That, amongst other issues, made me look for an alternative. Step forward, Flickr, who had just revamped it’s offering with perfect timing.

While the desktop version remains largely the same as before (save for an updated “uploadr”) the new iOS app is excellent. Much like Instagram you can take photos directly in the app, add filters, share on Facebook, Twitter et al, place on a map, following your friends and comment and like photos.

Take a photo with the Flickr app, add a filter and post to Facebook and Twitter

And it does a bit more. Flickr uploads high quality images, with the original image available to view on the desktop version. Tools to edit photos are available too, including brightness, contrast, red-eye reduction. You can even whiten teeth!

Flickr search, nearby and sets display thumbnail images in a beautiful grid layout.

As with everything, there’s a couple of downsides. With a free account you can only see your most recent 200 photos and your friends probably aren’t on there yet, but if you can put up with that, it’s definitely worth looking at. Give it a whirl at flickr.com

You may have seen a video showing off the new site a few months ago. We did, and we drooled. It was the most beautiful social media site we’d ever seen and just before Christmas I was given the privilege (because I asked for it) of being invited to sign up for the new Myspace.

The most popular social networking site 5 or 6 years ago, in recent years Myspace took a massive decline as everyone signed up for the more user-friendly, Facebook and Twitter, but with the help of new co-owner Justin Timberlake (yep you read that right) they’re back.

This time around, they’re clearly not trying to compete with Facebook and Twitter. This is apparent from the ability to Sign in using your Facebook or Twitter accounts. Instead, they’re taking a different angle and focusing on what they always did best. Music.

My stream – laid out horizontally and with a popup music player at the bottom

Using my account I can do the usual social media tasks: post a status/photo/video, make connections etc. but I can also upload songs, make mixes of any music I can find on MySpace, find my favourite artists, follow them and listen to as much music as I want.

Update my status – pretty

So far the uptake by artists hasn’t been huge, but that will come as more of their audience signs up, but from a music fan’s point of view it’s great and it whips the pants off Spotify using only one weapon… no ads.

Make a mix – not so pretty

Go to new.myspace.com to request an invitation to sign up.

UPDATE New Myspace have is now open to all.

The Big Issue in the North is embracing the future trends of content consumption by releasing a digital version of the magazine. Street vendors sell QR codes on scratch cards for the same price as a printed version, meaning they get the same return from the transaction. The full story from Design Week is here.

It’s an interesting and inventive way of delivering content digitally, yet in person. And it’s an idea that could be transferred to a lot of other projects…

Some of you may have received our recent email campaign offering some time out over Christmas to listen to music for your soul. (If not, please drop us an email and we’ll add you to our mailing list)

You might have picked an alternative tune, or a traditional one. But what you might not have realised is that you also picked how your email looked depending upon what browser or device you opened it on. We call this ‘responsive email’.

Here at Tribe we’ve been talking about ‘responsive’ websites for quite some time. It’s almost a given nowadays that a website should work just as well on a tiny screen as it does on a tablet, or a large desktop screen. By using something called ‘media queries’, we can rearrange the design to best fit the available screen space. Now we’re bringing these same principles to our email designs…

A standard marketing email would normally be around 600 pixels wide. This is to ensure the best possible viewing experience in desktop clients such as Microsoft Outlook, as well as web-based clients such as Hotmail and Gmail.

47% of people opened our Christmas message in Outlook. This is what they saw:

On mobile phones, the smaller (320 pixel) screen means that 600-pixel emails get shrunk to nearly half the size (see below left). Users are forced to pinch and zoom in order to read tiny text, resulting in a less-than-engaging experience. Using media queries, we cropped 140 pixels off both edges of the design, increasing the legibility on smaller screens (below right).

Statistics show that people tend to open their emails on a range of devices at different times throughout the day. Sometimes they might scan the email on their phones, store it, and then read it in more detail or reply from their desktop client when they get back to the office.

Nearly a quarter of people who viewed this email used either an iPhone or Android device.

The latest technology we use for websites won’t work with emails, so it’s much more difficult to create a layout that looks great on shiny new mobiles and older desktop clients. It requires more planning at the design stage, and much more iteration and testing at the development stage.

So was it worth the extra effort?

In short. Yes.

