Archive : July 2011

Lately I've been doing a lot of thinking about conferences. Partially because I'm looking for some good ones to add to my autumn calendar, but also because this evening my colleague Leila Johnston and I are hosting our own conference, Storywarp.

I'm a little nervous about the event – will people enjoy themselves? will I make a good moderator? will we have enough beer? – but I'm also really excited: I'm about to hear a lot of interesting ideas from bright people, and at least one of those people ISN'T a white male.  

Here are some things that have been mentioned in the office lately. Happy Tuesday!

As Facebook and Twitter aren't accessible from within China, most western brands aren't reaching people there online, including those using services like FB Connect etc. Even so, language and contextual relevance makes many branded web experiences in the west less useful in China. Solve this and brands have a massive opportunity to connect with this growing market. 

We’re extremely proud of our work on Skype in the classroom, which we’ve mentioned here in the past a couple of times. The community has now grown to over 14,000 teachers and that’s increasing every day.

When we entered it in the Service Design category at the Core 77 Design Awards, our hopes were high, and though we are a bit disappointed that it didn’t win (congrats to Open Ideo, who did), we are really glad to see it get a 'Notable Professional' mention.

Here’s our video submission that explains how we went about building it:

Web technology moves fast, especially now we've made it through the dark ages of Internet Explorer, however, it would seem that we're yet to reach the enlightenment, to shed the constraints of a single platform web. It's time to move on; it's no longer acceptable to create web interfaces that don't – even on the most basic level – embrace platform agnostic development.

Here are some of the links we sent round the office today:

This week, Raymond Lyttle joined us as Financial Controller. He used to manage finance at Thomson Tour Operators and Marsh Insurance, (the guy in the image above is not him, to be clear!) and is probably the least geeky of the Many (at least for now!). I asked Raymond a few questions as he settled into his first week at Made by Many:

1. What's your opinion on technology and how do you use it?

I thought I was fairly techy - till I got here! I'm nowhere near as techy as I should be if you compare me to the rest of Made by Many, but as far as the finance industry is concerned, I think I'm fine!

Amnesty International UK has just launched Amnesty TV, an online factual entertainment platform designed to humanise activism and inspire a mass audience to stand up for human rights. Its launch coincides with Amnesty's 50th anniversary and marks the natural next step in the evolution of campaigning and activism.

Amnesty is a longtime client of ours. In 2008 we created Protect The Human and we've had an ongoing role shaping Amnesty's social media strategy. Amnesty is the kind of organisation we're really proud to work with and we were thrilled to be asked to deliver the platform for Amnesty TV. 

This week, I came across some useful and neat-looking slides on design, (the latter of which is a good thing given the theme!).

First, from grammar to models and perception, Simon Collison, a freelance designer, writes about a dialect for design. The presentation has really clean graphics; don't forget to look at his website.   

This week Made by Many put on an event for the D&AD New Blood festival. As New Blood is designed to welcome graduates to the creative industry, we thought it best to hand over the floor to two of our most recently-graduated members of staff, Conor and Cath.