Tag : design

I've been learning about trade-off curves recently and they seem pretty useful for learning and making decisions when designing products.

After I explained to a friend that I used Keynote to re-design Skype in the classroom, he had a look of confusion. "Can you even design in it?" was his response. Good question. After using Keynote almost exclusively since joining Made by Many 3 months ago, I can say its been a refreshing experience. It's taken a bit of an adjustment and realisation of what can and can't be done with it, but there are a lot of benefits of breaking out of the Adobe-Industrial complex.

It's required a lot of secrecy here at Made by Many to keep it under wraps, but we're excited that the new ITV homepage went live earlier this week. Part of a complete rebrand of ITV, this has been a great opportunity to highlight the depth and breadth of ITV's content - showcasing the best of ITV right now whilst simultaneously reinforcing the broadcaster's new brand position: at the heart of popular culture.

The homepage is a result from collaboration between Made by Many and the in-house design and development teams at ITV.

We're looking for a senior designer (with at least 4 years experience) - a creative geek type obsessed with services, platforms and applications.

OATBook is a iPhone App to help users undergoing Oral Anticoagulant Therapy (OAT) monitor and record their medication.

Every designer has stories of the design that got away. The version that the client should have chosen or the version that was turned down because the client’s partner didn’t like purple... These are emotional reasons for a design not succeeding though. Here, I want to talk about the rational reasons behind work being rejected.

UPDATE: This position has now been filled.

Made by Many are looking for a interaction designer to intern with us over the summer for three months.

We're looking for someone's who graduating or taking a year out for work experience. Whilst it is a paid placement, we're not looking for someone to help out with our work. You'll be here to create something new.

We'll be teaming you up with a developer intern to build a new product, application and/or service. The two of you will be jointly responsible for coming up with an idea and then making it real. We're hoping you're going to create something exciting, transformational, a marriage of creativity and technology, maybe something that makes us see the world in a new way... Everything is up for grabs, the only limit is time.

You'll be involved at every stage, from workshops and idea creation to prototyping and high-fidelity designs. We see design as a mix of thinking, collaborating and learning - being comfortable explaining your work and visualising your ideas using pen and paper is just as important (if not more so) as being able to use Photoshop and Illustrator.

Above all, this job requires a passion for combining design and technology. If this sounds like your thing, send an email to tomh@madebymany.co.uk. Tell us about yourself, show us your portfolio and convince us why you are right for the job. Please keep it short and to the point. No recruiters.

For a while I’ve been troubled by the effect that language can have on the group design process. When we began to come up with ideas and solutions for ITV’s online news proposition, we used terminology to share our individual understanding and to communicate different solutions between us - we would use the words “feed” and “stream” interchangeably, as were phrases like “topic landing page” and “dynamically generated index page”. You could say that this is a natural symptom of having multiple humans from different backgrounds with different mindsets working together on the same shared problem. We want very different people working together, this is good. But what we want less of is the misunderstandings, confusion and antagonistic recollections. We want more group flow, enthusiasm, cohesion and personal investment so that we can use less energy for more benefit.

After a week of BBQs, speeches, panels, margaritas, putting names to faces and more BBQs I’ve landed back at Made by Many HQ and I want to share some of the Picle love.

I’m counting down the hours until thirteen of the many (including myself) head out to Austin for SXSW. Just as the tradition of us sending a swarm over to Texas is well established, so is the idea of South By ‘taking over’ our homepage for the duration. So, here’s a sneak peek at this year’s page (and a reminder of what’s come before).