The problem of choosing the right sizes to design at is a false problem. The real problem is an inappropriate approach to designing in this medium. If you’re still using that approach don’t worry, it’s not your fault. We’ve all been guilty of it for a long time.

Designers have always (well, almost always) begun their design process by setting limitations to work inside. In print it was the size of the paper, for web it’s been the size of the screen. At first it was 640px, then we all jumped to 800, then 1024, and so-on. It’s always been a less than perfect approach because there is no such thing as a standard size for desktop, a standard size for mobile, or an acceptable compromise for any of them. Setting ourselves limits and designing inward from them has been working ok up until recently because up until recently the variation in device sizes wasn’t huge. Today there are simply too many bits of hardware out there that have so many different screen sizes, and even the ones that do have the same screen size often have different viewport sizes. We can’t design for some imaginary standard number of pixels anymore. We have no idea what size canvas people are viewing our stuff on.

What do we do then?

We start our design process in the browser, with real content – sorry, if you’re used to comping up in Photoshop first that’s not going to help overly much these days. It’s great for look and feel – incredibly important in fact because designing purely in the browser tends to produce boring predictable type-based designs. But forget trying to craft a complete PSD and then translate it into a website. That isn’t going to work well either. We need to be designing visuals as we build. The two can no longer be separated into differing stages, the one now informs the other.

• Start with the smallest layout
• Use liquid layouts only, no fixed width units anywhere.
• Stay with that layout and increase the browser width. When it looks funky, that’s a new break-point. Add a media-query and get designing from there up.
• Repeat the last step until there’s no bigger monitor in your possession.

Resources

If that’s left you with as many questions as when you started, you’ll do well to have a read of the following resources:

• Mobile First from A Book Apart.
• Mobile First an article from Net Magazine.
• Adaptive Web Design a small book by Aaron Gustafson.
• Responsive Web Design a small book by Ethan Marcotte.

Good luck, and have fun!

Note: We use this approach at View only when the project warrants it, due to the increase in time it takes compared with a traditional design process.
Note 2: This article was originally written for my personal blog.

Attending a marathon event, and not taking part would normally make me feel guilty, but not on this day. As I looked on at the hordes of fit and healthy runners doing their bit for charity, even with a double chocolate muffin in my hand, I felt proud.

The Royal Parks Half Marathon is a yearly event and, as you would expect, does what it says on the tin. But it’s not only a half marathon through London’s Royal Parks, but also a festival full of food, entertainment, fun and games.

After an early morning stroll through a slightly rainy Hyde Park I was struck with the sight of The Royal Parks Foundation Half Marathon. Wherever I looked, there was a piece of design created here at View Creative. I hadn’t fully grasped the scale of the work we had done until I was stood in the Festival Area, surrounded by it. It was pretty impressive if I may say so.

Heading over to the VIP area (with a little bit of hope of bumping into some celebrities), I picked up some of the breakfast on offer there, including the double chocolate muffin of course, and headed straight out to watch the race start. Once the runners had put my health to shame, I proceeded to meet up with Pete and take in the rest of the festival. From bands playing on stage, to stands promoting charities, to fun activities for all ages, I could see why The Royal Parks Foundation Half Marathon was crowned the winner of the Event Awards Best Outdoor Event of 2011.

Watching the runners return for the final stretch towards the finish line was a great sight, some barely breaking a sweat, some working as hard as they could to finish, some dressed as squirrels. The whole event was fantastic, the rain held off, and it was a great feeling to see the entire event branded with our hard work and to be involved in an event like this.

If you want to find out more about this award winning event and see our handy web design check out www.royalparkshalf.com

View Jollies

It’s fair to say as a company we get around a fair bit! Be it visiting clients locally, and those dotted across the country…Plus our little holiday jaunts abroad. With all this travelling about, Sean (our trusty in-house illustrator/stats geek), decided to document our travels by doing a great info-graphic. Click on the image to grab the A3 poster.

When we moved into our new headquarters, now affectionately known as View Towers, we had the best of intentions of decorating the interior. There was talk of creating a View mascot that would appear everywhere, unveiling a forest room with picnic facilities and many other off the wall (ahem) ideas.

Fortunately, we have been too busy with our clients’ work to find time to get creative with our walls. That was until Bree came along.

