The Blog of Mr & Mrs OK

Choosing what to invest time in

2013-05-20T13:57:45+00:00

Like every tiny business, we struggle with time. We’re always going to opt to spend time on paid work over everything else. For the last year or so we’ve been coasting in a lot of ways, relying on connections we have and a little bit of luck to bring in projects to keep us going and we’ve completely neglected the site you’re reading this on. That was a mistake, quite a big one as it turns out, and one we’re working very hard to rectify at the moment.

Alongside just getting a ‘good enough’ portfolio site up we know we have to get out there in the world and try and draw a little bit of attention to our services.

A conversation on Twitter today is the reason I am sharing where we’ve got to with the social network bit of that.

To begin working out which social networks to invest any time in is a pretty simple formula for me really. What will help us do a better job even if we go completely unnoticed on that network? Any other approach is just hubris.

So, we’ve picked Dribbble as one because it creates a timeline of visual notes. Alongside its ability to pop things in buckets it’s a handy reminder of what happened when.

At what point did I come up with that idea for a logo/breadcrumb combination for Rationalist Association? Roughly November 12th 2012. When I come to writing the case study for that project it’ll serve as a good reminder and, as a bonus, also gives me a date should I need to look back at all the emails for that project at around that time.

Same goes for Twitter really. We’re not entirely sure what we want to do with @mrandmrsok but I do know I bookmark a lot of stuff and share it all with Rach, so it could be quite handy for us to have a place to refer to on a daily basis. Why not share it publicly rather than just sharing links via instant messaging in-house.

Not very sophisticated and I am sure should an overly caffeinated Social Media Guru trip over into this post they will surely choke on their Skinny Latte Fuckoffachino but it’s a start and better than nothing, which, as I said, was a big mistake.

The new Mr & Mrs OK logo

2013-05-14T16:12:50+00:00

Our logo has been a long time in the gestation. As usual, designing for ourselves was the most difficult project, but we have finally settled on the latest iteration.

Below are some previous logo iterations which never (or only partially) saw the light of day:

On top of that there are pages and pages of sketch books full of quick doodles and variations on a theme.

We wanted to incorporate a hot air balloon into the logo, well partly because I’m a bit obsessed with the look of them - they are that bit old fashioned and whimsical without being too twee - and they have a lovely soaring association, good for representing ideas and thoughts. Part of the challenge was working a balloon in without losing the impact of the “OK”.

Anyway, there are a few work in progress shots on Dribbble if you’d like to see a bit more.

The OK guide to preventing design theft

2013-05-09T19:32:53+00:00

I’m sure you, like me, are still in shock at the revelation that the latest Clearleft website was in fact stolen from a much smaller agency somewhere in Kent (see http://adactio.com/journal/6232/ for more info). Whilst I winced and chuckled my way through Jeremy Keith’s recording of the resulting phone call, I also had a real sense of doom. What if that happened to us? We’d never purposefully rip-off someone’s site and I’d be gutted if we were ever accused of it. But we are so often inspired by a lot of design that I worry we might accidentally steal. And that’s before we even get to the fact that there’s a lot of ‘samey’ looking sites out there. It’s healthy paranoia and we have a few internal checklists to try and avoid such things.

The basics: Am I really stealing this design?

If you can answer yes to any or all of these questions, STOP! You’re probably about to steal a design

Have I downloaded the site in its entirety and am about to use it as the starting point for my own design?
Have I carefully extracted the color scheme, grid, fonts etc. and am about to use it as the starting point for my own design?
Is my graphics app loaded up with screenshots of the site that has inspired me so much so I can refer back to it frequently?
Have I just cut & paste the copywriting from the site?

The OK’s one-stop practical in-house guide to prevent outright design theft

I’m going to use Mark Boulton Design as the case study. They recently launched their new site just at a point where we’re desperately trying to put together our own, and struggling a bit, and we want something like that. I’d say we’re in real danger of stealing it. So rather than doing any of the things on our basics list, I started to break down why we wanted to steal it.

1: Why do I want to steal this site so much?

It’s deceptively simple which to my eyes gives it elegance but also confidence and authority
Combined with its simplicity is a unique and utterly refreshing way to navigate. No navigation bar
The copywriting is tight, it takes moments to read but you’re left with a real sense of the company
The video has great atmosphere, can we afford to hire these guys to do our site for us?
Look at that client list. You bastards!
They never use the word clients
I love the art directed style of the projects
I like how the Mark Boulton Design brand itself is bold and confident on its own but almost vanishes completely if you are reading a project case study
At the bottom of every page is a master class in conversion. A ‘what we want you to do next’ contact us form

I could go on, and I probably will, with this and a few other sites, but that’s quite enough licking of bums and I’m sure you get the idea. This is actually quite a useful list for us as a team of two and it most certainly shifts the focus away from that copyrighted combination of colour, typography, words and layout.

