Five Things I'm Thinking Right Now

Always one to turn up fashionably late… following the meme by @wonderlandblog, @hondanhon, @matlock. @dwlt et al, here’s five things i’m thinking right now:

(maybe I’ll get round to writing more about some of them some day)

It’s like TED Unplugged:

After being one of the extremely lucky folk in last year’s awesome #CrossCreative course by TRC with the aforementioned @hondanhon, @dwlt and others, it was an honour to be invited back this week to do a brief talk to this year’s contingent about Stardotstar and how I found the course last year. Reflection is something I don’t do enough of, so it was a good chance to go back through my notes and see just how much the regular trip to Glasgow has influenced me. The format of Cross Creative is beautifully simple: invite an interesting speaker to sit around a table and chat with us about the wonderful stuff they do, and the interesting places they work. In trying to describe the course, it finally dawned on me: “It’s… It’s like TED Unplugged…”

Tell us the problem; not the solution

Over the past few weeks we’ve had a really good hit rate on tenders for some very cool projects. Some of the briefs though have been varied to say the least. On the one hand there’s briefs that outline the problem that needs solving accompanied with great detail about the audience it’s aimed at (we like these kind of briefs a lot), and on the other there’s been requirements lists with little explanation for the purpose or rationale. In the case of the latter, we’ve gleaned information to identify the problem and audience and (if we’re honest) pretty much ignored most of the detail in the list of functional requirements…

It’s a high risk approach when tendering, but much better to win an interesting project at the risk of losing a boring one.

Timing

It was Vic Reeves who said that 88.2% of all statistics are made up, but I think it was Woody Allen that said that 95% of good luck is being there… Sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time with the right idea. Sometimes you have the right idea in the right place, but happen to have come up with it a little too late… Bah! Two out of three aint bad.

Interface – how to sell less

We’re working on a really interesting interface project for Canvas. UI, like lighting or editing in a movie should be invisible to the lay person the majority of the time, and for this project in particular we’re focusing on a UI that will (if we do it right) not be used for the vast majority of time. It can be nerve wracking demoing something that you’ve spent a lot of time removing stuff until just the essentials are left, but fortunately in our meeting yesterday we were preaching to the converted, and had very similar backstory to the work being done in-house. Good meeting.

Children’s Stories

Doesn’t reading wonderful stories at bed time make you want to write children’s books!
Doesn’t reading terrible stories at bed time really make you want to write children’s books!

Gareth Langley Friday 23rd July 2010