Bree Crum is currently at View on a 6 week work placement all the way from Ohio in the US of A. She is a talented young graduate and when we first saw her illustration and typography skills we had to put them to the test in the toilet!

“When was the last time someone asked you to draw on the walls? Probably never! When Wes asked me to doodle on the bathroom walls I thought he was crazy but I grabbed my pencil and paper and let the creativity flow. I’m so excited to be part of the decorating. There is no better feeling than knowing everyone is thinking of you while they are in the toilet! :)”
Bree Crum

1 room down, 19 or so to go. We’d love you to pop in and take a look when you’re passing. We will keep things ticking along with our own decorating so check back soon to see some progress.

Six of the View Creative print room, along with the boss, set off from Liverpool in the early hours of the morning, and after a quick flight, a frozen bacon butty and a bus ride into the city centre arrived at the apartment before heading over to the venue.

The Grand Canal Theatre, an impressive building built in the redeveloped docklands of Dublin was hosting the event and, set over three floors, the festival featured some design orientated shops, and smaller events dotted around the building, with the main event, a series of lectures and presentations taking place in the main theatre.

A crowd of people were already at the theatre when the team arrived and numbers steadily built up, Creative Review (who were covering the event) later mentioned that there were around 1000 people on average for each of the talks which was a pretty impressive feat for a relatively young design event.

Martin Haake

The opening lecture was from German designer Martin Haake. A Berlin based illustrator, Haake gave a light hearted insight into his work and processes including a portrait of Albert Einstein made out of Sausages. He set the tone for the rest of the event with a pretty informative approach that was interesting and gave you a good sense of his opinions on design, and the creative industry.

Aiden Grennelle


Straight up after Haake was Aiden Grennelle. Starting with his own background, Grennelle spoke about his inspirations, who he looked up to – in this case Joseph Müller Brochman, even to the point of Grennelle admitting that he would of been quite happy just copying the work of Brochman for the rest of his life, thats how much he admired it.

Grenelle spoke about his own work, broken up with visuals, the studios work, inspirations and stories from his career, including work going to print with a joke name by mistake, and Umpires chairs straight from Wimbledon.

Grennelle gave a very good account of what it’s like to be in the design world in the modern day design environment, and how they are a company that are trying to create a history and a reputation for themselves.

Studio AKA


Even though we are not animators we welcomed Philip Hunt of Studio AKAs invitation into his mysterious (to us) world of sketches, illustrations, 3d modelling, key framing and soundtracks that go into the melting pot to create their stunning animations. You’ll know their work from the long running campaign with the Lloyds TSB adverts and the 2010 Winter Olympics. It was reassuring to find out that even at this level their problems were similar to ours. Interpreting briefs and trying to get the message across to the client of what we think would be the best solution.

Scott Dadich


Dadich spoke mainly about the work he had done with the digital (iPad) version of the magazine, how function was created based on design, and not how design was limited by function. He mentioned how the availability of new revenue streams were having a massive impact on the company, through the availability of interactive ads, and to purchase (downloads) there and then.

Dadich was also able to rely on the celebratory status of the magazine by bringing in ads starring Will Ferrell, and name dropping always gives a good idea as to the scale that Wired Magazine works to.

After Dadich brought the day to close we headed off to the Temple Bar area – to eat and chat about the days highlights however on the way back to the apartments we did make a detour to the oldest pub in Dublin for the customary pint (or pints) of Guinness, on the way though we were witness to an amusing street act of sorts.

A man, staring at some friends inside a restaurant from the street, he then proceeded to lick the window, it was amusing how quick the group of people with him vanished as two police officers happened to be walking by at the exact moment the mans tongue hit the window.

Emily Forgot

After clearing the cobwebs of a long Friday and a few local beverages the night before it was refreshing to start Saturday with London based illustrator Emily Forgot. Her honesty and humble approach was an eye opener as she guided us through her graphic art. She taught us to put ourselves into our work (which became a theme for the weekend).

Emily likes legs and keeps showing us examples of how she has incorporated them into her fun and playful work examples, especially with her Selfridges hoardings where there were plenty of well crafted legs.

Nate Williams

From some eye candy for the guys we went and saw some eye candy for the girls, Nate Williams. A well travelled illustrator who spoke about his experiences from around the world, largely south America. While describing himself as an illustrator, Nate’s hand lettering and silk screening skills were impressive. Nate also described how he isn’t overly protective of his designs during his idea generation, and is quite happy to throw something out if he isn’t happy with it.