Desperate as we are to have what they have this partially completed list has enough for us to ‘steal’ a little of what we have interpreted as part of their success but also to be honest with ourselves and understand what we can’t achieve just now; like their staff, office, clients, time and budgets. With those things in mind even if we thought we could get away with it, nicking the design outright seems futile anyway.

We’ll try never to look at the site again as we build our own but you can be sure we’ll be checking back when our first round is done to check we haven’t been too heavily inspired.

There is no point 2.

The Tail of Bill & Jill

2013-05-08T20:55:16+00:00

There was a young woman called Bill,
Who married a man, name of Jill,
They left for the sea;
But stopped for a pee,
And ended stuck up on Duck Hill.

OK wedding invites

2013-04-15T09:46:49+00:00

Using Kirby CMS, Wufoo and MailChimp we created a ‘homemade’ looking website.

It is, of course, responsive and was customised for each of our guests.

View the site (use Username: demo Password: demo to login)

Rationalist Association notes: Responsive design

2013-03-27T07:42:31+00:00

The text is too big! Has been something of a reaction to the Rationalist Association site. To which my head quietly replies, stop hunching over your desk, grab a cuppa, sit back, relax, and try that big text out now.

The main challenge of responsive design for this project, and one that is incomplete given the limitations we are faced with, has been typography.

We’ve relied heavily on a modular scale and, quite frankly, wouldn’t have got anywhere near as close as quickly without pairing that scale with Gridset. So far we haven’t really dived into anywhere near the detail I would like with the typography but have spent some time looking at the line lengths of articles. I don’t mind telling you that it has been enormously challenging. Even with the half a dozen or so devices we have to hand working out appropriate break points, well, I am not sure we have worked them all out yet. In fact it seems futile to try. Which leads to the main thought about responsive and this project.

Things will get more complex as we add features and I’ll have to let go of this oversimplistic approach at some point but for these first few ‘beta’ releases, I ditched the notion of mobile, tablet and desktop and started thinking of the site as simply a good old fashioned fluid design with media queries there only if things started to break as the screen got narrower, taller, wider etc.

Rationalist Association notes: The team

2013-03-26T16:14:53+00:00

I’ve been attempting to write something concise about the Rationalist Association for some weeks and it’s not happening. Prompted by a writer friend I’ve decided to start by breaking it down into little chunks. Part one then, the team.

That the team is tiny and part-time is probably the most important consideration for this project. There are essentially just three of us at the coal face with others chipping in where and when they can. Rach (Mrs OK) has made significant contributions too, particularly on the setting up of Google Analytics, the grid and in answering my frequent calls of, ‘That looks really hard, can you do that?’ but has had to drop out when other work demanded.

I am wearing many hats: Designer, front-end developer, [agile] project manager, content strategist, researcher, workshop facilitator, hater of Internet Explorer. Julian at Simplicity Web is focussed on the custom CMS we are building, release management and wrangling with a third party to try and get a membership checkout in place (I don’t envy him this task) and also pops on his front-end developer hat when he can see me about to burst. Caspar, CEO and Editor, is doing all the many other things that are needed to make this happen at all, that and running the charity and editing the magazine and getting the content in the first place… you get the idea.

So no, not an ideal situation but the atmosphere in the team is exceptionally good, I’d dare say ideal.

In fact the combination of using agile and the limitations of time, team and budget has it plus sides. We always choose to launch rather than hold it back and wait until it’s perfect.

During the early phase of the project we generated enough user stories to keep us going for about 5 years and I think that roughly sums it up for me; I’m pleased with where we’ve got to so far but there is loads to do.

Second Rationalist Association release

2013-01-15T22:05:50+00:00

Today we’ve released another piece of the RA puzzle over at http://rationalist.org.uk/ (there’s another very big release to come). For me the release isn’t about visual design and at this stage I see a year ahead where we iterate and chip away at all of that and refine as we go along.

That said I am quite pleased with our take on the breadcrumb navigation which incorporates the logo; I’m sure there are a thousand examples out there that we’ve subconsciously absorbed, but at the time it felt like a reasonably original thought and it’s tested fairly well. I hope it works because we’ve put it front and center rather than having a massive main navigation bar as is usual on sites. I must acknowledge the fantastically brilliant gov.uk site which was a source of inspiration for this approach.

The image above also shows off one of three illustrations comissioned from Mary Anne Cooke which will eventually be used for things like the login and register pages. For now though we put one on the temporary homepage to gauge reaction to the style.

This release feels significant because it moves the blog out of Blogger and into the custom CMS being developed by Julian at Simplicity Web and introduces a new taxonomy which is a lot stricter than that found on the old site which was reliant on free form tagging and had become at bit unwieldy over the years. Though not present yet we have also introduced the notion of themes and series, more on those as time goes on.

Additionally we have replaced the notion of a seperate Magazine and Blog with one section, Articles sorted by subject, which came about after a round of usability testing. When we move the magazine articles over to this platform this will start to, we hope, show off the idea behind the new taxonomy and how it sorts lots of different types of content by subject rather than by type. When all content is moved over we’ll probably retitle the section Articles & Posts.

