February, 2010

design — Comments Off
26
Feb 10

Week 475

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.

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technology — Comments Off
20
Feb 10

Week 474

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!

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Uncategorized — Comments Off
12
Feb 10

Week 473

Not the usual weeknote this week, seeing as I’ve only been able to do a couple of days of work. Monday was a hospital visit to check up following my heart valve replacement at the end of 2008. All is good, with dramatic remodeling of my heart so far resulting in a halving of the size of my distorted right ventricle. So yay that.

Wednesday and thursday not so great, some noro-type stomach bug I guess – short but unpleasant, hey ho.

So inbetween those things I’ve been looking at the amazing work and possibilities opened up for us on our future products by Processing.js which by all accounts is a marvel. More here http://processingjs.org

Considering we want to mash up high-end music experiences with all sorts of metadata, this might be a very tasty visual layer to add a degree of richness. Plus being completely open we can have a kind of developer API to all our products right off the bat. Awesome, awesome stuff.

Hoping next week is a bit more normal – I’m actually in London overnight Thursday 18th too, so it might be nice to catch up with some people in the hoxton ‘hood.

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design — Comments Off
3
Feb 10

Week 472

As this week passes it’s apex I’ve just about run out of room for manoeuvre on this iteration of the design. I’ve got some good things going, which we will probably stick with and some things that haven’t worked too well. Luckily some of these elements (UI bits for content manipulation tools) are things I’ve been leaving very basic, so am keen to go deeper on those anyway – a promising idea presented itself while walking the dog no less.

Basic layouts and navigation ideas have begun to blossom into something with a solid basis (referencing the Eamse’s Powers of 10 and Zooming User Interfaces) – implementation needs improving, but there’s definitely something there. Plus I’ve hopefully set the tone of a product that has less hoops to jump through and more cake. (Achievements and rewards vs direction and requests).

All that said, the next run needs to progress quicker and feel much more immersive while remaining, you know, buildable at some point.

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