A collection of posts and projects

The last few months have been a little bit hectic. Starting a new role (senior creative managerthankyouverymuch), kicking Early Doors Disco into 5th gear, reviving a slightly hasping Twespians and joining a band have all made life a little mental. I thought I'd do a wrapup of various things I've been doing across the web...

Design/Dev

  • I pulled together an interactive infographic for Anywhere Working with the help of Syd called 'Future World of Working'. The entire thing took far too long to pull together and design that I ended up getting a bit sick of the look of it by the end! More that I would've liked to do to it, including some more texture, detail and fun little easter eggs, but alas there were deadlines... Check the infographic out here.
  • For BE Broadband, we put together a history of the internet for their facbeook timeline, complete with sketches for important milestones. I had a lot of fun pulling these sketches together with Sam, who wrote most of the content. Check out their page here.
  • Pulled together an ASCII invite to this year's Critters Web Dev and Design Awards for Ubelly. Absolutely LOVED doing this on a Friday afternoon. Was inspired by and borrowed some of the code from Adam Onishi, who thankfully didn't get too cranky at me.
  • You can follow more of my design stuff on my dribbble account.
  • Played with the Twitter API to pull together a quick Boris Bikes/Twitter hack that lets us know the capacity of our local Boris Bike dock. Quick, dirty and effective. Check out @33Bikes here.

Posts

  • At the end of March I decided to stick my neck out into the theatre/social media world again with a post on 'Just because you have a Twitter account, doesn't mean you're doing social'. Nowhere near as much controversy as I expected, but some nice responses via the Twitters.
  • Based on the 33 Bikes hack I put together a post for work on the 33 Digital blog called 'Tinkering with the Internet'.
  • Not so much a post of mine, but a rather indepth interview went up on Defected Records about Early Doors Disco. I learnt the valuable lesson that you never just 'chat' to a journalist, as a lot of it could end up in the articel! Luckily, I didn't actually say anything that could get me in trouble...
  • Over on Ubelly I've done a ton of events posts, but the two that I'm happiest with are around inspiration I've had from listening/chatting to people. The first is around creativity bandwidth, as inspired by Bill Buxton. The second is around Data Auralisation, as inspired by Peter Gregson and then Tassos Stevens connected the dots for me...

Going to try and get back on the blogging bandwagon on this blog as well. Let's see how I get on with that...

A couple of posters

Got bored yesterday on my day off and pulled together a couple of posters based on some quotes I've heard at conferences both recently and in the past.

The first one (Share. Play. Create.) was inspired by @seb_ly (from CreativeJs.com) at DIBI Conference. The man is a creative genius, with the work he's done with coding and visuals is truly inspiring. If you ever get a chance to see one of his live coding sessions, do it. He is basically Noel Fielding of the development world.

The second (Life is too short to own an ugly pencil) is inspired by @brendandawes' Notes on Design from FOWD 2012. Again, Brendan is an inspiration when it comes to creative coding. His book Analogue in, Digital out is one of the best reads I've had this year, and details a whole bunch of his projects and experiments. I'd thoroughly recommend giving it a read.

The third (Fail early. Fail often) is inspired by... just about every speaker at a design conference in the past three years. It's a phrase that I've heard so many times and have no idea where the origin is, but is something that I live my day to day life by. That is, jump into everything you can and see what works.

Might actually get some of them printed for the office...

 

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The 'I get bored easily' projects: #whowantsapostcard

Dccomics

A few weeks ago I had a stray, stamped postcard sitting on my desk thanks to New Adventures in Web Design conference and the lovely folks at Mailchimp. I ruminated over what to do with the postcard for a while, wondering whether I should send it to a friend, my wife or a random person who's address I found. In the end I gave up and asked Twitter, because that's where my inability to make decisions usually takes me. I put out a tweet, got a reply and sent the postcard off post haste.

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However, what I wasn't expecting was the slight joy that sending a real life postcard, with proper words and a picture of a cat on it, would bring. As a result I've bought 100 awesome postcards and will soon venture out to buy a bucketload of stamps. I'm going to to tweet out about #whowantsapostcard at random times until my postcards have run dry. In return, either send me a postcard back or send a postcard on to someone else. 

Why? Because you can.

Alright... who wants the first postcard?

Early Doors Disco: The Beginning

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For those who haven't heard, and considering how often I mention it I'm guessing there aren't many of you, my recent venture sees me opening up my first monthly club night in London.

The story goes that at the end of last year I was out for some drinks with friends on a Tuesday night. After one too many pints, I decided that I desperately wanted to dance. However, being a Tuesday and with the pesky fact that I had to get a train home around midnight, there was nowhere that would let a drunk commuter shake his thang and still get home for the night.

After sharing my conundrum with a mate, we decided to open up our own special kind of clubnight, where, being midweek, doors would open by 7pm, music would be kicking it within half an hour and we'd pack up and leave by the last tube. We called up some dj friends (Liton and Wylie) and dusted off our DJing equipment. Thus, Early Doors Disco was born.

Our first night is in just over a week on the 7th of March at the very lovely Drink, Shop & Dance (the dirty little secret in the basement of Drink, Shop & Do in Kings Cross), and we'll be setting up residence on the first Wednesday of every month. 

