The National have just released their third album High Violet. It’s one I’ve been waiting for for a while. If ever there was a band worth listening to, these are the guys. I LOVE them. Matt Berninger’s voice is golden. Standout tracks after first listen are Bloodbuzz Ohio and Conversation 16. Can’t wait to listen more and more. Go buy it!

Phresh blog

The thing I love about the web is that I come across great and inspirational art, music, web design, people, and more all the time. Twitter has become the tool of choice to for the quick share. My poor blog is taking a hit as a result as I find myself rarely updating it. For the the next 30 days, if I see anything I like I’m gonna use my blog to share it! Only the really good stuff will make it on though.

Lets start with this great new blog this I discovered this evening. http://phresh.gr/. Described as:

a collaboration blog, made by 5ive greek creatives. An experimental daily soul soup, mixed with links, photos, videos and texts that we liked.

It’s full of great everything from the inspirational, quirky and sublime in art and design. What more could you ask for. Enjoy

I love the the way this one uses illustration with motion graphics. It’s a great example of using the small space to it’ll full advantage.

http://bit.ly/4CWlSa

This second one is just really clever and had me messing with it for ages. Who doesn’t love a Rubix Cube!

http://bit.ly/5XwtTl

Recently had the pleasure of designing a very simple little brochure site for some friends who have set up a  new company selling 100% Alpaca blankets and scarves.  They ask me to design them a very clean site which focused, very much, on the products.  I took them at their word and used bold photographic imagery and nice big fonts for the headings, while using lots of white space. I think it works very well and captures the brand very well. You can check out the site at www.simplethings.ie

It was a nice project to work on especially due to the lovely photography by the guys at Picture House Photography.

Eammon Lenoard of EchoLibre gave a great talk on Web Development. It was like an A-Z of  useful tips for designing and developing for the web.  He spoke about Frameworks, Version Control (those of us still using ftp upload hid behind our chairs), collaborative tools, testing and Cloud computing.  Being more of a designer and Frontend developer,  I found his talk really useful.

Next up was Sabrina Dent.  I saw Sabrina speak at a FOWD event in London during the summer and, much like then, she chose a topic which would ruffle a few feathers.  This time it was the current state of Irish web design which she gave a humorous roasting.  It bought home to us just how bad some Irish web design can be at the moment.  Government and educational sites are the worst culprits and Sabrina spoke about how the need for some kind of shakeup in Irish web design is needed, and not just amongst the web design community but by the leaders of our country who have the ability to start integrating good web design principals into all government websites from local government,  emergency services and education. Its as if clients are smothering the standards of design with “design by committee” and lack of knowledge.  They need to start engaging with the web community in an effort to learn and prioritize the clean up of web design.  She made an interesting point that designers and developers can create fantastic personal websites but when you look deeper into their portfolios at their client projects, the standard dips.  It reminded me of this article http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html which is well worth a read.

Up next were a couple of the guys from Playhouse Dublin team. The guys bought us through examples of similar projects around the world such as http://www.blinkenlights.net/ and Quad Cubatron. It was interesting to hear how the project was very much a collaborative effort and how there was a vast array of both digital mediums and programming languages working together to make it all work.  In my opinion it was one of the nicest digital projects produced in Ireland and they definitely captured the interest of the public.  It would have been nice to see a few of the best and favourite examples from the entries but i think time ran out!

Finally, Tim Duggan of Mecury Girl spoke about how they are using Augmented Reality to develop some great apps here in Ireland.  He spoke about how AR is opening up a whole world of innovation and how the idea of  Tom Cruise in Minority Report isn’t so far away! He also spoke about how AR can not only be used for advertising but also as a really cool educational tool in various areas such as medicine and training and the building of cars (see how BMW used it here.). All really exciting stuff. It was great to see that an Irish company like MecuryGirl are working in such innovative ways.

All in all, the speakers were great and I liked the way there was a group panel question section at the end which provided some interesting insight and debate.

If I were to make any changes to the next Refresh I think I’d like to see each speaker talk for a little bit longer. The 15 minute time slots felt a bit rushed.  Maybe even push them to 20-25 minutes each.  I liked the way that there was an interesting mix of  speakers from different spectrums of multimedia and I think that should be carried through in future events.  It would also be nice to see some slightly more in depth topics like  Usability in web design,  Tips for keeping your skill set and knowledge base up to date, Guide to becoming a freelancer or startup, innovation in frontend development,  How Social media is changing the way we design and build sites, Cloud Computing in depth.    In terms of people I admire and would like to hear speak, from the Irish web community, I think that that Paul Mckeever of DesignbyFront in Belfast would be great and Paddy Donnelly is a great young designer worth a listen. I also think that Grace Smith would be great to hear from.  I think the recession has seen an increase of people biting the bullet starting up their own projects and companies, some of whom are being quite innovative,  it’d be great to hear more from them.

