The long weekend was a joy, and although this isn’t ‘work’, we did get round to scooping out about 9 frames of honey we’d taken from our bees earlier in the summer. The messy results of that sticky process are now sitting in a slowly filtering honey-bucket awaiting bottling in a few days.

After that, it was a new month, a new term and it feels like a new start. Having had hardly any EMI work to do this week I’ve been able to focus on the new startup. Now everyon is off holidays, we had a great catchup meeting on Thursday, with the whole team together. Awesome stuff, a few shifts in the various strands but overall momentum, which is invigorating.

Immediate tasks bubbled up with a pitch next week so Friday was spent putting some very quick screens for an iPhone app together and sketching out an iPad app. This weekend I’ll flesh those out and should have nice work ready for midweek.

Busy busy busy!

Back on the weeknotes horse after summer off, apologies for the absence. It was a self imposed quiet from not wanting to crap on and moan about work not going in my preferred best direction. Also, I didn’t want to undermine myself by talking about future plans prematurely.

I’m currently splitting my time between winding down my participation with new digital product development with the record label and early design work for a new startup I’m involved with. The contrast between the two especially strong right now, where the project I had originally begun in November is culminating in multiple releases in early October. Meanwhile the startup has assembled a killer team, has multiple streams spinning up and should have a couple of early products out in October with more following.

This brush with corporate culture has been quite interesting but eventually the frustrating inertia inherent becomes frustrating and the opportunity to get out and at least fail fast again is irresistible.

So like Phil I’ve had a lot of trouble getting back into Weeknotes after a holiday break. I tried doing the 30 Days Of Music which I will continue – just not right now.

I’m currently in a nice hotel room at the top on Nob hill in San Francisco. I arrived a week ago to continue work on a better digital music product, and this past week have been working with IDEO a bit. They wind down now and we shift to development with Pivotal Labs.

It’s a bit nerve wracking, I’m not sure we’re quite ‘there’ yet but we are a step or two forward from our prototype phase. The amount learned having built that is only now becoming clear to me and it’s been a big help deciding what is interesting and what is fun, rather than being dry and dusty about the whole thing. Users are not archivists, old records are not data.

Being Sunday I took some time away from work to enjoy sunshine, Blackpool winning their Premiership playoff and the Maker Faire here in SF. I can haz arduino, finally. The week ahead should be lots more work, not sure if it’ll be fun, but have a feeling it will be decisive.

The week just passed in a blur of events. We reviewed our prototype, which may be held in a little too much reverence. I see why – we aren’t a technology company, doing things like this looks risky or weird. It might have been better to spin it in music-speak, something like “working out some riffs” or “cutting a 4 track demo” perhaps. Anyway, it needs some changes, and additions, which will mostly be flat photoshop mockups pasted into ‘dumb’ pages I think. It was quite a chunk of work, and I didn’t finish until Sunday evening.

Meanwhile, a volcano erupted and clogged our skies with ash stopping flights. No problem thought I, not going anywhere. I’d ordered a brand new Macbook Pro on Tuesday but a little dealy wasn’t a problem. And then my current laptop went *poof* and properly died. Arrgh! Suddenly the efficencies of mass transit and globalisation becomes quite important.

It’s now Monday evening finishing this post, still no sign of where UPS may actually have my package (maybe Cologne, maybe Shanghai) and tentative signs of flights resuming. Getting work done if fine (ancient G5 tower to the rescue) but I’m a lot less portable. Work is at a very specific desk.  Laptops, I realise, are ace.

So, that was a bit of a gap in weeknotes, my apologies. The weeks before the dev/fort were mostly quiet, like a coiling spring. The 10 days from Good Friday onwards were spent at a remote location in a big house near Inverness with a team of quite exceptional talents doing a mammoth sprint. A two day ideation generated something like 800 postit notes, whittled down to about 60 ‘groups’ and finally a couple dozen priorities. After a day or two exploration on things we knew we’d need (fundamental UI concepts like a timeline, a music player) and generating some data robust enough to hang it all off, we started building. And building.

At the end of the week, exhausted, we had a Thing. And the Thing was really good, exactly what we needed at this point (arguably a bit earlier…) that stands opposed to the glitzy video demos I’d previously completed by myself. They now look very thin indeed. This Thing on the other hand while not perfect by any means is deep, has layers and extracts attention from you in a good way – you gladly hand attention over. I played with it for 10 minutes at the end of the week, it was compelling – I want to spend more time with it and explore more, enjoy more of the artist we built it for. Rough edges aside, that is the response we want to illicit, so I think a success.

Now, sleep.