Andrew, Liton, Wylie and myself will be playing tunes on the night, we has a website you can check out and you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Come down, have a wee dance and get your early doors on!

Weekly links - 26nd Feb 2012

As of late I have been upping my daily consumption of articles online, largely thanks to being pointed in the direction of an ifttt starred google reader to instapaper to kindle delivery service, which means I can read all my articles on my morning and evening commutes. As a result, I'm going to start doing the ever popular 'weekly links' blog post, if only to share some of the things that inspire/anger me...

Social/Digital

Jye Smith's post on being a better strategist is sound advice for anyone wanting to don the 'digital strategist' hat, hammering home how important being able to personally deliver on tactics, as well as strategy is for any strategist out there.

Neil Patel's guest post on problogger talks about a great 4 part-formula for delivering irresistible content on your blog.

Olivier Blanchard posted a few weeks back on 10 things you still need to know about social media/social business, which I urge anyone in social to go and have a look at.

Theatre

I finally got around to reading Jake Orr's article on the UK's theatre blogging community, where he praises Australia's theatre blogging community (which is much smaller, but seems to have a larger voice) and calls on UK theatre bloggers to stop reviewing and start commenting.

Chris Unitt once again delivers the goods with two thought provoking responses to last week's Twespians/SOLT event, the first being a nice rundown of the event, and the second talking about using data from social media to improve decision-making in marketing.

Finally, Honour Bayes wrote a well-thought out and argued article for the Guardian on whimsical theatre that makes her gag. However, I just couldn't help myself and had to blog a response.

Inspiration

News from MIT that the Terminator is about to happen, with a robot that can continuously map and learn the environment with little human interaction, all through the use of a Kinect camera and a few sensors. The robots are coming, people.

A rather fluffy post from a while ago that resurfaced in one of my feeds on where ideas come from. it's an area I've been looking into more and more recently, and the different ideas and theories around the best ways to generate ideas fascinate me.

Finally, an article that got me into a fight of sorts on Twitter this week on how the happiest people in the world spend their money. However, for anyone who isn't in a tight financial situation, there are some great tips on potential ways to turn money into happiness (so money can buy you happiness!)

A triumphant return to theatre blogging (kind of)

Today I finally started my theatre blog back up with a piece on whimsy in theatre and why I love it. Not the meatiest subject matter, but something I'm quite passionate about. Nothing gets me more excited than seeing an imaginative, creative piece of theatre like what Hugh Hughes and Hoipolloi keep putting out.

Anyway, read it here.

Reasons to love Sydney: Thunderstorms

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Did you know that in Finland there are 40 different words for snow. There's words to describe slushy snow, snow downpours, sleety snow, light fluffy snow... To be honest I kind of love it. It has a kind of romantic quality to it. In the UK, the same seems to stand for rain. I didn't understand how many types of water falling to the ground there could be until I embarked on the adventure of marrying a foreigner (apparently I'm the foreigner here... go figure). On the first mention of wet air, I was both amused and depressed. On moving here, I realised the necessity of so many descriptions of rain. My personal favourite is the aforementioned wet air, that seems to not be visible to the naked eye when glancing out the window but sneaks through every slightly loose weave in your clothes and permeates your very essence with WETNESS. Pleasant.

In Australia there seems to be two types of rain: rain and THUNDERSTORM. Rain is rain, but thunderstorms? They are the epitome of awesome. First, there's the dramatic entrance of a thunderstorm. What usually starts as a rather lovely, sunny day is marred by a big, rolling black mass of cloud, occasionally showing off like a 4 year old toddler with barely concealed flashes of lightning. It darkens the sky and bodes doom. DOOOOOM. 

Yes, thunderstorms are drama queens.

Next comes the electricity in the air. The kind that makes you think that every hair on your body is standing on end, when in fact, it's doing no such thing. But hey, it feels exciting. Then comes the smell... The smell of a thunderstorm is what I miss the most. You can keep your poxy roses. I pah at your fields of flowers. The smell of a freshly mown lawn? PAH I SAY! The smell of heavy rain on hot ground is one of the best smells in the world. Period. It fills your nostrils with awesomeness. Yes, awesomeness. It's that good.

Then the sky falls down on you in the form of sheets of heavy, heavy droplets of water.

In short, thunderstorms are awesome. I know I've used awesome a lot in this post, but there are no other words to describe it.

Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Awesome.

Image lovingly stolen from here

52 posts

Let's start with the cliched new year's resolution posts...

Last year I seemed to massively drop off social media and blogging. This is mostly due to the fact that I was kicking arse in my job (or just spending a lot of time there), making Twespians bigger with Laura, running a few more ghost crawls and going on a couple of holidays. Oh, and getting married. That took a little bit of time...

I've been quite happy with the stuff I've done in the past year, including two speaking gigs, running a bunch of pub quizes and pub crawls around the country, attending a bucketload of events and dipping my foot back into the design and build work. 2011 was the year of pretty darn good. 2012 is going to be the year of awesome.

To begin with, I've already got some speaking gigs set up, a new year of Twespians and now for the content business... This year I'm going to post 52 posts over the year. Hopefully I'll post more, but at the moment I'm focussing on at least one per week. This marks the first one for last week. I blame Australian time zones for the delay in posting. The next one will be posted in the next two days.

Ok 2012...

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