Well done to us.

What interests me is the fact that procrastination is almost universal in people who are normally described as “creative types”.Why? Douglas Adams used to famously avoid having to write by having baths. Several a day, in fact. Apparently his publisher once commented that he never once managed to hit a deadline…but he always smelt really nice.

As designers, we are surrounded by some very dangerous distractions. Computers. The most tempting, time-sucking creations ever made are, by a cruel twist of fate, the very things we are also supposed to use to get our work done with.

I took games off my Mac years ago. It just had to be done. However, since then the internet has sneaked up on us. Facebook, Twitter, the hundred blogs you feel you need to keep up with. Email, iChat. All of these toys with their shiny, glossy icons inviting you to come and play, and all with built-in justifications: Facebook could be helping you meet your next client. Blogging is a great marketing tool. Email is easier than phoning someone. That retro video PhotoShop plugin you just spent ten minutes downloading will, if mastered be great for some job in the future. Probably.

But it’s not all computers. There are endless possibilities for analogue procrastination as well. Never is our office tidier or more organised than when a big project has just begun. Well – you need to clean up, clear a space, get organised for the new work. And go and get some crisps and chocolate to see you through. Maybe the skirting boards need levelling off a bit. A new shelf to put all the new work on. Anything, in fact, to avoid doing the actual work itself (which, of course will be great when it is done, so no need to worry, really).

Wikpedia has some really scary things to say on the subject. Phrases like “psychological disorder”, “mental health” and “low self-esteem” kind of made me decide to go and do something else and maybe read that page later.

My own theory is that creativity is somehow in need of a jump start which can only be achieved with a buildup of adrenalin. Designers need the utter terror of a looming deadline in order to kick into action whatever part of the brain that supplies us with the instinctive solution to a problem without all that tedious thinking and planning that normal people have to go through. Also the act of thinking of something completely unconnected to what you are supposed to be somehow allows a hidden part of your mind to work away undisturbed and to quietly deliver the answer – usually at the strangest of times.

You could say rather than a negative aspect, procrastination is practised by people who have a supreme confidence in their own abilities. People who know they’ll always think of something at the last moment and know enough about how their own heads work to just let it get on with it automatically.

Either that or creatives are just people who are good at working out the bare minimum of work needed to complete a task so they can fill the rest of the day on Facebook.

Who knows? Not me. Anyway, there’s a deadline looming here so, naturally, I’m just going to fill the screenwash up in my car and maybe go and buy some crisps.

Sheffield: Shortlisted for UK City of Culture 2013

Sheffield, Derry, Birmingham and Norwich have made the shortlist to become the very first UK City of Culture in 2013. Sheffield is therefore on its way to achieving its ambition to be the most creative city in the UK by 2020.

Sheffield’s bid sets out to curate an amazing programme of events and activity in 2013 which will engage, not just those already involved with arts and culture but, everyone in the city by inspiring, nurturing and celebrating their creativity. The bid also highlights Sheffield’s international credentials as a city with strong cultural assets; a diverse community; a great place to live, visit and work; the capacity to deliver big; and an innovative approach.

UK City of Culture 2013 aims to build on the success of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture 2008, which had significant social and economic benefits for the city – including a total income of £130 million over six years.

The four shortlisted cities will be required to submit a final bid to DCMS on 21st May 2010 and the winner will be announced in early July.

Join in at www.sheffieldcityofculture.com

This has prompted us to make a decision which we have been agonising over for quite a while: by default we are not going to support it any longer.

Why? Well, in short it doesn’t really work. We have to do things to our websites that we’d rather not do to make them work in IE6 – things that often break the site in other browsers.

That’s an oversimplification, of course. IE6 was OK in its time. But its time has passed. Things we take for granted just didn’t exist in August 2001 when it was released. No PNG transparency, lack of proper CSS support, non-standard rendering of pages and bugs galore were not so much of a problem when there were no standards to stick to. However, times have changed and browser manufacturers – despite still arguing about details – are making an effort to standardise the way websites display and work in order to deliver a better user experience.