We make the distinction between articles and posts for two reasons. The primary one being blog posts aren’t edited in the same way as a magazine article, and are more prone to spelling mistakes whereas magazine articles are much more polished. It may be a mistake to mix the two, we’ll find out, but as the blog is very much about the subjects, rather than simply a blog about running the Rationalist Association itself, it feels right to mix them together. We are also going to introduce some sort of experimental pay wall at some point (though a porous one) and magazine articles will live behind it. The paywall isn’t the whole strategy though, there’s a lot of work to be done on telling the story of supporting the RA because it’s worth supporting.

I always find it amazing to sit back and look at such a simple site and think how much work has gone into just getting this far; a lot of strategy, discussion and just working stuff out and whilst you won’t yet here me say I am proud of the visual design work I’ve done thus far, I am proud of what our small team has achieved.

Oh and I made the call and said no styles for IE6 or 7. Let’s see how that plays out.

Next job today? I’m off to rework the typography.

Read the RA’s take on the launch.

A quick opinion on the A-list

2012-12-10T23:38:44+00:00

I’ve been quietly watching a little ruckus develop on Twitter about the so called A-listers, the same old faces, the leaders in our field, the speakers, the ones sent down from on high to inspire and inform. There appears to be some resentment and I mention it only because I see it crop up quite frequently.

I’ve spent time in the past wondering about this. Why is it some people get all the fame and glory (or should that be flame and gory) again and again whilst I seem to spend my days hard at it, digging through shit and trying to make this damn website work in whatever browser is misbehaving at any given moment. It seems mighty unfair doesn’t it?

To be honest I probably had my chance to become one of those people sometime in 2004 but it passed me by, I was hopelessly unaware that such things could be done and by the time I’d realised it could be done, it all seemed so advanced, complicated and scary that I really didn’t much fancy trying anyway. Standing up in front of a room full of people who probably know more about the subject than I do and trying to talk about my work is not something I fancy thank you very much!

If I put my mind to it, I reckon I could probably have a go though, if I wanted to. I could start small, work my way up to a bigger crowd, find something interesting to say and take it on tour and maybe one day I will.

Meanwhile, it seems frivolous to spend my time resenting people who do. In fact I am glad they do what they do. Yes, sometimes I read a piece or listen to a recording and think, ‘ah yes but that’s the ideal, day-to-day doesn’t always work out like that’ but more often I use these talks, articles and opinions to bolster up my case when I need to. I steal their ideas and inspiration and try to use them in my work. Or I nod in excited agreement that I’d already worked such and such a thing out and now that person that I respect is saying I was right!

These stars of the web, who quite frankly my Mum has never heard of, have a purpose and a role and they do what they do again and again because they are good at doing that particular thing and people enjoy watching and listening to them do it. I am sure like the rest of us they have varying degrees of skill when it gets down to the nuts and bolts of actually doing the job; some are no doubt utterly brilliant, others just OK, all are very likely competent. Some are probably very nice people, others maybe not so, some could be propping up all kinds of personal weaknesses behind an ego, others just happy to be doing what they are doing. Some may be chatty and welcoming others a little aloof and caught up in their own hype. This is just life as we know it Jim, the human condition. It doesn’t matter a bit.

There’s no need to hero-worship the people who do this (though secretly there are just 1 or 2 that I do) but nor is there any reason to resent them. Let the market decide, if people are genuinely tiring of the same old faces they’ll stop paying to see them meanwhile they are adding value to our industry you just need to understand how to use the value they provide for your own gain.

So my opinion, in short, is this: Don’t be resentful if someone is doing a thing you’d secretly like to be doing, start doing that thing you’d like to be doing instead. There’s no gain in focussing your energy being angry with those people who are doing that thing you want to be doing; better time spent doing that thing and doing it better and besides life’s a bitch and those people will remember you being angry with them when you arrive at your first packed conference to talk looking for some moral support.

Ideas for a breadcrumb navigation

2012-11-12T16:47:46+00:00

Since the very start of the Rationalist Association project we’ve been sketching ideas for a simple, responsive nav and nothing so far has hit the mark. It’s all adjusted too much on screen resize or taken up too much screen space for the job it was doing.

The other challenge is there are so many potential sections, some of which we’re yet to think of, that anything approaching a ‘traditional’ navigation bar wasn’t going to cut it for very long so with a firm nod to the gov.uk website we started exploring ways to make a breadcrumb work harder.

The end result, yet to be tested, is a breadcrumb that incorporates the logo as part of its make up and the section heading if you are on a section’s ‘homepage’

The hope, and it is just a hope at this point, is we make it very clear that the breadcrumb is a good starting point to finding your way around the site, especially as the data suggests the majority of people enter the site at the individual article level.

Anyhoo, I am quite pleased with it so far. The actual design needs some refining yet but that will happen in the browser.