Home » Blog » Archive for the ‘Design’ Category

Channel 4 has just launched an exciting ideas based website - 4ip. The press release from the NinetyTen website is below.

Caffeinehit did the design for this, so we’re pleased to see that it’s live and are looking forward to seeing what happens with it in the future. Anyway, on with the press release…

Channel 4 Launches 4iP to Create New Digital Businesses with Help from NinetyTen

London, UK | October 15, 2008: NinetyTen has created the ideas submission system at the heart of a new Channel 4 venture which will stimulate public service digital media across the UK. The new venture, called 4iP (4 Innovation for the Public), officially launches on October 15th.

4iP will allow anyone to submit new digital business ideas at www.4ip.org.uk. 4iP will then uses the expertise of Channel 4’s digital team to fine-tune the ideas and turn them into viable businesses.

In the first stage, the ideas are reviewed by Channel 4’s team of digital managers who will suggest ways in which the ideas could be improved upon. The second stage will take some of the stronger ideas further, and use the knowledge base of Channel 4 to help build a financial and business plan around the ideas. As the ideas pass through 4iP’s network, the ideas will become more and more robust, with the strongest ideas coming out the other end with support from Channel 4.

Marcus Page, IS Business Development Manager from Channel 4 commented: “With 4iP we are being pro-active in finding original interactive media products & services, as digital platforms become increasingly important. NinetyTen’s expertise in creating the ideas submission system was a key element in the overall creation of the 4iP website and over the last few months we have been impressed by their hard work and expertise.”

David Atkins, CEO of NinetyTen said: “4iP is a great way of harnessing the creative potential that’s here in the UK, so it has been a great project to be involved in. As we have experienced in the last few months, more and more businesses have started to understand that social networking technology like ours has become a fundamental part of their business - it is not just a nice-to-have any more.”

NinetyTen is a specialist provider of social media technologies that can be incorporated into new and existing digital media. The company was formed by an experienced team of technology entrepreneurs who have all founded and run a number of successful video, telecoms and digital businesses.

About 4iP

Announced as part of Channel 4’s Next on 4 strategic blueprint, 4iP is a major new initiative to encourage innovation on digital platforms, which aims to re-invent public service media for the digital age. A collaboration between Channel 4 and a series of regional development agencies and funding partners from around the UK, the editorial focus will be on working with the best talent, both individually and within digital production.

Over the next two years Channel 4 and our 4iP partners will be investing up to £50m in content and services which will help it deliver public purposes on new platforms, in new ways, for new audiences.

I stumbled across this really nice (and simple) concept by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Constant Setting.

It’s a website that pulls in creative commons photos from Flickr and then displays sunsets in ‘realtime’ for that specific town or city where the sun is actually setting. You can read more about it here.

Visually it’s a really nice, clean way of dealing with what is a very simple concept. It would be nice if the Google maps was embedded into the page when you clicked on the location link, if it was possible to view more sunset images for that location it would be good too.

Anyway, lovely idea!

It’s great to see coverage of MyBuilder and Kublax in the FT today (6th August 2008).

I’ve got the pleasure of working with MyBuilder at the moment and have recently pitched for doing some design work for Kublax. Having seen what Kublax can do (it’s just gone in to Alpha) I can happily say that it’s one of the first websites that I’ve seen that I actually thought “you know what, that could be really useful”. Once the design is nailed (obviously if it’s not done by Caffeinehit it won’t be quite as good!) but it will be awesome, a definite success.

MyBuilder is another one of those sites (although maybe not as relevant to me) that you will find really useful. I often hear friends and family saying “do you know anyone that could do…”. With MyBuilder it allows you to find and use builders on the site that are local to you and recommended by people that have used them through the site.

The team at MyBuilder are awesome and I honestly think that if the ‘credit crunch’ and property market behave themselves they could find themselves in an incredibly interesting position in the next year. I hope so at least.

Read about all the other success stories (and failures) from last years Seedcamp on the FT.com.

If you think you’ve got what it takes you can submit your idea to this years Seedcamp.

I’ve just put the finishing touches to the new look Caffeinehit. I thought it was about time it had a bit of a sprucing up and spring clean. Being the 1st birthday and all it seemed a very suitable time!

It would be great to hear what you think, so leave some comments here…

Check it out here: www.caffeinehit.com

I was just using Google Maps, as I often do and spotted a new addition to the interface, a neat little dropdown giving the option of viewing photos AND wikipedia content on your maps.

Now, I know it’s only going to be a matter of time before they introduce browser type ‘add-ons’ to your Google maps but for the time being this is a seriously sexy addition. One issue that I have with Wikipedia is that there is no way to view location based content in any sort of context, to have it viewable on a map makes it seem somewhat relevant.

Not only does it add interest to the basic google maps it does look pretty cool at the same time. I know this is pretty common place with many mashups but it’s nice to see Google finally adding a little bit more to the basic Google Maps.

Mobile phone operator O2 recently lost a ground-breaking court battle over the use of its trademark bubbles advertising imagery.

