aspire to enquire

Service resumed

I finally got the internet at home today after 5 months of living in London without it. It's good - it means I can finally catch up on my feeds without feeling guilty at work. Instead, I get to do it at home and be made to feel guilty here instead! 

For the record, I'm using O2 and it was pretty straightforward to get set up and seems pretty fast and stable for the time being. Cheap too, as an existing customer. It's a shame the iPhone tethering was so rubbish really.

So hopefully I'll be posting a bit more regularly and coherently from now on, and starting to comment more frequently and get some new conversations going. And I can get my amazon wish list ready for Christmas ;)

Watlr

Beautiful photograph by Ruud Baan found on shotspot 

I think I'm going to start a little tumblr for all these images I've been collecting, but I can't think of a name for it. If anyone had any ideas I'd definitely appreciate them.

Sean Kennedy Santos

I'm trying to make a concerted effort to broaden my photography knowledge at the moment- firstly because I find it beautiful, and also because I feel there's a lot that any creative can learn from the very pure form of image-making that photography can be. If you have any recommendations I should check out, I'd love to hear about them.

So I've been totally awestruck by Sean Kennedy Santos today. From his website, his work seems to span fashion, advertising and editorial through photography and moving image.

What's really captured me is the bold shapes and composition in a lot of the work. Also there's the lighting, which often mixes natural and artificial light from unusual points. There's this very modern, glossy feel that is so poignant when contrasted with urban environments that we know to be decaying and flat in reality. His work is a little like Gregory Crewdson's in that respect.

 

Here are a few more of my favourite images. You should look at his beautiful flash website too, the photos aren't really represented well here.

 

All pictures here are obviously copyright the photographer.

 

Awesomes!

What does democracy look like?

I'm working on a political brief at the moment, it's quite exciting. It's an iPhone app for an MP, launching just after Christmas.

Looking at other other democratic engagement sites, here's a fantastic variety of effort - from templated blogs to fully bespoke campaigns. Often the most effective examples aren't from the bespoke end.

And the BBC has just launched Democracy Live, at the same time that I was checking out PopVox from the Parliament website. 

In many ways, the two sites have very similar aims - to enable the wider public to greater understand and connect with the work of Parliament - but their approach is completely different. PopVox, a school's resource page targeted directly at young people, relies on long streams of copy and a few (very nice) illustrations to get its traditional message across. Democracy Live uses live video of Parliamentary business through the iPlayer platform, and has links to lots of other political stats and information. 

I'm not sure if the sites aren't working for me because of their design and content, or because politics is just quite boring: It's very rarely about culture change, empowerment and getting things done - it's more often about partisanship, process and scandal. And unless you're in the business already, or a journalist, you're probably not that bothered with those things. 

So visually I'm presented with a bit of a dilemma for my app. Functionally, we're really pleased with what our first release will enable constituents to do. I think it's going to be really special. 

But do I go for a glossy, web 2.0 mess that completely mis-represents the day-to-day reality of Parliamentary life, or do I go for a stuffy but learned aesthetic that hopes that the issues of the day will provide the excitement and engagement? 

The answer is probably somewhere in the middle - but I'm becoming fascinated by the relationship between political activity and its visual representation, between the perceptions of value, integrity, and efficacy.

Starlets

I really love the colour tones and lighting on this doggy image, found on Dropular via bighugelabs.

Kate Walsh

It's not often that you hear Debussy cello sonatas at live gigs, but that's what happened to me the other week when I went to watch Kate Walsh at The Tabernacle, a beautifully converted venue in the Portobello Road area. Kate Walsh is one of my favourite artists, and I've been lucky enough to have seen her five or six times now.

I can't remember if I've mentioned her here before, but I thought I would share a video from her YouTube, of a live recording of 'June Last Year',my favourite song off the new album; Light & Dark.

I think this is Kate's third studio album, with the most recent two setting themselves apart from the first by a few years and a stint at BIMM in Brighton, where Kate is still based. That's how I first came across her music many years ago. Whenever I see her at gigs now I mumble something about the Open House, my ex local and a lovely pub. Anyway. Much like another Brighton resident, Emiliana Torrini, Kate's third album has found a way to take the best parts of albums one and two, and show a real evolution of sound and style.

The first album, Clocktower Park, was produced very nicely, and the songs were very listenable. They were also much more heavily orchestrated than the songs that followed on Tim's House. For me, having heard Tim's House first, the extra instrumentation on Clocktower Park went a long way towards hiding what I've now been able to be more sure of listening to Light and Dark; that the songs on Clocktower Park weren't anywhere near as sophisticated as those on the follow-up album. 

It's hard to explain, as the Clocktower Park songs all sound good and I've spent a lot of time listening to them, just like with Emiliana Torrini's Love In The Time Of Science. But when you hear the songs stripped back in the way they were on Tim's House (and Torrini's Fisherman's Woman), you can really begin to appreciate the songwriting at work. The versatility of Walsh's songs has been proved every time I've been to see her, as she's had a completely different accompaniment each time, giving the songs a whole new setting.

Now that I have my copy of Light and Dark, the departure from record number one is even more apparent. Kate and Tim Bidwell (who also produced Tim's House, in his house), have re-introduced the orchestration, building on the solid foundations laid down in the previous album. The results are simple but intricate, melodious but challenging.  

