Blog

One (or two) of the things that characterise the Web 2.0′sphere is (a) an almost unnatural predisposition to omitting vowels and (b) delight in new stuff.It was only a matter of time before The Onion entered the fray with frrvrr.com, touting a social network service that introduces you to people you don’t know, based on shared purchase history and your browsing habits, medical records and CCJ’s.

How do you create a distinctive look and feel for a website that helps set it apart from the rest of the marketplace? Type, font, colour, image choice? Where does the inspiration come from for creating the best solution at the right time for the right client?

I recently found myself asking just that after finishing a project. Before I started designing I knew that one of my key tasks was to find a typographic style that would not only unify the site’s content but also make the site feel different from its well established competition.

Lots of friends, colleagues and clients have expressed bafflement at the lead story on the front page of New Media Age last week. NMA suggested very explicitly (but inaccurately) that Hearst is retreating from its web strategy. We’ve been working with Hearst on strategy and design for over a year now and we knew this wasn’t the case. As planned, Hearst is simply going to be folding some old print title websites into the women’s 35+ digital brand Allaboutyou.com, soon to go onto a new platform with complete redesign.

(And, by the way, we’re currently helping Hearst Digital implement the UK’s second manifestation of social media software Pluck – and it might be the first if we can get in ahead of The Guardian).

I find it hard to imagine a scenario when it would be appropriate – other than in a totally ironic way – to use any of the templates provided at Template Central.

We went to mashup* Events Widgets last night. There were about 200 people there, four panelists and some people demo’ing new stuff. I went along to find out what is happening on the widget scene. I was hoping to hear about some concrete examples, and was interested in hearing how people, brands, media owners are making money from widgets. So was everyone else, and the audience attacked.

Adweek published a great article this week by Benjamin Palmer of the Barbarian Group. It it, he challenges the ad industry to stop being scared, embarrassed and confused by “Web 2.0″ and to start exploiting crowd-sourced creativity from within as well as radically new ways of working together. He urges both advertising creative and television commissioning people to learn from the way ideas are generated and developed in a Web 2.0 world.

Images from the Flickr Coversourcing pool

Random House have come up with a very good wheeze to promote the upcoming book ‘Crowdsourcing’. Crowdsourcing, for the unitiated is:

Here at Made By Many we are technology agnostic. Primarily because we believe a client should use the best technology solutions to fit them and fit the problem we are trying to solve. We work with lots of in-house technology teams and out-sourced partners for clients, offering technologyconsultancy wrapped into a holistic offering on next-generation website problems.

That’s not to say we don’t have technology preferences. With all things being equal for greenfield deployments we can work with the best technology to do the job. That’s why we have delivered several solutions using Ruby On Rails and use WordPress for delivering blog solutions, such as this one.