David Carson


Some love his work, some hate it but you have to respect this guy.

After showing up a matter of minutes before he was due on stage, then having to hold things up while the laptop was replaced with his own, the guy had everyone eagerly waiting. It’s safe to say he had a warm reception and with the auditorium completely full he began. There was no specific talk set-up, more a collection of other talks, snippets of work and general items picked at random from a ‘cluttered’ Mac desktop.

Carson’s whole talk felt as if it was a mish-mash of images, stories and bits about the days of surfer and ray-gun magazines, he almost came over slightly disinterested, but from talking to people and watching a few more of his talks this is just his style, and that was his message at the end of the day, design should be about your own style.

“NOBODY CAN PULL FROM YOUR EXPERIENCE SO USE IT IN YOUR WORK – IT WILL BE UNIQUE AND YOU’LL HAVE A LOT MORE FUN WITH IT.”

If he didn’t want to do it, he wouldn’t. He wants to do the work that he wants to do, and if he wants to go surfing inbetween he will, he’s not trying to be this big name designer, he just is.

After-party

Saturday was the night of the Absolut Offset Party at the Twisted Pepper but before we set off Dan had a ‘moment’ while cooking but luckily for us the fire department didn’t show up even when the alarm had been going for 10 minutes.

The event party brought both speakers and visitors together in a relaxed environment with live music across three floors of one of Dublin most popular clubs. The beer was flowing, a bit of networking, a face-full of glitter and a crawl home… we were almost ready for the final day of offset.

Sunday morning was a little ‘shaky’ but a walk across Dublin cleared any lingering after-effects from the previous nights fun and we were ready for the final day of events.

Lance Wymen

After groggily fumbling out of bed following the ‘Shinanigans’ of the night before, we quickly packed up our belongings and headed down town for an early morning Bacon Bap and then onto the Grand Canal Square for our last day at the Theatre. First up, bright and breezy, was the much anticipated, Lance Wyman, expecting the usual ego of a world famous designer we were pleasantly surprised how affable and humble Mr Wyman was, he started off with a preamble on his family history starting with his Great Grandfather who would regale the younger Wymans with tales of Billy the Kid and the ‘Wild West’.

He then moved onto his Professional Career, starting with some nice iconography for the Chrysler World Fair in 1964 and then moving on to highlight the amazing work that he did for the Mexico ’68 Olympics, knowing that Mexico City didn’t have the capacity or the finances to facilitate a massive rebuilding programme like it predecessor, this was Dubbed the ‘Graphic Olympics’ and the results were nothing short of spectacular. Other Highlights included the beautiful Branding and wayfinding icons designed for The National Zoological Park in Washington DC.

Tomer Hanuka

Tomer Hanuka showed us that it’s his attention to detail that makes his illustrations so captivating. The use of framing, perspective, color palette and use of light and shadow that makes his comic/graphic novel style illustrations come to life.

Still feeling a little worse for wear we were treated to a screening of Studio AKA’s adaptation of Oliver Jeffer’s book, Lost and Found. Some, were so caught up in the friendship between the boy and the penguin that they were brought to tears, well Naomi anyway.

Wooster Collective

The variety of visual art at Offset was reinforced by New York based Sara and Marc Schiller, also known as Wooster Collective, a showcase of street art. View Creative are based in the sleepy town of Rhos on Sea in North Wales and are sheltered from any decent street art so when Wooster Collective gave us an insight into the process, reasoning, messages and unity that street art offers. We were inspired, before long you might even see this influence within the studio!

Hunger was calling again so the blind started leading the blind. 45 minutes later and a large portion of Dublin traversed, food was being served up at the quirky ‘Mona Lisa’, set in an old tobacconist, a perfect ‘last meal’ was enjoyed before heading back to the final presentation of the day.

Gary Baseman

The events finale was something special, and something that none of us were prepared for. Gary Baseman’s world of shoons, ha cha cha’s and not forgetting his well travelled best friend Toby was for many the highlight of the event. Baseman, can only be described as slightly mad, and therefore went down very well with the View Creative lot and we couldn’t have asked for a better closing to this amazing event. A big thanks to the Offset team for putting on an absolute brilliant event, and of course to View Creative and our clients for letting a large portion of the team go off for a ‘Jolly’!