Hearing the new songs live was a delight and I'd encourage you to go along if you can over the next few weeks.

Race: Science's Last Taboo

I've been involved with a really exciting project over the past few weeks which is starting to come into fruition now and I wanted to mention it here quickly.

 

Race: Science's Last Taboo is a season running over the next few weeks exploring the history and myths in science's justification of racism. As the season has been commissioned as a factual and scientific set of programmes, the producers wanted to include a lot of educational and contextual content in the season's online presence, so Public Zone have been working with them on this. 

It was really interesting to work with the Channel 4 brand and across two platforms - the custom bits that we designed and built here, and the bits that come with every Channel 4 show and have a set template. The necessity to clearly highlight the different areas of the minisite, whilst maintaining a consistent user journey was challenging but I think we did a really good job. Right now there's only a small version of the site available online, but as the programmes transmit there will be new articles, clips and pages available. 

I think the element that we're most proud of as a team though, is the 'definition tool' conceived in the early stage of the project.

 

In essence it's a fairly simple comment tool - but with a twist. We wanted to make it a gateway to all the content that would be on the site, rather than an end in itself. As the season highlights, it is very problematic to define race at all, because you immediately start establishing terms of differentiation which could be discriminatory to one group or another. So by asking visitors to the site to define race right at the outset, we wanted to give people the opportunity to then explore the content with a greater sense of purpose. In many ways the definition tool sums up the season.

It's still quite interesting reading what people have said when they have tried to answer it though. Why don't you have a go?

It's been a really great project to have been involved with, with lovely clients and a very committed core team here at PZ. It's also been a great chance for me on a design level to work with such a great brand identity.

The Uniform Project

Two things have just happened. I've been completely inspired by The Uniform Project, and I also realised that I haven't shared anything from Lost at E Minor for a long long time. More to come soon.

So The Uniform Project is an awesome idea by Sheena Matheiken and designer friend Eliza Starbuck who have conceived a cute and versatile dress, which will be worn every day for a year(There are seven identical dresses, not one smelly one). This is made to look not odd by completely different accessories every day.

Somehow there are donations involved, but ultimately the main lesson to me is how sustainable clothing could be if only it was designed with this versatility in mind. Or maybe some of it already is, we just need to think a bit harder about what we buy in the first place.

What does social look like?

I attended IPAsocial last week.

As a recent graduate, and someone who doesn't even work in advertising I should probably have known better than to tweet a suggestion for a break-out talk during the second half of the evening.

But listening to the other subjects that came up, I do think there's some space in the debate for a consideration of the aesthetics of what we're all doing at the moment, whether we're working in straight up advertising or in a more productiony / content kind of place like public zone. The title I suggested was "what does social look like?"

I didn't really manage to talk about this much, but elsewhere there was a discussion on how clients could be convinced, and why they might be sceptical about using social media. There was also a lot of discussion on the more anthropological aspects of behaviour and imitation. You can read a lot more on the IPAsocial page

From my experiences so far, I'm not sure there are many sceptical clients. For me, it's been quite the opposite - nearly every project I've seen recently has had social media and engagement as part of the brief. They're all public service and voluntary projects, which might offer some rationale, but my feeling is that it's probably the same in commercial-land too. At least at the beginning of campaign discussions, people seem to be rushing to 'use' social media right now. I do feel it's widely accepted that it is changing the way brands and organisations need to operate, even though Will has raised some concerns that ultimately I do agree with.

My own concern is the speed that the transition to conversational marketing is taking place. The way that it's occurred within the lifespan of one visual trend; the Web 2.0 world of glossy rounded corners, big search bars and clean lines.

There's nothing wrong with these things, but I think it's going to put half-baked social media campaigns in a precarious position over the coming months and years. 

What I mean by that is that right now it's kind of ok to have a website screaming "share this!"... "add this!"... "tweet this!"... "facebook!", but this won't last for ever — It's always been the case that it's the ideas being conveyed that need to be social themselves to gain momentum and spread. So I'm worried that as clients come to the end of their transitions to adopting these new techniques, or at least thinking they have, their audiences will be on the way to turning off from the generic iconography and aesthetic that's been shouted at them for so long. People get bored.

Of course this transition won't be a one off thing, it will need to continually re-invent itself as new platforms and trends emerge. But there will be no point if people have got fed up with listening. And I think that for that to happen, we need to be very careful in the short term not to push 'social' into people's eyes. People know they can share, they have the tools to do it. Let's spend our time worrying about giving them things to talk about rather than whether they should or not.

Which kind of ties quite nicely back into Will's notion of brands just being good at what they do. As well as the 'technology changes, people don't' principle that Amelia wrote about a few weeks ago.

Yes.

Times to wake up

I quite like these adverts, really fun use of logo and image - there's another with a helicopter which is also good. All the different executions are visually inviting and fresh whilst still relevant to the target audience and suitably austere.

But I have a little question about this particular version - they've found a statistic that says the average Londoner gets up at 6.04 am. So why can you only get your paper before 7am? Wouldn't it be easier to get it before 6am? It seems strange to show off that they know what time you're going to get up and then not let you read your paper for potentially another 55 minutes.