This campaign was our most successful ever. Over half of people who opened the email clicked a link; over 10 times the industry average. That rose above 60% for users on smartphones.  Traffic to our website increased by 4 times the daily average.

Our email campaign was business to business; so we’d expect Outlook usage to be higher. For some consumer campaigns, smartphone usage is now as high as 40%, with Outlook just 20%.

The ‘mobile’ segment of your mailing list is highly engaged and more likely to respond to your message, especially if you make it easier for them to do so. In your customers’ crowded inbox, a responsive email design can certainly help your message stand out from the crowd.

If you’re interested in discussing how ‘responsive email’ could work for you, get in touch.

———-

Oh, and here’s what the most popular Christmas tunes were:

Alternative – 39%
Traditional – 32%
Golden oldies – 29%

This is how you should introduce your family and friends to your new born baby.

Ava Geburi created this fantastic A3 poster to announce the birth of a little baby girl. By constructing a fake floor that stands vertical, Ava was able to photograph the baby as she lay comfortably on the studio floor. Sounds simple, looks great and will be a guaranteed lasting memory.

Found this lovely example of identity design on a recent blog.

Created by Swedish designer Klas Ernflo for Still Light shop in Barcelona. This ticks all my design boxes – clean, simple, beautiful choice of fonts. Spot on.

Special delivery from Munken paper arrived today and I love it.

My very own diary, packed full of information about paper and languages. Very well designed and an inspiring creative which I’ll be reading each month.

There are some very freshed-faced young men at Tribe today. Taking part in Movember has meant we’ve all (well at least the fellas) had to start November 1st with a full clean shave.

As we’ve registered online and created our own “Mo Space” we were able to order Promo Packs and Posters, which arrived today. We were impressed by the shear amount of goodies we got, so hopefully we’ll manage to raise enough to offset the cost!

“It’s an awkward moment when you realise that an energy drink company has a better space program than your country does”.

A comment on twitter that made me think…

The ‘Stratos’ project cost an estimated £30 million – a bargain perhaps, when you consider the global media coverage the project has received. Not to mention the 4.5 million+ views on YouTube.

Red bull’s annual turnover in 2011 was £3.43 billion. Their overall marketing budget is estimated to be 25% of that; approximately £850 million. Admittedly – this is ridiculously high. The company is privately owned. It has no R&D costs, and it’s sugary drinks carry a very high profit margin. Perhaps it can afford to spend that much?

By comparison, NASA’s annual budget for 2013 is approximately £10 billion. Over 300 times as much. So why, since the moon landing of the 1960′s, has NASA failed to capture the world’s attention in the way that Red Bull did for a fraction of the cost?

An estimated 600 million people watched the Apollo 11 landing live on television. The cost of the Apollo space programme was calculated to be £93 billion in today’s money. (Source: the Telegraph)

If the world’s 5 largest companies by revenue (ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Walmart, BP and Vitol) put just 7.5% of their annual turnover towards a combined space exploration program, they would have a total budget of £97 billion… enough to send a manned mission to the moon every year!

Not that I agree, but it could be argued that these companies are the ones that have the most to gain by exploiting the natural resources of other planets anyway. With governments pre-occupied by more pressing earthly matters such as health, education, energy, infrastructure, war and famine – should we be looking to our biggest brands to push the envelope of human discovery?

Space exploration? Medical research?

Perhaps marketeers have more power than they think.

Sexism, degradation and general offence were an everyday part of 50s and 60s advertising. Fast forward to 2012 and shampoo wants to be your friend, crisps tell you jokes and drinks regale their life story. Some product labels have even descended into what can only be described as downright gibberish (see photo). So what happened?
Innocent Drinks happened.

You probably even know the story: three young men turned a tiny stall of fresh smoothie drinks into a multi million empire (with 15 strawberries, 7 raspberries and a banana)*. Impressive stuff. They also used a tone of voice that was genuinely different and captured the attention of consumers worldwide.

But what was perfectly timed in 1999 has spawned over a decade of copycats weaving whimsical tales on everything from porridge to pineapple juice. Even Innocent Drinks hasn’t moved on. And while everyone was trying so hard to be different, brands using their own blend of wacky now all sound the same. So what’s next? And before the trend moves on as all trends must, is there anything we can learn?

