charlie francis
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Change your paradigm…
Chipping away slowly at the M2M coal face, we are finally going to have a first draft of most of the wire frames after two weeks. Pretty good going as three weeks ago no designer in the office new anything about the portal. One personal concern is have we had enough time to question the…
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How I learned to like UX again….
Another chatty post from the coal face. Rather serendipitously I came across this blog post whilst looking for the very famous tree swing problem. Which is a great internet meme/illustration of how your deliverables go wrong.
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Just trying to get the job done
Well as we start another ‘massive’ project and the pressure mounts, I hope we have all the safeguards and checks and balances in place, so the jobs a breeze and we all enjoy it. There is alot of romanticism in design, and thats why I love it, but it also generates an idea that projects…
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The curse of the perfect delivery…
Today, I committed the classic Seren mistake all over again. It happened on ITV when we delivered a perfect billion page analysis, it happened when I worked all weekend to deliver the perfect user journeys storyboards only for the client to change the names into Chinese to make the vendor laugh, I tried to deliver…
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Designing application icons for Vodafone Business Services
Vodafone has a wide range of iconography used across their various platforms from VOIP phones with their simple dot matrix LCD displays, to their website and mobile devices and back to Mobile Wi-Fi’s some of which have a simple monochrome screen. Vodafone had developed a really rich visual style. I conducted an audit and then provided…
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Service Design for Project Canvas for ITV
Project Canvas, (rebranded YouView) is a partnership between ITV, Channel 4, BBC, Arqiva, BT and TalkTalk, to provide catch up TV, video on demand, and regular TV through a set-top box. Seren was asked by ITV to investigate its users viewing habits and based on this research provide recommendations and concepts for the Canvas platform.…
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Go Faster
The aesthetics of car racing has always been mixed up with the thrill of speed. I regularly browse with great pleasure Customised: Art Inspired by Hot Rods, Low Riders and American Car Culture. The front cover featuring Roadrunner by Craig McDean. If you ever by a book on the strength of a cover alone this is…
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Readymades and the skilled artisan
Reading yesterdays guardian I came across an article by Jon Henley, called ‘Last of their Kind’. Which was a view of ‘heritage crafts’. These are skilled craftsmen who make useful tools and object, but very much reminded me of some of the things I like to think of as readymades.
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Speedy Design
If I am working on very small sites, which need a very quick turn around. I often find myself skipping most web development processes. As building a working site you can quickly adapt as you go along seems to be the most efficient path. This creates some unusual photoshop files which just contain mock ups of…
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Of phlogiston and web conventions
I was watching Chemistry: A Volatile History and the presenter Jim Al-Khalili spoke about one of the greatest red herrings in science which was phlogiston. A theory that fire element called “phlogiston” was given off when substances burned. So when wood burned it became ash and an invisible element had been given off phlogiston, as…
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