From the desk of Mr. Monk

Just got home from the launch night of Fazely Studio’s. We were there on behalf of Plus and it sucked. Considering we had put our own money into our piece we received no thank you or even an acknoledgment of out time for FS. This plus the fact that no-one was really interested in anything but alcohol made it completely useless. I feel used and although I have been cheated. That money could have gone on our studio.

In terms of plus’ postioning it was a total waste of money.

It wasn’t a waste of time however. We finally got to meet SuperCool, who by the way are super cool. They’re dead friendly and really welcoming. I hope smile is that nice when we are established.

Also caught up with James Griffith. He looks different to how I imagined. Got some great working coming to font lorry from him. Beautiful typeface!

And there have been other good results. I won’t go into those now. They’re top secret.

So as part of the Last/First project (uni project about Smile’s last uni project that’s also our first project as a commercial entity) I will be redesigning the Smile website so it looks its best.

My problem? I think we need three columns. Nav>Content>Copy. Easy right? Wrong. It’s a pain in the bum! This is because of the limited width I can use. I think that most design studios websites fail because the content and copy overpower each other. Clearly the Swiss were the best at information architecture. This style has bee adapted to the blog platform with great success at http://www.subtraction.com/

It desnt quite adapt to a studio site. The closest I’ve seen to what I want is http://www.seadesign.co.uk/

What I have noticed, is that these studio sites that use this style are flash heavy. For me, this is an instant fail. Why? a) I can’t do flash. b) It isn’t great for SEO c) iPhone. Flash isn’t supported on the iPhone, the business markets fastest expanding browser share which (lets face it) will be the dominant phone in the next 3 years.

http://www.whynotassociates.com/ is the closest in terms of not using flash, but still isnt great. It feels 50% compete. 

http://www.spin.co.uk/ is another flash based studio site and the one phrase that keeps popping up is ‘Our website has just been updated with fresh content’. Wow, way to make it sound like a chore! Posting a new project online should be dead simple and what’s more the output should be obvious. These sites seem like a designer microcosm. It’s a different universe compared to the rest of the web. These site should be able to communicate. If I don’t understand their complex systems for navigation or how to reach the project copy, then the site has failed to serve its purpose.

So I need to create a site that’s not using flash and serves all of the necessary information in one glance. No easy feat.

Oh yeah, did mention I also want to use a serif font alongside a sans (properly!) and keep it from being clinical/sterile… and also add in some daily dynamism?

I went (with Smle) to Leicester to meet some accountants on the recommendation of Sarah Coleman. The two hour drive was well worth it. We got some great advice and we’re now set on the right track for the close future.

I’ve been screwing around with Baskerville and Helvetica and trying to make them play nice with each other. It’s really quite a challenge. The application is tricky because of Baskerville. This is mainly because I’m forcing it to comply with the Swiss layouts I’ve produced. I don’t think B likes it.

Not my problem :-P

I’ve actually got it working in some instances. Theres a balance of how much B you can use before you realise you’ve pushed it too far! Anyway, look out for this as I feel it’s gonna be a hot new phase for Smile.

First of all, these are my personal opinions and I am not trying to force them upon you nor do I claim any of them to be facts.

I don’t think that Blogger is necessarily a bad platform, there are just a few irritations and gripes that I have with it. The first major pain is the overall look of every blog tends to look the same. Blogger has a big user-base which is great, but when a form of design monotony starts to creep into a community, changes should be made. Typographically, Blogger has a bias towards Trebuchet-MS. There’s something about that face I just don’t like. I can’t put my finger on it, but it irritates the life out of me. 

Then there’s Georgia. Whilst I appreciate why it’s there, it seems to be used very inappropriately. Used as a display face at relatively small sizes? Really? Surely this design-monopoly goes against the vein of blogging? Isn’t blogging about individuality and self-publication? 

Then there’s that top ‘blogger navigation’ bar. That just plain sucks. This leads me onto my next gripe. Blogger tries way to hard to be social. Listen up Google; I thought you were all about the standards? You can pack in all that proprietary following with a Google account business. Unfortunately this following thing seems commonplace. Even Tumblr does this nonsense. I like to know who reads my stuff, but seriously it can’t be that hard to add how many people subscribe via RSS too? Google could use their Analytics knowledge for Blogger.

Bloggers woes are probably created by the poor templates. I say ‘poor’ in haste really as they’re actually very compliant. However standards don’t equal great design without adding in the future-looking stuff. Be a bit bad-ass and write in some font classes that might only work on Macs or Windows. Dare we stipulate Helvetica first over the more compliant Arial?! What’s the worst that can happen? Your site won’t freak and die on your user. I agree that there’s a limit, I mean let’s not go genuinely mental and bring a font like Bello into the mix, chances are it’ll never get seen, but there are cases to be made.

My biggest personal gripe is not directly Blogger related, but with Blogger dominating the blogosphere it’s the biggest perpetrator of this crime. A blog is a form of website that needs to be treated in the way that it was meant to be used. Blogger handles text O.K. but deals with other media pretty badly. After one image it starts to fall apart. Tumblogs were designed with multimedia in mind. Doesn’t the choice make sense? Some things just weren’t intended for a blog. Long live the mini-site!

I’ve been really happy with Tumblr. It keeps me concise and focused on getting my message out without confusing it in translation. If I can’t make my point in one image, I have failed. if I need to write a monster post, I can. If I want to add rhythm, I can insert much shorter snippets and inject a bit of interest with audio, quotes etc. It doesn’t feel like your preparing a contained piece of communication, but the output is the same.

Blogger made me blog. It was a chore.