Playgroup | Creativity through play

I live in Stoke Newington. Most days after work I walk up to Angel, and get either the 73 or 476 bus back home.

Sometimes I go to Sainsbury's in Angel before jumping on the bus. When paying for my food I always use the self service checkouts - an efficient and painless way to quickly queue up, pay and get the hell out of there. There are a lot of self service checkouts there after a relatively recent refit (probably more than regular tills), and it seems like a good strategy for reducing queuing time.

The tills provide a good user experience - a speedy system with an intuitive interface. The only slow part is when you need to get a worker to approve your age when buying booze. But the worker is generally very helpful.

Last week I bucked the trend...

On the way to work, I chose to get off the 73 before my usual stop at Angel tube, and go to the Tesco at Islington Green.

Bad move.

Only 1 regular till and 2 working self service checkouts were open, with queues of people getting their breakfast in time for the start of work.

At first I couldn't believe the stupidity of the people in front of me. It took one man 4 minutes to buy 2 bananas, some muesli and milk (healthy b*****d). I end up queuing for 12 minutes. Surely these checkouts are pretty similar to Sainsbury's versions? How wrong I was.

You touch the 'start' button. Nothing happens. You touch it again. Nothing happens. You frantically touch it another 8 times. It finally decides that it's ready to start, but the following screen flashes up 10 times because of your previous impatience. 40ish seconds already wasted.

You scan in your first item. It beeps, but nothing comes up on the screen. So you scan it again. Nothing comes up on the screen. A few more scans and all of a sudden the item appears on your list 5 times, but you only have one of them!

You have to call over the uncommunicative and very miserable lady in the Tesco uniform standing chatting to her mate to help. The machine again doesn't respond, as she tries to remove the 4 unwanted items from the list. Eventually, after approximately 4 minutes into this phase of the experience, and you have your first item scanned in.

With this experience fresh in your memory, you can slightly speed up the process for the rest of your items.

Now it's time to pay. In my case, the whole experience had taken so long I had forgotten about this part as I was so desperate to get out of there. The miserable lady in the Tesco uniform soon put me in my place though.

Luckily I had left early for work that day, so wasn't late. But it set me up for the day in a bad mood.

Sorry for the unnecessary length of this blog, but it took me an unnecessary amount of time to buy my melon, chewing gum and oat bars. To top it off, once I got to work, I realised my melon was past it's sell by date.

Moral of the story?

An intuitive user interface isn't the only factor that goes into creating the perfect user experience. The queuing = the ridiculously long loading time. The 3 open tills = the lack of bandwidth to cope with traffic. The slow computer system = the bad choice in platform for delivery of the experience. The miserable lady in the Tesco uniform = the bad choice in storytelling mechanism for delivering the content. The gone off melon = the un-engaging content. 

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This conceptual video for a 3D light show projected onto buildings looks pretty amazing. A way of eco-friendly advertising in the future?

Projection on Buildings from NuFormer Digital Media on Vimeo.

Find out more about the idea from Nuformer here.

Nuformer's website.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7839744.stm

This is an interesting article about the new Google favicon, and how brands may frequently change in the future thanks to digital technologies.

A couple of quotes which struck me:

"The world's leading search engine, whose very name has been adopted as the generic term for finding pages on the web, has achieved web domination without ever having had an actual logo."

and:

"While the old branding rulebook would discourage such regular, radical overhauls, reeking as it does of indecisiveness and inconsistency, in the digital world such rules are temporary, at best.

Steve Plimsoll, of brand consultancy FutureBrand, says the traditional rules on corporate identity are starting to look a little tired.

Mighty morphin logos

"Logos are set to become fluid, ever-changing, customisable, even personalised entities and Google is the first global brand that understands this," says Mr Plimsoll, who is head of digital.

"We are going to have to get used to the idea of our brands changing frequently, and when we do, every three months will seem like the dark ages." 