VC with Mr David Carson

A small mention must also be made to the line which will go down in View Creative History, “Lick my face” – You know who you are!

The soon-to-be-released IE9 comes with a feature that allows it to render in both IE7 and IE8 Modes. In these two modes, Microsoft ‘fixed’ the parser bug that affected the actual IE7 and IE8. This fix breaks the @font-face syntax for those compatibility modes.

FontSpring: Further Hardening of the Bulletproof Syntax

Yes, you read that right. Microsoft specifically include modes to emulate IE7 and IE8 while you’re using IE9 – that’s good, it means old creaky websites that are badly programmed and don’t work in IE9 mode can be seen OK in IE7/8 mode. But in their infinite wisdom they’ve changed IE7 and IE8 so that those modes don’t actually emulate IE7 or IE8. Let repeat with less verbosity: the goal of those modes is to exactly mimic IE7 and 8. MS have deliberately “patched” them, and now they do not.

This is <sarcasm>so great</sarcasm> for us web developers – thanks MS for giving us two new FrankenBrowser versions of IE to have to test against because they have their own quirks. You’re f****** geniuses.

For the ever suffering Web Developer, here’s some new code to get font embedding to work in the real IE7/8, the new FrankenBrowser IE7/8, and every other sane browser in the land.

Hello View team!

I just wanted to wish you a happy christmas time and a happy new year!

A little early maybe- but we got so much snow in Austria, that it feels like christmas already…
and since christmas lights are in the print room from august… It doesn’t feel too early…

have a nice christmas time!
Eva

During these 8 weeks I learned more than in three years at college. I was entrusted with different kinds of jobs and a wide range of design tasks… and I loved it! I even got the chance to expand the View branding for print and web.

I am so happy that I got the opportunity to learn from such a great team, which always encouraged me to go crazy and to have fun with my work.

Thank you View Creative! I really had a great time! Yours Eva.

The details of our journey down to Brighton deserve their own post, so they’ll be saved for another day. Suffice to say – (somehow) we got there. And by there, I mean here. dConstruct 2010 itself was a spread of 9 speakers across the Friday in Brighton Dome. For those only wanting to skim, we can sum up our high and low points thusly:

The Day in Graph Form

As you can see, there was a definite double dip. As a group we seem to have had pretty similar experiences through the day. A great start, rough middle and strong ending.

There were 9 speakers on the day. Of the nine (in my opinion) there were 3 that stood out head and shoulders above the rest.

Marty Neumeier // The Designful Company

• You gotta design.
• Things can be good, and they can be different. Things are made in all four combination of this (Good & Different, Good & Not Different, Bad & Not Different and Bad & Different). The ones that last and change things are the Good & Different type. When making something different don’t be put off with some negative feedback – people are scared by things they don’t recognise.
• Innovation is not a strategy – its marketing rubbish. It means nothing with out continuous work.

Tom Coates // Everything The Network Touches

• The transformative infrastructure of today are api’s. Data is connected.
• By building the api’s we can let people take things to places new.
• You can’t have too many transitions in on a slide.

Merlin Mann // Kerning, orgasms and those goddammed Japanese toothpicks

• It’s good to be nerdy. Being a nerd means you care about something.
• Most people are nerds about something. The great things happen when a group of people are nerdy about overlapping things.
• Some people will never get the nerdyness. For some it will always be just a job.
• Keep an eye out on what you need to be nerdy on next otherwise one day you’ll be left behind when everything moves on.
• Know when to move on, when to quit, and when to stick with it. (oh come on – that’s a hard one)

The Rest

I don’t want to slag off any of the other speakers, and doubtless their individual talks had their own unique merits, however none of the others really struck a cord with me (or my colleagues). Likely due to the design focused nature of them, some we found to be just to “fluffy”, forced or stretched. This tweet from the day sums it up:

If your talk can be summed up in a single tweet – maybe it wasn’t a full talk topic #hashtagredacted. someone on twitter

Summing up the other speakers talks as short as I can:

• Brendan Dawes – Boil, Simmer, Reduce do things
• David McCandless – Information Is Beautiful – make infographics
• Hannah Donovan – Jam Session: What Improvisation Can Teach Us About Design – a musical interlude
• James Bridle – The Value Of Ruins – a history lesson
• John Gruber – The Auteur Theory Of Design – a lesson in movie theory
• Samantha Warren – The Power and Beauty of Typography – typefaces are like shoes

EDITORS FOOTNOTE (MC): If you’re still reading and crave just a little bit more, you are best heading over to the slightly fuller and slightly more whizz-bang version of this post over on Mr Bradbury’s own site.