The company was told by judges that it was legal for rival operator 3 to use its branding if comparing price plans - opening the way for any business to use a competitor’s logo. Companies must only ensure there is no risk of confusing the two brands, the European Court of Justice ruled.

02 took 3 to court after it used the award-winning blue bubbles branding in an advert comparing the prices of the two companies’ pay-as-you-go services. The EU judges ruled this was not trademark infringement as long as the branding was not abused.

So, is this right? Well, I don’t personally believe that a competitor should be able to use another companies branding in any way. In some way or form it gives the illusion of endorsement. Not only that but it does detract from your carefully constructed brand values. An obvious example are the top supermarkets like Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda. Having the Waitrose logo in some way or form in an Asda advert isn’t going to do Waitrose any favours, obviously very different audiences for each shop so maybe that’s a bad example but you see what I mean.

It would be great to hear your views…

It’s a funny thing being a designer. You either have copy to work with, use a load or Lorem Ipsum or try and get creative and write some example copy.

For two of my current clients I have been trying to do the latter. I’ve never been much for a scholar (as I’m sure my English teacher would attest) so it’s come as a great surprise to see clients (and their competitors) adopting my copywriting.

A great example was for Kindo. I have been coming up with a number of bugs to encourage people to add people to their tree. About three weeks after we put it live the main competing websites had some scarily similar bugs themselves: Genoom, Geni and Itsourtree. See the similarities here:

I guess it should be taken as a compliment really. If someone’s copying you it must mean that you’re doing something right, however simple and obvious the idea.

My other client is slightly different. I have been writing copy to fill out the designs I’ve been doing. They are now asking their copywriter to copy the ‘British’ style I’ve been writing in to be used across the whole site. It also looks like they’re going to inherit the tagline I came up with to go alongside their logo. It’s great to feel like I’m going to have created pretty much everything on the site through from design all the way through to copy style and tagline.

A real sense of achievement, saying that, when it gets panned I’ll be deleting this post

I’ve just had a check and Caffeinehit is back as #1 for the Google search term “graphic designer london“, at least on Google UK. Caffeinehit.com has been in the top 10 for some time and was briefly at #1 earlier in the year. I tweaked the SEO and markup of the site a month or so ago and it appears to have done the trick.

I find that 80% of my work comes through Google searches and other online networking websites. Getting your SEO fully optimised and streamlining the site code will more than pay for the time you spend working on it. Updating the code and making changes to enhance your listing on search engines like Google should ideally be done every month to keep your site on the first page.

I realise that there is a hell of a lot more to it that simple tweeking the code, if you can find that balance and get the code and copy right on the site you’re on to a winner.

Adobe says next Photoshop will be 64-bit native on Windows only

Adobe’s John Nack has an interesting post on Photoshop, Lightroom, and Adobe’s 64-bit roadmap. His purpose is to break a bit of news as gently as possible: that the next edition of Photoshop will have a 64-bit-native version for Windows 64-bit operating systems, but not for the Mac.

The problem is that Mac OS X has two different programming interfaces, known as Carbon and Cocoa. Nack explains:

As we wrapped up Photoshop CS3, our plan was to ship 64-bit versions of the next version of Photoshop for both Mac and Windows. On the Mac Photoshop (like the rest of the Creative Suite, not to mention applications like Apple’s Final Cut Pro and iTunes) relies on Apple’s Carbon technology. Apple’s OS team was busy enabling a 64-bit version of Carbon, a prerequisite for letting Carbon-based apps run 64-bit-native.

At the WWDC show last June, however, Adobe & other developers learned that Apple had decided to stop their Carbon 64 efforts. This means that 64-bit Mac apps need to be written to use Cocoa (as Lightroom is) instead of Carbon. This means that we’ll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa.

Naturally the news has brought a small number of less charitable Mac users out from under their rickety old bridges, but as John Gruber says on Daring Fireball: “I think it’s hard to argue that Adobe should have somehow known the end was near for Carbon when even Apple didn’t know.”

Currently, Windows XP and Vista come in two versions: one runs 16-bit and 32-bit programs, while the other runs 32-bit and 64-bit programs. Today, Photoshop runs happily on both the 16/32-bit and 32/64-bit versions. However, the 64-bit version of Photoshop will only run on the 32/64-bit versions of Windows. Both versions are included when you buy Vista, though Microsoft only ships the code in the box with Vista Ultimate.

The Mac users who plan to run Windows versions of Photoshop (as they did before the so-called “universal binary” version of Adobe’s Creative Suite came out) will be happy to know that Apple’s BootCamp software already supports 64-bit Vista.

Another release via Caffeinehit Ltd is the new look last name pages for Kindo. The original design was made only for one country, Sweden. Now there is last name data for a number of countries there needed to be a page that was easy to add future countries to.

Anyway, here’s the design I came up with, since it’s launch traffic has sky-rocketed. Watch this space and while you’re at it, why not see if your surname is in one of the countries listed on the site.

More: Kindo Surname Pages