Archive : April 2009

Recently we’ve launched a blog OolaMoola for our client Hearst Digital.

The blog is about how to live a fabulous lifestyle on a low budget. It consists of challenges that are taken by our creative and very determined editors StylishMoola and BirdyMoola, who know exactly what they want: get the best for less!

As a Made By Many designer, I’ve created more than a few blogs so far, however designingOolaMoola was a new and fun experience altogether.

Ok, so I guess the best part of it was that there was hardly any brief. There were no major constraints nor specific requirements. All I was asked was to create something inspiring, something that looks fresh and fun, and something that gives users a positive experience.

We’re in the process of redesigning our client pages and have noticed a trend where poster designers take a photograph of themselves holding up their work. Here’s an example of our own Metrotwin poster excellently demonstrated by Julia:

Hey ho cheerio – it’s time for my list of links that have been making us at Made By Many go ‘ooh’, ‘ahh’, or ‘hmm’ lately. 

1. Cat Shit One Movie Trailer: As Isaac very succinctly put it, words fail us. 

We’ve been working with LOVEFiLM for some time now. They’re a very exciting client whose business model is built around the internet. They’re also a very successful client, having just passed 1 million subscribers to their DVD rental service.

One of the projects we’ve been working on recently is the redesign of their film pages. These are absolutely at the heart of the service – they contain all of the information about each title that LOVEFiLM has, including user reviews, recommendations, interviews, news stories and cinema listings. Seeing as LOVEFiLM have over 65,000 titles on offer it’s important that they work hard.

Rather than simply showing you the great work that one of our Senior Designers, Julia, has created, I thought it might be useful to show the process behind the project…

Recently Rails 2.3 was released, with a number of new features.

One of these was the ability to set the created_at/updated_at time-stamped columns manually. Now, why anybody would want to do this currently escapes me – but that aside, those columns are now attr_accessible.

This means that anybody can set them by manually editing the forms on your site, so you can’t trust them to be correct. Your audit trail is no longer valid.

There’s some sort of renaissance bubbling. I’m sure of it. More and more people are coming out and speaking about this malaise that is afflicting the media/advertising/marketing/digital/interactive industry, so I thought I’d add my two-pennies worth. I mean any and all of the above-mentioned industries, and to simplify matters I’m going to henceforth refer to them as the communications industry, a broad umbrella term. OK, so many more people in the communications industry than before are voicing their honest thoughts about the state of the industry. Ben Malbon, Mark Earls, Gareth Kay, Robin Grant to start with. In the last couple of weeks that is. 

This post has been brewing inside of me for some time. It’s has finally been burped-up precipitated by Ben Malbon’s provocative post at BBH Labs (yes, we are genetically related – he is my uncle).

Ben asks the question, “Why isn’t there more great work in the interactive space?”, and it sparked rabid debate at the BBH Labs blog – in no small way helped by his Twitter ‘outreach programme’.

I’m not taking the piss when I say that it’s gathered a posse of mainly advertising folk – strategic planners and digital creative brains – in one place. It’s a kind of ‘dirty’ several dozen. It’s like Mad Men two-dot-oh without the cigarettes. But it’s generated a fascinating open conversation about a big problem: what do advertising agencies need to do about digital, or interactive, or whatever it’s called? The really interesting thing is that this conversation is happening in the open. The problem is both bewildering and widespread enough to have convened an itinerant community of interested people from competing agencies in discussion. The power of networks, eh?

You probably saw the Skittles debacle a while back. They basically turned their entire home page into a Twitter search for the word ‘skittles’.

What was quite an innovative idea opened Skittles up to quite some exploitation, people posted literally anything to get on their homepage, regardless of how gratuitous.

Whether you’re building a new website, or want to manage your community more effectively – moderation is a common requirement.

Unfortunately computers haven’t got to the stage where they can recognize libelous/offensive images – so UGC often has to get passed in front of a human moderator to get an accurate verdict.

I’ve been thinking of the concept of branded utility, and brands being useful, good or nice for some time.