What was interesting was that all those who spoke were an example people working either for their own small company or as a freelancer.  They all spoke about the importance of doing a job that you love and ensuring that  you keep uptodate with both the ever changing world of web and the community that it creates.  Refresh feels like it could be a great place to do all those things.  I saw some familiar faces and some new ones and I also learnt some great new things. I was an evening very well spent and I look forward to the next RefreshDublin.

The site I was uploading to is built in ASP.net and as a result in running on Windows Server 2003, what I didn’t know was that .flv it isn’t one of the native MIME types on MS servers and as a result has to be set up using the IIS. This is how its done.

1) Select the site to configure in IIS, right click and select “Properties”
2) Under HTTP Headers Tab, select “File Types” under the MIME Map section and select “New Type”
3) Type “.flv” as the associated extension and “video/x-flv” as the content type.
4) Select “OK” and you’re ready to fly!

I was so delighted to work this out I had to share it with you. Hope it helps anyone who’s having the same problem!

p.s. Thanks to Ryan Moore ITToolbox, for helping me find the solution.

Accessibility

When it came to the crunch though, the speaker that made the most impression on me was Robin Christopherson from Abilitynet. He spoke of Accessibility in Web Apps and its importance in the design and build of websites. He is a leader in his field and has made a career out of it by being one of the founder members of AbilityNet. The difference is that Robin is blind. A fact that made his talk all the more interesting.

We all aim to be as accessibilty friendly when building sites and indeed I have been involved in some builds where it was paramount and we followed all the rules and aimed to make the site as accessible as possible. However, you can never really know unless you have a need for the benefits that these accessibilty tools can bring. This is why Robin’s talk was fascintating. He was using screenreaders throughout his talk and showed us a number of examples of sites where bad acccessibilty coding meant disaster for those with visual or hearing imparments trying to use the site. The importance of the simple “alt” tag took on a whole new importance! The layout of the site is paramount in terms of headers, structure, nav etc. Screen readers read in a linear manner so reading a site can take so much longer. Watching Robin navigate the site with a screenreader seemed like such a frustrating way to browse a website and bad accessiblity coding only added to that. It really brought home the absolute neccessity of making accessiblity a primary element in the design process.

Here’s some of the more intersting tips he gave us:

• Playing video on your site - try to avoid Autostart. The reason being is that the audio will interfere with the screenreader and the user needs time to hear the screen reader , even just to find out where the stop and play buttons are on the video player!
• Be careful of the type of videos you play on your site and watch them for flashing in terms of the effects on people with epilepsy. There are some tools out there that can measure videos
• Have you catered for those with Javascript turned off? Fixmystreet.com is an excellent example where users with JS turned off can still utilise the service in an accessible manner.
• Be careful with your css and html build, what happens if the user increases the size of the font? Check the Number10 website to see how it can all go horribly wrong

All these things can seem like a time consuming part of building your site or App. However, what’s the use of having a beautifully designed site, it may look great but for people like Robin who are more interested in your content, yet you’ve neglected even the basic elements of accessible coding, he’ll disgard your site immediately because its just too frustrating!

*If its all a bit daunting, start here: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while and it’s well overdue. However it was a project I was involved with last month just after I lost my job and it was important in so many ways in keeping me focused and creative. I’m sure a lot of you know the story but for those who don’t it started with a guy called David Jones writing a book. The difference is he wrote this book in only four days and four nights after becoming unemployed and deciding to do something proactive. Once he wrote the book he rang Newstalk, they liked his story and all of a sudden he was on the morning show talking about it scouting for a publisher and website. This is when the lovely Maryrose from Brightspark Consulting saw an opportunity to help this guy, but in her typical style, she  added a twist. “We’ll do you a website, podcast, book cover and blog, but we’re gonna do it for free AND we’re gonna do it in a week!”

This is where I came in. Maryrose rang me and asked me if I would be on for creating the website.  I was delighted to be involved and the week that ensued was great. The site was designed and signed off on in a day. The cutup happened the next day and then the process of integrating the podcast, blog and book cover happened.  I was introduced to and worked with some fantastic people and the momentum we created was fully of energy. Due to the timescale we also found that things got done fast and we all agreed very quickly which was refreshing! The result was something that we are all very proud of and from my part its a design that I love as I had an open book (excuse the pun) and could do something slightly different.  David is still plugging away now regularly blogs on his website about his book (which is a must read and free to download from the site) and his experiences.

So here’s a nod to the rest of the folk involved. Gordon Murray, David McDonald, David Duignan, Alex Gibson and Dennis Deery. All talented guys and fantastic to work with. You can read more about what they do and who they are on the website on the “How this happened” section.

FOWA Dublin

My new job is an exciting creative role with an group who I think are the some of the best and brightest in the industry and I’m so excited about working with them. I feel as if I say who it is, I’ll jinx it , but I’ll let you all know when I start on Monday.  So for now its just a case of enjoying tomorrow at the FOWA in Dublin and containing that nervous excitement feeling in my belly which feels great!