Ever had one of those day’s where you just can’t put your finger on why there’s a little black cloud permanently hovering over your head, well yesterday was one of those for me, it started off with a banging head and a gloomy drive to work.

To cheer myself up I decided to chronicle my mood on the hour from 6am ‘til 6pm and make a chart of it, here’s the result…

That’s great, but there are some considerations for those of us that build websites and want to take advantage of these new high density displays. If we carry on building sites as we do now, all of the sites as seen on an iPhone 4 will continue to look “blocky”. Uh-oh!

What a web browser does on high definition displays

It essentially ignores the high definition. Sounds crazy doesn’t it. Trouble is, if it treated a pixel as a pixel, like a browser does on normal displays, then your webpage would be tiny and unreadable because a pixel on one of these shiny new displays is a quarter of the size of a regular pixel. Unless you want to hand out magnifying glasses to your site visitors that’s a problem, and the browser manufacturers knew that’d happen. So for all intents and purposes the browser treats a square of four physical pixels as a single pixel. That way the site stays the right size and everything is readable without having to squash the screen against your face. But, that means all the images we put on a website suddenly look old-school blocky. And that stands out like a sore thumb when you see it for real.

How to fix that for your CSS supplied images

We can tell the browser “hold it old chap, this isn’t some ragamuffin old school website! I know all about your new-fangled display so there’s no need to do the pixel-pretence dance! Here, have a high-definition image instead of that normal one”. And suddenly your design looks sharp as a razor again. Here’s the CSS magic incantation to do that:

/* iPhone with Retina display */
    @media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2) {
      .hd {
      background-image : url(600x600.jpg);
      background-size: 300px 300px; }
    }

What we are doing is using the media query to check that we’re on a high-density display. If we are, then the browser applies the CSS rules inside the query. Excellent. What we do inside of the media query is set a new background-image on the elements we want to “upgrade”. That image is exactly the same as the default one, but it’s twice as wide and twice as tall. After we’ve swapped the image we then use a new bit of CSS to say to the browser: OK, now pretend that the image is only half the size it is, so that it fits the design properly! The browser dutifully pretends that the image is the same dimensions as the original, but it isn’t really, and the browser can now use real-pixels instead of pretend-pixels. Boom – the image is sharp instead of blocky.

Doing a similar trick for content images

If the CSS trick is to load an image twice as wide and twice as tall but then squash it down again, does the same idea work for HTML images? Yes, yes it does. So you can do this:

<img src="800x800.jpg" width="400" height="400" />

But you wouldn’t ever do that. Not really. Why not? Well because it’s a massive waste of bandwidth for any non-hd device, and because you need to know the dimensions of the image for it to work. And if you’re handing a site over to a client for them to add and modify content it’s unlikely they’re going to be able to do that sort of thing.

Automating the HTML image replacement

Fine, so it works technically but it’s got a few drawbacks. Let’s fix a few of those drawbacks by copying the CSS methodology. Here’s our strategy:

• We’ll assume that there isn’t going to be a HD sized image replacement for every <img /> on the site, so we’ll write some jQuery to look for images with a class of “hd” and only replace those.
• We’re sticking to a simple naming convention. The standard sized image is whatever filename you like, and the hd version is the same filename but with “-hd” tagged on the end.

So the jQuery does this:

• Asks the browser if we on a device with a high density display. If not, we bail out and leave the existing image alone, otherwise we;
• Look for images with a class of “hd”
• Change the src attribute by adding “-hd” to the image filename
• Wait for the new image to load so that we know what dimensions it has
• Divide the width of the new image by two and apply the width attribute to the img tag

Job done.