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If you haven't already, check out our game for ITV's new Saturday night vampire smiting series, Demons.

In the game you take on the role of main character Luke, with the aim of ridding the streets of London of Half-Lives, aided by Half-Life expert Mina and best friend Ruby. Once you've smited them they get stored in your cells. From here you can show them off to your friends, and compare your score to all the other players of the game.

It's been a groundbreaking project for ITV as they expand their digital experience, and great fun to work on personally. The teams here at Playgroup and over at ITV have worked in collaborative approach to produce various iterations of the game leading up to the release. Check back here soon to see a 'making of' video!

Now, go have a play!

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http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/147701-top-40-music-videos-of-2008

Which one's your favourite?

For me it has to be 'House of Cards' by Radiohead. They're always one step ahead when it comes to innovation, particularly digitally. Creating a video using laser technology instead of cameras certainly is unique. It captures the mood of the song perfectly.

Also, special mentions to Bjork's 'Wanderlust' which is pretty epic! As well as Yeasayer's 'Wait for the Summer'.

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If Radiohead didn’t exist, then Sigur Rós would probably be my favourite band.

Last Friday I had the pleasure of going to see them for the 4th time, at Alexandra Palace. As a live act I don’t think there are many that match them. Beautifully haunted vocals, layered guitars played with violin bows, a build up to the loudest and grandest climaxes you will hear, and white sheets with huge ghosting silhouettes of the band projecting onto them. Epic!

However, this time was different. Much like their latest album, this was a set that went back to basics. Not that Sigur Rós have ever been at basics. This time they played solely with the 4 of them – no string or brass bands to accompany them – just completely stripped back. And it worked well. Not quite as epic, and may be a bit more choreographed than before, but it was an extremely accomplished set. And it’s a tactic that has worked well for them commercially, judging by the amount of 18 year olds singing their heart out to the news songs! (something I never thought I’d see at a Sigur Rós gig).

And they ended on their trademark set closer, Popplagio. The best song I have ever seen live. Watch it here.

Sigur Rós, it seems, are a band that completely divide opinion. To my surprise the other day, I overheard Tim say to Steve “let’s have our meeting out of the office, I need to get away from the Sigur Rós!”.  He did admit to liking them, but to finding them too much in that situation. To me, they’re the perfect band to work along to. I once read an article mentioning some research from a university professor, who came to the conclusion that Svefn-G-Englar is the best song to listen to on the tube at rush hour! Mainly due to it’s relaxing qualities. I guess some people just find them boring, and may be find the vocals a bit too much. I told my housemate to watch them at Benicassim, and she described them as “whale music”.

I’d be interested to hear other people’s opinions.

On another note, I’ve just spent a few days in Lisbon. What a great place! I have a huge desire to travel around South America, only enhanced by Lisbon. I heard it described as “the only place you can find South America in Europe”. Whilst I’m not sure how true this is, it certainly did seem like a “mini Rio”. Speaking to a man simply known as Raphael about the likes of Fabio Aurelio, Lucas Leiva and Diego Cavalieri in a Brazilian bar only confirmed this! It’s a very chilled out city during the day with small cafes, hilly streets and stunning views. During the evening the narrow streets transform into a lively night spot, lined with traditional Brazilian and Portuguese bars, all featuring an array of live music. I also managed to go there at a time when the temperature was freakishly rising above 20 degrees. Which was nice.

Now back to the ITV job…

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On Tuesday of this week I attended Google's London Developer Day, held at Wembley Stadium. The keynote hosted in The Bobby Moore Room (renamed 'Space Invaders' for the day) opened proceedings introducing the wide range of Google developer products - including Google Gears, Google Web Toolkit and Android ("the first complete, open and free mobile platform from the Open Handset Alliance").

Being a designer myself, I wanted to find out the various things that Google are making possible in the online world, as opposed to directly learning how to implement these things. So I chose to avoid the various code labs that were running through the day!

