Oooh, that’s Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design) - video clips!

Talking about clever logos and hidden messages… (Youtube)

Silly live-action stage show of the Silverback holding page, featuring a “live gorilla”! Okay, so it was just a bit of fun rather than a learning exercise… (Viddler)

…and even a sketch of my talk by Austin Kleon!

My talk was about design delighters and Easter eggs, about hiding clever little gems in websites which people will find, enjoy, and share with their friends. The benefit of this is an intangible viral marketing effect which will help engage your audience and build hype around your product or service.

I have been overwhelmed by the positive response to my talk, on Twitter and elsewhere, with people describing it as their “favourite thing they’ve ever seen at SXSW [#]“, and “the presentation that stayed with me the most [#]“. Paul Boag, of the Boagworld web design podcast, said “A really, REALLY good presentation by @nicepaul. Very entertaining and inspiring [#], the best I have seen in a long time. It was obviously carefully prepared, informative and very entertaining [#]“. Very flattering indeed!

Unlike some of the others at Clearleft I haven’t done a lot of presenting, so I was a little nervous to find that I was in Ballroom A - the largest room at the conference, with over 1,000 people in the audience. Still, I had fun, and hope it will lead to more speaking opportunities at conferences in the future (I’m already in talks with a couple, so watch this space!)

If you saw me present and haven’t yet rated my panel at rate.sxsw.com, please do, so I’m invited back next year! (you’ll need to scroll down to the 3.30pm timeslot to vote)

The talk was deliberately very visual, featuring a magic trick, several website examples, and Elliot Jay Stocks in a gorilla suit (naturally). Unfortunately no video recording was made, but I have sychronised the audio recording with my slides below. During my presentation I demonstrated each website’s easter egg on the video screen, but when viewing this you will need to pause the slideshow and visit each site in a new browser tab to get what I’m talking about! You can also find many of the example sites I referenced in my bookmarks at Del.icio.us (plus a few that didn’t make it into the final talk).

If you run a conference and would like me to speak, please get in touch.

Enjoy…

Oooh, that’s Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design) - with audio!

1. It will be what you’re known as in the social world of Twitter, not just what you use to log in. Choose something fun! And best to avoid numbers, special characters, or anything unpronouncable.
2. People will be typing your username lots send messages to you, like “@nicepaul“, so it should be short for their convenience.
3. Messages sent on Twitter have a maximum of 140 characters, so it’s annoying to use up 1/10th of a message just with someone’s username.
4. If you’re Twittering as your business, use the business name you’re known as (Little Tikes use Twitter under the name of @CozyCoupe - who’d have known!)
5. If you’re Twittering as yourself, don’t use your business name. People will only follow businesses they have an interest in for fear of just getting a load of spammy messages.

Sorry to use my friend Hannah as an example here! She’s a fantastic wedding photographer based in London and her business is called Funky Photographers. Her personal Twitter account is @funkyphotograph, which is inconveniently long to type, takes up over 10% of any message to her, isn’t her own name and isn’t her business name either because the maximum length for a username is 15 characters (but it sounds like a business so that might deter some people from following her).
 

How to Change Your Twitter Username

 
If you end up registering with a username you later want to change, all is not lost. Unlike many services, Twitter does allow you to change your username at any point, and you retain all your followers. Remember to tell them about your new username or they might be confused where you’ve gone and who this new person is that they’ve never heard of!

It’s worth mentioning that your username is also your web address on Twitter, so if you change your username any links from other websites to your old messages will stop working. All my messages are stored at twitter.com/nicepaul and because my timeline is set to public rather than private, many of them have been indexed by Google. Were I to change my username, all of these links would break. Not such a problem if you’re a relatively new Twitter without two years of messaging history up there.

You can change your Twitter username on the ’settings’ page - just follow the link in the top right corner of your Twitter page.

Please leave a comment if you found this at all helpful.

This is my third year at the festival with Clearleft, and is the first year that I’ll be presenting a talk about putting delightful and entertaining niceties into the websites you design. I did a cut down version of this talk twice last year, at SkillSwap and <Head>, the online conference. I’m really looking forward to SXSW this year, whilst at the same time having butterflies of anticipation and nervousness about speaking at such a large-scale event. Wish me luck!

For the third year in a row, Clearleft is also putting money behind the bar and organising the Great British Booze Up. If you’re in Texas for the SXSWi, feel free to pop by, say hi, and have a drink on us!

In other conference-related news, we’re also hosting a User Experience conference of our own here in the UK. UX London boasts a stunning line-up of high profile speakers who’re at the top of their game. It’s a three-day affair featuring a day of awesome presentations from the likes of Don Norman, Peter Merholz and Dan Saffer, followed by two days of intimate workshops. Places are limited to just 160 attendees, so book early to avoid disappointment.

Finally, we’re also running our regular grassroots dConstruct conference here in Brighton in September. It’s sold out every year for four years, and once again we’re really looking forward to it! We’re in early planning stages at the moment, suggesting ideas for themes and potential speakers - and some of the suggestions being put forward will make it a fantastic day!

If you’re planning on coming along to any of these then let me know, maybe we could meet up for a drink or two.

At Clearleft, we regularly close the office and all head over for the interactive week — in fact, Andy, Jeremy and Rich are regular speakers there. This year, James also rocked the house with a very popular presentation about the way we prototype websites before building the final version.

I’ve decided to take the plunge and propose a presentation for next year, called Oooh, That’s Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design). I say “propose” because they take votes on which panels should be included in the schedule.

So, I’m taking this opportunity to request your vote.

Please click here and rate my panel idea 5 stars. Thanks for your support, and sorry for the shameless self-promotion!