As a copywriter, making brands talk more like real people is part of the job – whether it’s in B2B or B2C. Innocent Drinks certainly delivered on this in a fresh new way. But that’s not the only reason we drank up what they had to say faster than one of their smoothies. It worked because what they said and how they said it ran through every aspect of their business. Those whoolly hats, for example, actually meant donations to Age UK, and there really is a banana-shaped phone in fruit towers. They practised what they preached and we believed them.

The problem with every brand to try it since is the lack of conviction. A lot of the fluff around at the moment is saying almost nothing content-wise. Or worse doesn’t fit the brand or audience. And like the person at a party trying too hard, it won’t take long for customers to see through it and get annoyed. To resonate you need a tone of voice that’s truly yours. So that once you’ve stripped back the talking animals, dialled down the crazy and stopped trying to be everyone’s friend, what you’re left with is something honest, relevant and real. In today’s market, this is what stands out.

* approximate figures.

A great series of double exposure prints by Dan Mountford. All the images have been created in the camera using a multiple exposure technique.

The basis of this technique is to expose the film to light more than once. The result is one or more images are superimposed over the original image creating random layers of depth and colour.

Dan Mountford has expertly used this technique overlaying people, nature and man-made objects to create a series of wonderful prints. All the images where created in camera and the postproduction work consisted of the removal of blemishes and the addition of some vector shapes.

‘Birdland’

These series of illustrations where created by London based artist Norma Bar. The designs are simple, bright and colourful and the title’s finish them off nicely with the use of some cheeky punchlines. The series are being shown at London Design Week 2012.

Nat

‘Ouch’   ‘Open Face’

‘Pop Art’

We’ve starting to recover after the finishing of the Olympics left a hole in our lives, but after the Paralympics our attention can turn to Rio in four years.

The logo for the London Games received lots of criticism when it was launched – so what do you think to Rio’s logo for the greatest event in the world?

Possible trying to spark a debate on sexism, or possibly just having a laugh, the Boston Metro decided to see what it would be like if other Olympic sports were photographed in the same way as women’s beach volleyball.

Take a look at the full post here.

As a ‘present’ for Rob’s last day at Tribe last week, we decided to decorate his desk with his favourite things in the world… Post-It Notes. Not sure he appreciated it to be honest.

Nice ad here from MTV. Beautiful art direction and super execution. And at the heart of it, a great concept too. Close up after the break, or click here to view in full-size glory.

The problem with static mockups for responsive web design is that they are more suited to print – where a design is constrained by a set number of pages, and by the page itself.

The designer uses their skills to create a visual hierarchy within those constraints. Headings are picked out. Important points are bulleted, or pull-quotes are used. Typography is combined with images to create a ‘layout’ that conveys the essence of the message in a single glance. If the reader wants more information, he/she can drill down through the hierarchy to gain more understanding. It is the designer’s job to guide them through this process. Such is the power of ‘layout’ in print design, that it often dictates where the content goes, and in some cases what the content actually is.

On the web however, content is king. Content can be repackaged and redistributed in any way that the user chooses to consume it. The designer has less control over the layout, and in some cases a carefully crafted hierarchy might come unstuck. On the web, the user has a lot of say in their own content hierarchy.

Another idea we like is something called Style Tiles <http://styletil.es> . If we remove ‘layout’ from the initial design process, we can concentrate on visual design and content hierarchy as two separate things. Then combine the two at a later stage once a visual language has been agreed. This can be great for clients who are just getting started in the digital arena and perhaps don’t yet have a defined content structure. Perhaps they just have a few photos and a rough idea of what they want to achieve. A perfectly crafted design filled with ‘lorem ipsum’ might look great and get you super-enthusiastic about your project, but once you begin to think about your content, the layout and structure of the site has to change anyway.

Less time bogged down with the complexities of ‘layout’ in the early stages of the process mean more time to iterate on the design. And we think the end result will benefit from this.

Just in case you thought we only had another week or so of world-class sport to watch on the BBC, Channel 4 are here to show you that there is even more to come as soon as the Olympics finish.

This is a wonderful, slick ad from Channel 4. Bravo sirs. Bravo.

It was a stunning day on the Champs Élysées, and Team Sky decided to make it even better by making history with Britain’s first ever Tour de France winner.