Here’s the jQuery that does that:

$(document).ready(function(){
  /* Only apply if we're on an HD iPhone/iPod */
  if(window.devicePixelRatio >= 2) {
 
    // for every image with a class of "hd"...
    $("img.hd").each(function() {
 
      // get the image src and dimensions
      var old_src   = this.src;
      var box_width = this.width;
 
      // append "-hd" to the image filename
      this.src = old_src.substr(0,old_src.lastIndexOf(".")) 
               + "-hd"
               + old_src.substr(old_src.lastIndexOf("."));
 
      // wait for the hd image to load so we can get its dimensions
      $(this).load(function(){
        // make sure the image is sized correctly,
        // even if there isn't a html width attribute
        if(this.width != box_width) {
          var hd_width  = $(this).width();
          var new_width = hd_width/2;
          $(this).width(new_width);
        }
      });
 
    });
  }
});

View the demonstration

Here’s a bare-bones demo page. You’ll need an iPhone 4 to see it working (and that’s the point).

‘Free pitching’ seems to be more common within the public sector. Clients appear to be preoccupied with ‘box ticking’ to defend their discussions rather than hiring the agency most qualified to do the job. We witnessed a classic example of this, where the client, a local authority, asked five agencies to pitch for a new brand identity. The brief was sketchy, (really!) and so we declined the invitation to submit a visual response. We defended our position with why it would be irresponsible to submit ideas in response to an inadequate brief.

Needless to say the client selected the agency that ‘threw’ some ideas together, (and ticked that little box). Predictably, the new identity failed on so many levels and as a result is slowly being withdrawn. Yes the client ‘ticked their boxes’ but was it money well spent? What about research? What was this brand based on? And where was the evaluation?

In many cases poorly briefed projects include a reluctance to disclose budget. What’s the big secret? Instead, clients rely on commercial agencies to work for free with no guarantee of compensation or knowledge of the prize if they do win! It’s free and blind pitching with a 1 in 5 chance of getting paid. Sounds an attractive proposition doesn’t it!?

Finally, another sensitive issue for design agencies. After all the hard work, the thinking, the effort, the time and money spent on your ‘free pitch’ the only thanks you get is the obligatory letter with those so familiar words “Unfortunately on this occasion… blah, blah, blah. How does that help anyone? Where’s the feedback? How can anyone learn from this? It’s not a good return on all the hard work, a letter to shred! Save yourself the cost of a stamp and don’t bother, unless you’re serious and really want to make a difference.

Still think ‘free pitching’ is acceptable? Here’s 5 more good reasons, courtesy of NO!SPEC

1. No guarantee

Designers sell two things – ideas and time. ‘Free pitches’ require a designer to invest in both with no guarantee of compensation. The cost of free pitches is absorbed by design companies, their employees and clients alike. More specifically, design companies for the loss incurred for unsuccessful pitches, employees for unpaid overtime accrued either directly or otherwise, and by clients who ultimately bear the amortised costs of free pitching once included (inevitably) in a design company’s operating costs.

2. Unprofessional

Most professional-level designers won’t participate in speculative presentations since they take away time, a non-renewal asset, and resources away from bona fide projects with guaranteed revenue. The result is designers who participate in spec presentations are typically less experienced.

3. Lack of research

Successful design requires an investment in time to appropriately research the client company, its competitive landscape and the audience for the project. Since many speculative projects are run on a compressed schedule, adequate research cannot be done, resulting in designs that are more “pretty pictures,” rather than strategic design backed up with facts. (Therefore the true capabilities of a design company are never considered).

4. Needs of the client not met

Speculative requests are often a result of “I’ll know it when I see it,” thinking on the part of the client. The problem here is that it’s self-centered point-of-view rather than a position serving the needs and wants of the audience. We have numerous case studies where this has happened, the client selecting what they want rather than what their target market need. Evaluation is key in achieving results.

5. Reduces value

Speculative projects reduce the value of the client/designer relationship. In point of fact, there is no relationship, often the tendering / pitching process prevents the design agency from ever meeting with the client. Instead the process becomes a purely competitive environment that 98% of the time goes down to price. Again this hinders a design agency from doing their best work. Most agencies that are willing to work on ‘free pitches’ do so because they have time on their hands, you have to ask yourself why?

So, if you’re a client you should ask yourself the following questions:

Would you work for free?
Would you hire someone you’ve never met?

