Julia Wojcicka's posts

We’re very excited here at Made by Many to announce the second release of Ready for Ten. It’s got a new look and plenty of exciting new features!

Ready for Ten, a parent-powered website for mums and dads of 6-9 year olds, was created in January 2010. It started as a blogging platform stacked with tips, conversation and support for parents. In the past few weeks we worked on growing the platform, developing new features and evolving the look.

The Skillscape campaign is the most exciting feature of all. The aim of this campaign is to create a map of the UK’s best spaces for kids to play and practise their skills, from parks and playgrounds to sports clubs.

Yesterday I listened to a very inspirational talk on TED by Steve Jobs ’How to live before you die‘. By telling 3 stories from his life Steve is urging people to pursue their dreams and trust their intuition.

Connecting the dots

Steve always followed his intuition. He never graduated from the university. He didn’t know what he wanted to do in his life and didn’t think that college would help him figure it out. He dropped out of Reed College just after 6 months. By dropping out he could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest him and join the ones that looked interesting. For example he took calligraphy class to learn about typefaces, about what makes great typography great. 10 years later when designing the first Macintosh computer he used his knowledge and skills to design the first computer with beautiful typography. Much of what he stumbled into by following his curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Key learning points:

Recently while on holidays in Melbourne, I went to see an exhibition in The National Gallery of Victoria by hyperrealist sculptor Ron Mueck. Having heard about his lifelike but not life-size human sculptures, I was very excited to enter into his world. I was keen to see the way Mueck plays with scale and creates human sculptures presented at all stages of life.

As I entered the room, I encountered the first sculpture of the exhibition “Dead Dad”; a representation of Mueck’s dead father, naked, lying on the floor, only three feet long. The hyper-realism of the model was so striking that I could feel the fragility and the morbid temperature of the body. The fact that he was naked and exposed to the fully-clothed onlookers made him look extremely vulnerable, and I felt a slight discomfort looking at him.

We’ve recently redesigned and launched new campaign pages on Protect The Human. The aim of the redesign was to improve the user experience and usability, which would lead to the increase in numbers of people getting involved in the campaigns for human rights.

Campaigns play a crucial role on Protect The Human. They are designed to highlight the ongoing problems happening in the world. Each campaign has a range of actions for people to take in order to fight the injustice.

To improve the campaign pages and increase the number of people taking actions, we’ve done some major changes. We started with the campaigns index page.

The previous home page had grown organically over the last few years and hadn’t keep up with how the business has developed. Since the last major update LF have launched a new magazine section, cinema listings and video on demand – none of which were highlighted on the home page very well. Many pages of the site have also been updated to a new, more visually appealing look and feel, which now needed to be echoed on the homepage.

We’ve recently launched an activity dashboard for Audi at Goodwood festival.

Goodwood Festival of Speed is the world’s biggest and most diverse celebration of the history of motor sport and car culture. Audi UK has had a significant presence at the event for 14 successive years. The 2009 festival took place on the 3 – 5 July.

Last month Audi asked us to design a dashboard that would bring this and previous years photos, videos and tweets taken from behind the scenes by Audi and their loyal fans at the Goodwood festival.

It was a very quick project to embrace, and I was assigned to design it!

Following up on Tim’s recent post on the new Protect The Human homepages, I’m going to write about the process I went through to create the final homepage designs.

1. Sketching

I started with sketches. Sketching ideas on the paper helped me visualize quickly what we wanted to achieve through the new homepages and how we wanted to address current site’s issues.

It was an easy way to present the initial ideas to people involved in the project (client, creative director, developer, etc.), and made it easy to apply any changes required. It was also much quicker than creating the initial visuals in photoshop!

Mark Boulton was one of the speakers at this years’ conference Future Of Web Design (FOWD) in London. His presentation ‘Typography’s not on the Web, it IS the Web’ was the highlight of the day! It was very well prepared and very informative talk on the state of typography today.

Here are the following highlights:

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.

My colleagues and I went to Dconstruct – a one-day conference about designing and building the latest generation of social web applications.

All of the talks were interesting, although I found some too techie for me as a designer. However, one talk by Joshua Porter was particularly interesting.