The Web 2.0 revolution that has happened since the release of IE6 depends on technologies that just don’t exist in that browser. Neither YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or Google want anything to do with it any more because they don’t want to be held back. Other browsers allow them to move forward and innovate.

The biggest problem we have is that we are constantly told that “large corporations” still use IE6 because their IT departments insist upon it. We’ve never actually seen proof of this but we do come across clients who have shown their new site to somebody who is still using IE6 only to see it break or just look plain ugly. This, of course, makes us look incompetent. The hacks we need to do to avoid this often cause a huge amount of lost time as it involves actually finding out what the problem is first before embarking on a long quest around the internet to find a solution which doesn’t have the opposite effect on the other browsers. Then we have to actually implement that solution. Naturally the incompatibility is usually spotted at 4:45pm on Friday.

If we allow for this when quoting for work our prices will look expensive. If we don’t and take the chance everything will be OK, we’ll probably lose out. It’s always a dilemma.

We’ve read endless tirades against IE6 and why it should be killed off. Calls on discussion groups for militant action and rants and raves (which just usually end in general Microsoft-bashing), usually made in the early hours of the morning by web developers who are at the end of their tether trying to make their site work in a crappy, obsolete browser and not getting paid anything for it, whilst trying to explain to clients in simple terms what’s actually going wrong. We understand this – we’ve been there ourselves.

But mouthing off on the internet isn’t going to help, so we’ve decided to do something a bit less confrontational and, hopefully, helpful.

We’ve decided to make IE6 support an option with the websites we build. From now on our quotations for web work will have an “IE6 compliance” line which will detail the extra costs involved in making the site backwards-compatible for this browser. It’s not a way of charging extra…believe me, we’d really rather not have to bother supporting IE6 at all – life is just too short. But we can and we will if we have to. This way the client has the option. Long term, we hope if more web development companies calm down a bit and do the same IE6 will just become a ghost in the browser’s graveyard along with AOL, Netscape, Mosaic and CyberDog.

We’d like to hear people’s thoughts on this approach.

2009 was a bit of a yin and yang year for us. We began by bucking the recession due to the fact we were building online shops and other non-print projects. However the print design side also saw an increase, although the jobs were smaller and mostly relating to clients’ websites. For example, short run flyers promoting web offers or corporate IDs for new businesses who were wanting a web presence over anything else. Businesses seem to be retreating to the web due to the flexibility and ease of updating what they are offering.

The later part of the year saw a massive increase in late and non-payment from clients – even ones we have worked for for years and considered friends. It seems that when times are hard loyalty becomes a casualty. My own role became more of a credit controller than a designer which had a knock-on effect on the time available to spend with our “good” clients and developing new business. We felt that by giving massively increased credit (although not out of choice) we were suddenly doing the job of the banks, who were in retreat from lending.

However, on the upside, in terms of new business, 2009 must go down as a record year for increasing our client base with a surprising amount of startups coming to us and also established companies looking for a change, or for better value from their creative partners.

I’d be interested to hear some feedback from others in the creative industries to see if we had similar experiences.

As for our direction in 2010, 2009 has laid the foundations for a slight shift in our approach to website building. Every site we built had some sort of content management element. It’s something you can’t escape from now. Unfortunately this makes it difficult to add sites to your portfolio as you’re never quite sure what the client has done to the site after you’ve “handed over the keys”. The majority of sites were based on WordPress (including this one) which has now matured from a blog system into something that can transparently run a normal-looking site…but with the added advantage of a massive amount of control for the owner.

We also built several online shops based on the Zen Cart and X-Cart systems as well as creating a couple of totally bespoke systems ourselves in-house for clients with specific needs. A significant development here has been the wider acceptance of PayPal as a payment gateway. As it can also process standard credit and debit cards it allows the site owner to avoid having to jump through the hoops of the banks and also to avoid the nightmare (and often prohibitive cost) of PCI compliance. The surge of online shopping is something we hope to continue taking advantage of, and I think I’m going to have to just bite the bullet and start using the words “cart” and “store” instead of “shopping basket” and “shop” to save time when customising (or should that be “customizing”) these American systems.