Here’s a photo I took, just as the main bunch chased down the break away riders on the final lap before delivering Cavendish over the line for his fourth consecutive win on the cobbles. Wiggins was imperious – and I consider myself massively fortunate to witness first hand one of the most impressive achievements in sport. Awesome.

GoPro Dolly – Motor Testing from Rob Antill on Vimeo.

Various shots around Nottingham using a custom built, time-lapse dolly system.

A group of friends from Japan create minimalistic animations that show animated GIFs of people and objects ‘rolling’ around their center of axis to express the flow of time.

See more here:
http://rrrrrrrroll.tumblr.com/

If all goes well, Bradley Wiggins will be crossing the finishing line of the Champs Élysées on Sunday and will bring the Maillot Jaune to Britain for the first time.

I’ll be there watching – and tweeting my support along with the rest of the country with the hashtag #allezwiggo.

This is Alex Fowkes (The guy who worked on the Tribe walls) defying gravity and ’jumping’ over his bike in Victoria Shopping Centre Car Park.

Shrewsbury Council have commissioned an identity and branding campaign to promote the town, and I think & Smith and We All Need Words have done a fantastic job.

I stumbled across the project on the Creative Review website, and you can read more about the project over there. If you just want to take a look at the pretty pictures (and lets be honest, a branding project should work without rationale), feast your eyes after the break.

(Oh, and can I get a high-five for that awesome post title? You’re welcome.)

What Goes Around Comes Around is a simple, brilliant and incredibly impactful series of posters designed to wrap around poles, campaigning for an end to the war in Iraq. Grenades, rifles, missiles and tank guns come round the pole to catch up with the aggressor in each poster. Only when the posters are wrapped around a pole do you see the complete picture and the message becomes very clear.

Created by Big Ant International for the Global Coalition for Peace, to drive traffic to their website, the campaign has won a number of awards from around the world.

Today we’re talking about how changes in technology are effecting the process of designing for web.

When our designers put pen to paper, we use exactly that – a pen and some paper. We won’t even touch the computer until we’ve quickly come up with some pencil sketch layouts that work on a visual level. Traditionally, the next stage has always been to take those successful designs and mock them up in photoshop – to a rigid 960-pixel wide grid designed to look perfect on a 1024 pixel wide desktop screen. Then, we show them to the client for approval and the designs get passed to our developers to start the build. Simple.

Unfortunately, using this process, the client is signing off a design that will only look pixel-perfect in 10% of use cases. Due to the vast array of browsers, devices and user situations, the other 90% of the time it could (and should) look completely different. Our developers can only use the design as a guide, and are left to fill in the blanks themselves.

The dilemma is that the client wants to see exactly what his or her website is going to look like. The reality is that, using static visuals to demonstrate a fluid website design, we can’t. Not in a way that is cost effective to the client. There’s just too many variations. We could present visuals for a ‘desktop version’ and a ‘mobile version’ and invite our clients to use their imagination for everything in between. Better than nothing I suppose, but that could double workload and costs, and we’d still just be dropping 2 pebbles into the ocean instead of 1.

Perhaps a better solution would be to ‘design live’ in the browser? Many of our contemporaries are exploring this route as we speak. ‘Wireframing’, or ‘responsive prototyping’, are phrases that have entered the web designers’ vocabulary recently. We’re not sure that the tools are quite ready yet. Yes, it can be just as quick to design using code – but just as a design should work on paper before you take it to the computer, we think a design should work in a static 2D visual space before we start throwing too many variations and scenarios into the mix. We also think that the rigidity of code-based grids stifles our creativity somewhat.

Artist Bruno Munro has created this fantastic work of art – a garden filled with bulbs called “Field of Light”.

With a projector changing the colour of the bulbs throughout the garden, it creates a fantastic space. More images after the break…

It’s only a slight insight from Weta Digital, but it’s an interesting look anyway. A nice way to spend a couple of minutes on a Friday too…

Just found this work by German artist Simon Schubert. Called Paperarbeit (Paper work in English), they’re created by folding and unfolding pieces of paper to create the desired image and look unbelievably time consuming to create.

More here

These boots have recently made it to the top of my wish list, written in enormous capital letters and underlined several times. Nike GS Football boots are one of the most environmentally sound sports products ever made.