The first talk I went to was entitled "The state of AJAX" by Dion Almaer. As well as being a very well delivered speech it was particularly exciting to see how much is now possible with AJAX from the various online open source libraries. He'd even devloped a Wii games using purely JavaScript!

I then went to a talk called "Build YOUR YouTube" - which, whilst being a bit too 'techie' for my liking (!) - showed how you can very easily build a user generated video website based on the YouTube engine, which is completely customised to your brand.

The final 2 talks I went to were about Google's OpenSocial products - which allows developers to build applications which will work across all social networking sites which have signed up. The biggest name to already sign up is MySpace, and representatives from Hyves, Netlog and Viadeo were present to discuss how they were implementing it. The second of the 2 talks was particularly well delivered by Chewy Trewhella.

It was particularly interesting to see how much effort Google is putting in to working with the open source community, and how all of these different tools can be applied to Playgroup's future online work.

Here is a video of the day:

You can view all the other videos of the day here.

View pictures of the day here.

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One of the most fulfilling aspects of my job is knowing that a piece of work that I've had a hand in creating, is accessible for anyone to view throughout the world. Who knows who will be enjoying an experience that we here at Playgroup have produced?

After coming back from holiday I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the Sorted website had been made NMA's website of the week. It's acknowledgment like this that make the job as satisfying as it is. It may not be as big as winning an award, but the knowledge that people are enjoying and appreciating something you've had a hand in creating is equally (if not more) satisfying.

The same can be said for seeing the satisfaction on the client's face when you produce something that meets or exceeds their expectations. This was certainly the case for the 'Sorted Crew'.

So, well done to everyone else involved!

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A few days ago Weezer launched their new music video (Pork & Beans) on YouTube, ahead of it's official release. The video is an homage to viral video makers, featuring various guest appearances from "YouTube celebrities". You can only assume they spend a lot of time on YouTube themselves.

It's not the first time Weezer have gone outside of the norm to create innovative music videos to boost up the hype, having previously performed with the muppets, and of course in the classic video for Buddy Holly with the Fonze and co in Happy Days (anyone remember this coming free with Windows 95?!).

When I read about this I have to admit, I did get quite excited - due to my obsession with the band as a teenager. However, may be it's because I've grown up, but it just isn't the same as the early Blue album and Pinkerton stuff. The same infectious catchiness is there, but I guess my music taste has moved on!

Anyhow, the video has had nearly 3 million views in 3 days, showing the power of releasing it virally. Here it is:

And for the nostalgia, here is Buddy Holly (unfortunately this isn't an embeddable video, so you'll have to visit YouTube!).

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Smashing Magazine is probably the best web design/develoment resource I have found on the net. The site is packed full of incredibly in depth articles related to a whole host of web related topics. From different design trends/styles, to web layouts, to fonts, to AJAX, to usability, to icon design, to seo, to.....well, you get the idea!

The best thing about every article on the site is how well researched they are. They collate information/opinions, free downloads, working examples, tutorials etc from all over the web, into one article. As their strapline says, it makes my life easier!

Check out the 'All posts' list down the right hand side for insightful articles related to all areas of web design and development.

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Whilst researching for our redesign of the Norwegian Design Council's website, I stumbled across this Dutch design blog:

www.design.nl.

As well as being nicely designed with interesting articles, it has some cool functionality like being able to view the blog listings in small, medium and large views, and allowing the user to filter down the blog listings using the drop down menu at the top.

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The Jacky Winter Group "connects Australian illustration talent with an international client base" by featuring illustrators struggling to increase their profile outside of Australia and make a full-time living plying their trade.

The agency's website features work by the select group of illustrators which show off the diverse talent each one has. They range from more tradition illustrations, to digitally created ones. You can browse by artist or by category of work (ie advertising, fashion, environmental etc).

The above illustration is called Genesis by Justin Maller. He creates his illustrations digitally and often montages them with photography to create his own unique style. 

The website itself is also nicely designed. Check it out here.

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