This week I had a day off across the middle of the week, it was great and I had a haircut. Work either side of the midweek is more calm before the storm, our monster offsite prototyping sprint over Easter.

We want to have layers of data visualisations as additional content or even as interfaces to the mainstreams of content. I’d been putting together examples I liked, and received two glorious books to add to this. Information Is Beautiful by David McCandless Data Flow. Really nice.

A little userflow doc I sketched together straddled 3 pages, almost without thinking I added three dots, centred to the bottom of each, one filled the others in outline. UI style pagination signalling in print – seemed completely natural.I like it, will use it again. As we use screens for more and more of our reading, it seems entirely reasonable to translate the visual cues from the screen and apply them to ‘legacy formats’ like paper.

I didn’t do a weeknote last week. It got to Friday and I was a blank: weeknote block. Last week we had a big release, the second with an ‘extra feature’ product so I should have plenty to talk about except… except I don’t. Because we didn’t do it. It was a special case, with much more work than usual handled by the artist and their own design agency. We only saw it the day of release and while it wasn’t terrible by any means, it was a bit disappointing. Good album tho, so hey.

This week has been revisiting early work. Recording our process doing a couple of ‘lite’ products with third-parties seemed like a good idea, so I’ve been drawing up wireframes and layout advice for future product teams to shortcut what worked for us.

I’m also revisiting the iconography I quickly put together at the start of the project. We’ve had a little feedback now, and spending a bit longer drawing a better “suite” of icons seems like good time spent ahead of our upcoming dev/fort powered prototype week.

More about that, another time, but I’m quite excited about it.

A good week, i think, but this is late posted. Product dev churns onwards, I’m up to other projects too so those took priority this week a bit.

It’s simple wireframing of standardised ‘bricks’ (chunks of content, navigation elements, components, plugins, widgets, whatever) to use on a wide range of websites built using Wordpress. Not dull exactly, but just stuff that needs doing.

On Thursday I attended the Music 4.5 conference, which was a mashup of music biz and tech startups. Full coverage here. It was really good, decent line up and well organised. Techcrunch had a Pitch segment there, which was interesting.

One startup in particular caught my eye, Decibel who are aiming to create a metadata service, offering much more depth than the standard Gracenote artist/genre/year/album dataset. A big undertaking, but properly researched, maintained and API’d could be extremely useful to build advanced discovery services and connective tissue for music content.

Patchy week, far too much time consumed doing tiny, but multiple, changes to a couple of sites. There’s a convoluted approval process for some release-projects here, so progress can be slow and frustrating, even with modern workflows like Basecamp (about which i’ll write about in the future). Between bits of that, I’m making slow but steady progress exploring mobile UX angles of our embryonic ‘digital deluxe’ project, now codenamed Lava. Ongoing…

A site I sketched out a month or so ago is live, the revised EMI.com – this is based on the Basic Maths wordpress theme, with some tweaks and custom plugins. For such a big name, it’s quite a pared down site, basically a release blog, artist roster, press releases, that kind of thing.

Having tried to be a flashy ‘music destination’ before without success this makes more sense. Fans head directly to the artist or fansites via search engines. Music discovery happens is many other ways, but (almost) never off a label site, especially a ‘parent’ label covering an incredibly diverse set of sub-brands. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes.

One last note, the lovely guys at DUB need a great freelance design/ux person to continue some initial redesign work I’d done with them. If you have the relevant skills and sparkle head over and present your wares.

Wow, week flew by and it’s a saturday weeknote.

Good stuff done: a couple of reskinned mockups of our product concept for a couple of rock legends.

Let me explain in english. I built a mockup of a *potential* future product in After Effects. Not having gone through a proper design and prototyping process, it’s an impression of a product rather than anything real. Thing is, it looks nice so we use it to show people (artist management usually) the vision and get them to sign up to a shinier, digitally immersive future.

Luckily, After Effects lets me do a quick reskin per artist fairly quickly now. It’s not progressing the product design, but it is building momentum with People Who Matter, which in turn means we’ll get to build deeper, better products when the time comes.

I’ve started on really working out a mobile version of the above now too, whereas before “mobile” was a couple of boxes and arrows on a diagram, it’ll be nice to see what really fits, what needs folding, and what needs reworking completely. I may be some time.

I also managed to get a few minutes to play with iTunes LP and some HTML5 experiments. The people at ituneslp.net have some great guidance on getting the most of of this platform, usually not using Tunekit and expose a couple of undocumented features like sampling the waveform of the playing audio. I couldn’t get any processing.js to work but that’s more likely my incompetence rather than a major technical hurdle. I did get an opensource asteroids javascript+canvas game to work while playing a suitably themed song, which is immediately 10x more fun than any real iTunes LPs!