Tag : Made by Many

A guest blog by Robin Pembrooke, Managing Director online and on demand at ITV

A little over a year ago we kicked off the design process for our project to re-conceive and launch a brand new ITV News offering online. I'm writing on budget day 2012 and as we speak the product is up and running http://www.itv.com/news/, and being used by journalists around the country as the nation discovers what’s in store for the financial year ahead.

A combined team has delivered the project from Made by Many, ITV and ITN. Before we began there was much discussion internally about how much effort we should be putting into news online. Given the dominance of the BBC in the UK, the massive resources that the newspaper groups throw at it, and the general difficulty that everyone has in making money from online news, why would we bother?

On the left, a shot taken from the Home Page; on the right, the simple drag-and-drop Admin tool that was created for the newsroom. 

For the past ten months Made by Many has been working with ITV and ITN to transform ITV News into a multichannel news service by adding online, mobile and connected TV to broadcast television. Leading on a live news feed, the first web, mobile and tablet releases of a radically different digital news service went live on Monday 19th March. This is the story.  

At the end of last year the nice folks over at Computer Arts filmed us for their Studio Life series and featured us in the magazine.

Many thanks to @pauljwyatt his team and @ComputerArts

This week, we welcomed Will Roissetter to the Many. Being such a fresh addition, he's yet to be given an avatar. So while we wait to put a face to a name on the blog, we thought we'd ask him to introduce himself to you in his own words. 

Last week, we had our first ever summer party in our lovely new premises by the canal. People came, ate the awesome BBQ food that Oli was patiently and artfully serving up, drank, danced - in short, they partied. Lots of people said they loved our new home - some probably almost as much as we do. Marawa the Amazing provided some excellent hula-hooping entertainment - you can check her performance out here.  

Here's a video with some photos - in reverse chronological order (why not!).

This week, the Many got an addition to the ranks in the form of Leila Johnston, who does an amazing range of things, right from being a published author to writing for Wired UK and being the founder of the Hackers! newspaper. We’re super-happy to have her with us. I sat down with her for a bit to see what makes her tick, and what she’s looking forward to at Made by Many.  Here goes:

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What’s your favourite book?

I have many: Corvus by Esther Woolfson, Digital Retro by Gordon Laing, Room by Emma Donoghue, and both of Cath O'Flynn's  gorgeous novels.

Several weeks ago Nicki Sprinz aka @sprinzette– new to The Many and as yet sans avatar – posted her thoughts on Lean with a little intro from Justin. Now it's my turn to host!

.... and over to Nicki:

"Six weeks in and what have I learnt? A lot. And it's been fun too. Here's my take on how ideas are born at Made by Many:

Hopefully you’ve read Heather’s post about how she came to Made by Many to do an internship and what she learnt in all that time with us. It’s been a great 6 months (she left last weekend), and we all really enjoyed having her here, not to mention how we appreciate the fantastic design work she did on a number of our projects. I got her to answer a few questions before she left – here’s what she said:

This week is a big one for Made by Many. 

In three days we move from BBH to our new home at Diespeker Wharf, where we'll have five times as much space as we do now, and a real 'maker-space'. BBH London has been an amazing base for us for three years and we will miss the many good friends we've made there. As a place to start a business, I don't think it could have been better. The agency is full of awesome, clever people. But being three years old is like being a teenager in internet years and we needed to get our own space. More on all that in another post.

Timed to coincide with the move, we have been working on an exciting new website (err, yes, it's this one if you're looking at the dot com site). 

I was invited to talk at a SheSays event yesterday on presentation skills. My talk wasn’t so much about presentation skills as it was about Made by Many’s approach to presenting our work. In fact I was pleasantly surprised when I was told that they were interested in hearing me speak about Made by Many’s work because we ‘visualise a lot’ and also present our work ‘in interesting ways, including showcasing work in progress, sketching etc – the presentation is designed & considered as much as the work’. Kind words from Mel, one of the organisers. Here’s how the presentation flowed, it’s on Slideshare at the end of this post or see it on Slideshare here.