After saving some 285 million plastic bottles from landfill last year, by using up to 8 bottles for each replica shirt they produced, Nike have gone a step further with these bad boys, using not only bottles, but castor beans and recycled polyester. Not only that, they’re the lightest boots Nike have ever produced, weighing in at just 160g.

Although improving my game is almost impossible when you play as well as me, I wonder how I can persuade Andy to buy a pair… for the studio…

Quick! There only making 2012 pairs worldwide.

More details on the Nike website.

I’m rather taken with the way that Bangkok University are reinventing their student’s social space with some phenomenal interior design from Supermachine Studio. It’s been created with real wit and flair but there’s no mistaking this is seriously sophisticated design.

Not looking out of place in a chic city hotel, many of the features have been designed to adapt and be fully manipulated – the ‘ribs’ on the walls can be reconfigured to create new spaces, a super-long pool table has adjustable holes and then there’s the huge modular sofa that be rearranged to seat a canteen full of students. The aim is to reinterpret and re-imagine the space so that their students want to study there but also want to spend more social time on campus and enjoy the environment…I’m not sure I’d ever want to leave.

Right now is an exciting time to be a web designer. However, the growing abundance of browsers, devices and user situations is also presenting us with some new challenges.

Smartphones and tablets are changing the way we all access the internet. Last month, mobile devices accounted for over 11% of all internet usage in the UK. That’s only 1% less than people using Internet Explorer 8 on their PC. Mobile usage is predicted to overtake desktop browsing by 2014.

And what about the context that your user is looking at your website/app in? Are they on the move? Do they just need your address details super-quick, or are they sat on their sofa with time to browse your products or services? (Yes, they could still be doing that on their mobile).

No online brand can afford to ignore these trends, and neither can we. At Tribe we’re committed to finding the best solutions to ensure your site looks and works great in as many different scenarios as possible.

Back in April, we wrote an article entitled we’re going responsive. It usually isn’t practical or cost effective to build a different version of a website/app for every single scenario – so we build our websites to adapt.

More awesomeness from the mighty Ken Block. Production on this edit is top notch.

A pretty large image of Jessica Ennis has been painted on a field, which is visible as you fly into London. That should get the competition wound up a little.

They are the biggest, longest-serving band ever to grace the airwaves and to commemorate their 50^th Anniversary, The Rolling Stones have offered up a fantastic insight into life in the band. Mick, Keith, Charlie and Ronnie curate a collection of over 1100 photos and illustrations that have been compiled into one epic book The Rolling Stones: 50.

Released on July 12 2012, 50 years after the Stones first-ever gig at the Marquee Club, London (What a stroke of luck that is!). The book captures the band at the height of their hysteria and all the sensational antics on and off stage over the last 50 years

“This is our story of fifty fantastic years. We started out as a blues band playing the clubs and more recently we’ve filled the largest stadiums in the world with the kind of show that none of us could have imagined all those years ago. Curated by us, it features the very best photographs and ephemera from and beyond our archives,” write Mick, Keith, Charlie and Ronnie.

Fingers crossed the book will be followed up by a 50^th Anniversary tour.

Spotted via The Next Web, this video shows a guy talking to his younger self, through a video he made 20 years ago.

Well worth a watch for a few minutes.

Owen and I have just been geeking out over these beautiful graphs produced by Twitter, showing the volume of tweets for each team during the tournament.

It’s a great combination of two of my favourite things: Football and Graphs (nerd alert). They even went to the trouble of breaking the data down into minutes of each game, and the animation between graphs is pretty nice too.

Take a look for yourself at: https://euro2012.twitter.com

The Royal Society’s Summer Exhibition starts today and I spotted this interesting little slideshow on the BBC website showing images from the Animal Vision exhibit.

The image above is how a peacock would see another male peacock due to their ability to see UV light, and below is how a dog would see it’s owners feet, having no red-orange photoreceptors.

That concludes our science lesson for today.

Radio 1 Breakfast DJ Chris Moyles spent an evening in Nottingham last night, and tweeted the picture above, saying

“Nottingham. (I know it’s not a typical view but I really liked it!)”.

The eagle eyed amongst you will see this is the street to our studio, and we kind of like it too. Cheers for the shout-out Moylesy.