I should add that I’m not being in any way anti-American, it’s just that this particular grammatical error has developed only in American-English, and is not present in British-English. I’m not just talking about bad-English, this phrase in particular means exactly the opposite of its intended meaning.

Let’s assume that I don’t care about something at all. That would mean I care a zero amount about it. I could NOT care any less than zero about it. I couldn’t care less.

On the other hand, if I do care about something, then you could say that I care more than a zero amount about it. If I’m caring more than zero about it, I could care less.

To sum up, if you say “I could care less” then that means that you do care. If you mean to say that you don’t care, you need to say “I couldn’t care less”.

That concludes today’s English lesson!

Are there any nonsensical common phrases that you find annoying? Please click here and leave a comment.

I thought I was being helpful. He replied by private message:

Your rudeness
Before you leave patronising comments on other accounts you might care to read the comments trail explaining why a particular title has been chosen.

I’m surprised that he’d consider my comment to be patronising, and slightly offended that he’d title his reply “Your rudeness” and block me on Flickr! Talk about over-reaction! I get comments like “DUNB CUNT GO SUK UR MOMS MILK NOOB” daily on YouTube (that particular gem was left for me yesterday) and I don’t respond at all.

I admit I didn’t read the 350-word essay he’d left in the photo comments, which now that I look explains in depth why the photo is titled as such. But I wouldn’t say it’s uncommon for people not to read huge swathes of text on a photo sharing website.

Oh well, at least he brought the smile of incredulity to my face. And the chance to trump his over-reaction by blogging about it. I dunno, some people!

Of course, I wouldn’t want to encourage you to leave a similar comment as if you’ve just stumbled upon it, explaining that he’s got the title wrong. That would be bad, and not funny at all of course. *snigger* (if you get there and there are no recent comments, that’s because he’s deleting each individually - I know at least three people have commented in the last hour!)

These photos of White City and Broadcasting House are by Stevec77 and Speedwaystar respectively. richardr’s photo isn’t licenced for me to republish here, unfortunately.

The advert shows a morning family routine - dad is getting ready for work whilst mum prepares sandwiches for the children. Because the sandwiches contain Heinz Deli Mayo, “mum” is visually represented by a stereotypical male New Work deli owner for comedic effect.

This advert does not feature a gay couple (as has been misreported in some cases) - it is a metaphor. The joke is that Heinz Deli Mayo makes sandwiches taste as if Mum’s kitchen has been transformed into a genuine New York deli.

Seemingly a fraction of the population didn’t understand that, and Heinz apparently agree with them that a parody situation where a man gives another man a goodbye peck before heading to work is offensive. That being the case, it rather strongly implies that they would consider any kind of genuine homosexuality to be even “worse”!

If offending 200 people causes them concern, I think they’ve just hit a PR disaster by offending the entire gay community. Not to mention straight people like myself who are offended that Heinz took the opinion of 200 bigoted complainers to be representative of the views of the entire nation. Wake up Heinz - this is 2008, not 1908!

Heinz has invited us to write a message to them, and I invite you to leave a comment here with your thoughts.

Click below to view the advert.

[youtube]0cXNzcxDrN4[/youtube]

For the last few weeks I’ve been designing the new website, which was then lovingly built by Natalie. Being intimately familiar with the brand, I really enjoy designing the dConstruct site each year, but as an in-house project we never have as much time to devote to it as we’d like. The site is normally an evolution of previous years’ designs rather than anything completely new, but this year I took the move to highlight the excellent list of speakers in huge type right there on the homepage. It’s they who ’sell’ the conference, so they really should take pride of place, and the treatment used is quite striking and bold.

For any typophiles reading this, the font for the main speakers list is Alte Haas Grotesk bold, a kind of distressed, slightly weathered-looking Helvetica Neue bold.

One thing I’m particularly fond of with this year’s site, is that we’re encouraging people to mash-up their own photos with the dConstruct buttons. I’ve made this really easy to do, and you don’t even need to open Photoshop! Just insert the web address of one of your own photos into one of the code snippets provided towards the bottom of the buttons page, replacing http://url.to/photo.jpg. Your photo will then slot itself neatly behind the conference info. You can see this in action at the top right of this page, where I’ve used a photo of Toby at the play park.

The theme of the conference this year is ‘Designing the Social Web’, so rather than go the predictable route of giving the site a ’social networking’ feel (think Facebook, Flickr, Edenbee, Last.fm), my idea was to extend the website beyond its boundaries into the social space elsewhere on the web. Our buttons are more socially inclusive, in that people could personalise them with photos of their friends or family, which they perhaps already share on social networking or photo sharing sites. The buttons can then be completely customised fit the design of any site. I can’t wait to see a wide variety of visuals used on dConstruct buttons across the web!

If you do use our code to create your own button design, please add a screenshot of it to the My dConstruct Button group on Flickr!

The conference itself looks like a real treat as usual, and I’m looking forward to it hugely. 600 tickets sold out in 6 hours last year, so if you’re planning on coming make sure you hit the site for your ticket as soon as they go on sale!

War critics can no longer credibly argue that we are losing in Iraq, so now they argue the war costs too much.” President Bush - March 19, 2008.

As you can see from the second part of the sentence, Bush is trying to attack the methods of war critics. I include that just for context, but it is of no importance to the following point.

Taking just the first part of the sentence, Bush is clearly saying that up until now there has been credibility to the argument that the US Army is losing in Iraq. Which to me reads as an admission that each time he’s assured the world of their success for the last four years, he knew it was a lie.

The Huffington Post has the man’s incompetence in full.

Please click here to comment on this article.