Final thoughts:

We got to love:

• Lazy loaders
• Fat footers
• SIFR
• JQuery
• WordPress
• FML
• Filthy Dukes

We got to hate:

• Rouge clients
• The continued existence of IE 6
• Courses on how to use Social Media to increase sales

Glad to see the back of:

• That crappy swirly / spirally / flowery illustration style that everyone likened to Art Nouveau but clearly wasn’t
• The paint-splat / run effect

Design and in particular, web design are fields which require practitioners to keep constantly up to date on what’s going on within their chosen field. In the case of design, its important to keep up with the latest trends, themes and motifs, while trying to figure out where to go next. In the case of web design you also have to keep up with technology, APIs, frameworks and a whole host of other technobabble that occasionally fills me with dread.

Recently I’ve recently been learning the intricacies of x-cart. X Cart is a solution for building safe and robust e-commerce sites and supports all the sort of features that you’d expect to see in an online shop, by using it we can offer our clients a powerful shopping solution that should cover almost all their needs for a nominal charge. We’ll be adding a couple of shopfronts we’ve been building to our portfolio soon.

I’ve also been burying my head in the innards of WordPress to allow us to build ever more complex blogs and websites, I’ve also been working my first custom widget for the Sensora 2010 website.

I’ve also been busying myself with learning Action Script 3. To be fair, I’ve been learning bits of it since it was released, but I seriously knuckled down to it in 2009 and can now use it – together with away3d to deliver fully interactive 3d experiences straight to the user’s browser. Working with Flash and AS3 is a bit of a weird one for me personally, I used to hate it, then I had what I guess you could call an epiphany and everything seemed to fit together in my head. Now its an area I actually enjoy working with – go figure.

Ok… so I kinda revel in the technobabble, but when you can use it to actually come up with something it’s sort of seductive.

The visual style of the site is inspired by the work of Martin Bedford – a highly influential graphic designer and co-founder of the Leadmill in Sheffield. The Park Hill flats which dominate the Sheffield skyline are a powerful image and evoke unique memories for the people of Sheffield including many of the musicians participating in the film, so we decided they should be an ever-present part of the site. Bold contrasting colours and high-contrast imagery highlight the different areas of the site. You won’t find many clean lines and straight edges on this site.

Quotes from the film are pulled out and displayed randomly throughout your journey through the site. When clicked, you can watch the part of the film they were taken from.

As well as the video clips and screenings news and reviews, we have built a shop, a media area (including exclusive video, photos and a listening room where rare Sheffield tracks can be played) and a “Making Of” section. The site pulls together content hosted on Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter and makes full use of Facebook to complete the social media coverage – vital for a site like this.

Technically, the site it totally content managed by the film’s producers at every level.

www.thebeatisthelaw.com

Search Engine Optimisation is something that people get hung up on too much and it’s mostly because there is so much misinformation, half-truths and outdated ideas floating around about the subject. The current state of affairs has been brought about as the result of spammers trying to ruin everything for the rest of us, and search providers – mainly Google – desperately trying to keep it all in check.

The problem with many SEO experts is that they engage in practices that have negligible effect on actual search rankings, and in some cases can actually get you punished by the big G.

From my run-ins with various self-proclaimed SEO experts (and they are all self-proclaimed) here is a (non-exhaustive) list of the methods they employ and why I think they’re bunk:

1. Meta keywords – this is worthy of a post in it’s own right.
   I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve talked to who are convinced that meta keywords mean a damn thing. Thankfully Google has finally put the idea to rest. Stuffing the meta with keywords will most likely drop your site down the rankings as Google will think you’re trying to trick it.
2. Stuff your content full of keywords you put in the meta tag
   While it does make sense to have some keywords in your text, many SEO companies will advise you to stuff it full, until there’s barely any words left in between to hold the sentence together. Remember, it’s your customers who buy your products, not the search engine, text that is jammed with jargon and keywords isn’t pleasant to read and will most likely make people go elsewhere.
3. Change your content regularly
   This is usually the kicker of the whole shebang. Now, it’s true that Google likes sites that are generating new content, because you’re contributing to keeping the web fresh, however unscrupulous SEO experts go so far as to change a few sentences a month on pages that already exist. Now this isn’t too bad from a technical point of view (it’s not breaking the way the web should work), but its not uncommon to hear of people paying a £200+ retainer on a monthly basis.
4. Traffic shaping
   The above methods range from pointless to reasonably harmless, this is where we start getting into the dark underbelly of SEO practices. Traffic shaping is done by adding ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ to links that they don’t want a search engine’s spider program to go down. This is an attempt to increase certain page’s rank within their own site and while the “nofollow” attribute does have some good uses, it’s generally frowned upon as you’re artificially increasing the apparent usefulness of the page in question.
5. Link Bombing
   Now we’re well and truly in the dark recesses of the SEO world. This is the practice of spreading links all over the web with specific keywords, the idea being that search engines will associate these keywords with that link eventually. These methods usually involve employing 3rd world labour and paying them pennies per link they create.
6. Spam bots
   Similar to link bombing, although usually they operate by posting comments on blogs and in online forums. These are the cases where the nofollow attribute is useful, as it effectively renders the link pointless.

So, that’s some of the nefarious practices employed by SEO agents, what about good SEO?

Powazek writes:

“The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious…”

Thing is, its not really. Good SEO practices are all wrapped up conversations about semantics, page order and code execution.

Here’s another non-exhaustive list of what I consider to be good practice.

1. Header tag order
   Headers should always flow down the page in order of importance, the website’s title should always use the <H1> tag, titles for posts (for example) should use <h2> and so on. If you need more than the 6 levels provided by HTML, you’re doing something wrong.
2. Content at the top
   It’s important to get the content of the document as close to the top of the HTML code as possible for two reasons.
   1) It makes life easier for the blind: if you have to listen to a screen reader walk you through a bunch of unrelated garbage before you get to the content, it’s just unfair.
   2) It ensures that when a search engine takes a cache of your page it actually captures the important bit first.
3. Menus at the bottom (of the code)
   This is related to point 2, the navigation bar should always get put to the bottom of the code. It saves blind people having to listen to the options over and over like an infernal telephone menu system stuck on repeat and also guarantees that Google doesn’t return your menu on its search results. So long as your web designer knows what they’re doing (and I do) the menu will still appear at the top (or where ever you want) of the actual page.
4. Use semantically correct tags
   This is a point that’s going to become increasingly important in a few years as the web moves towards a true relationship-based network of pages. This means using list elements for what they’re intended, rather than trying to make one using carriage returns.
5. Write good content
   Which is hopefully what I’ve been doing here. What’s the point of having a beautiful, semantic, optimised website, when there’s nothing worth looking at when you get there?

So there you have it, I don’t completely disagree with Powazek’s position, I just think that perhaps instead of bleating on about how ‘obvious’ it all is, he could have at least touched on why he though it was all so obvious.

Yooouuuutuuube is a simple idea, brilliantly executed, it basically copies a youtube video and tiles it endlessly over the background of the page. This would be pretty cool in its own right, but add in the ability to zoom out and pan the camera round and soon you realise you’ve watched the video twice over and you’re still not bored.

If you go to the site’s root you can enter the ID of any youtube video you find online, the video that I’ve set the link above up with is a music video made by the charmingly named “Fagottron“, a kind of meta art work in its own right, re-editing and reusing footage to create his own work.

So, how is this meta? When we talk about meta-*, we’re talking about something being about itself, metalanguage is language that is used to describe language, metaemotions are how a person feels about their own emotions in a certain situation. Well, yooouuutuuube is nothing on its own, it’s in fact a piece of art, that needs more art to complete it, it’s essentially art about art.

The idea of “Meta-something” has flourished on the web, where it has both practical uses, such as adding metadata to a webpage to help give it some context, to the more dubiously practical art of ‘metahumour’ – where an Internet in-joke (known by Richard Dawkin’s term “Meme”) is used as a basis for another joke, usually involving 1 or more other memes. Then there’s ‘recursive metahumour’, where the joke makes a joke about making a joke about itself within the confines of the original joke…
It all gets very complicated. I think it might be best to just watch the pretty colours.

“…Drop your overpaid, colourblind designer….”

Watch on YouTube…

But wait…there’s more…