We understand why clients ask for creative submissions its a way of testing the agency, to get them to produce ideas, see how they work and more importantly see what they would do for them. This is fine, but it’s a lot to ask for free! If you want an agency to take your business as seriously as you do, you’re not going to achieve this by asking them to produce unpaid work. Why are you asking them to work for free? Is it your lack of understanding of the industry? Perhaps you can’t afford to pay for any design work? Are you unsure about your goals and objectives? The project may not go ahead (we’ve seen this happen so many times!) Any of these throw up warning signs for professional agencies.

Most agencies have a portfolio of previous work, as a client this should be sufficient for you to evaluate the quality and diversity of their work and to determine if they are suitable for your project.

If you work in the public sector and require the statutory three comparison quotation rule (for that all important box ticking!) then this is the approach we suggest you take to get the best out of your agency.

1. Prepare a clear and accurate brief (you will be taken much more seriously if its comprehensive!)
2. Be clear about what your budget is
3. Identify a selection of agencies that you would consider as professional
4. Meet with them at their offices, members of the team, evaluate their portfolio, ask questions, speak to their clients
5. Select the 3 agencies you would be happy to work with (ideally all of similar size and experience).
6. Brief the selected agencies, a good agency will ask lots of questions and will want to fully understand your objectives
7. Following the briefing ask the agencies to submit their costings (estimates are FREE!)
8. Select the agency you feel is most experienced to do the job, not just the cheapest

And lastly, if you or your boss is still insisting on getting an agency to prepare a creative response, then you will need to provide a fee, it’s only fair, after all your asking the agency to do the work!

View Creative supports NO!SPEC

Our site is like a cupcake. A big one, and instead of being made with flour, eggs, sugar and water, this one is made out of html, css and javascript, and rather than being a delicious treat you might find on naomi’s desk, this one lives online and gets indexed by the Google. Ok, so the analogy breaks down if you analyse it too much, but go with it for now.

The site design is the icing on top of the cake. Tasty, sweet, colorful and entirely lacking in any lasting nutritional value. If we only ever ate icing sugar we’d all have terrible teeth, that’s why the bulk of the site is made up of our work. That portfolio you’ve so lovingly drooled over – it’s the spongy middle, the cake in our cupcake.

But I’m interested in the cup!

Cupcakes are nice and all that, but I can see you’re really interested in that little paper cup that holds it all together. That’s the cup in our sordid affair, and that’s the bit I do, it’s the mold we pour the uncooked batter of a site into, to turn the delicious wet mess into something that resembles a confectionary based treat.

The specifics of our cup

At View we use (and love) ExpressionEngine for anything that vaguely resembles a website. We’ve got good reason too, it’s a seriously good product, brilliantly easy to use, super extensible and flexible and I’ll stop here because I’m sounding too much like a salesman. Let’s just say we’re rather fond of it.

Imagine Expression Engine is the oven that we bake our cakes with. The paper cup is the specific to each site and we use our tremendous skills in making exactly the right shape and size for the job in hand. In the case of our site, it’s a (relatively) small site, without too much complex functionality going on so from that point-of-view it’s a small circular paper-cup.

If you’re even more interested in the specifics of our cup, well great, you must be a bit weird, but I think we’d get on well. We’ll be going over some detailed examples in the coming weeks, if you’re very lucky you’ll even get code examples! I bet you can’t wait for that now can you.

In the meantime, enjoy our tasty cupcake.

Masters of cooking

Holding back the creative flow for a couple of hours this afternoon, we took time out to congregate in the overcast and often neglected View Towers car park. Following a morning building flat-pack picnic tables, the boss eventually got the beers (and Pimms, with ice) in. The barbecue dusted down and the charcoal white-hot we were ready for some serious quality control for Edwards of Conwy. After weeks of work researching, consulting and designing their new packaging styles, we took a few more seconds to appreciate them and got straight to the meat of the matter, b-dum-tish.

After a glut of meatball and sausage innuendos (the staple of any barbecue, right?) there will likely be a grand unveiling of our Edwards of Conwy packaging in our online portfolio next week; as soon as the super-secretive embargo is lifted. Update: here’s our portfolio showcase for Edwards

Acknowledgement and a tip of the cap to the attendance of the burgeoning TasticMedia empire, and to Kev Adamson ; who’s hair as ever, was sculpted to casual perfection. Champion!

A long and winding road, actually.

Work on the new View began in February 2009 (February 2009!), when we finally found a spare five minutes between client jobs, looked at our existing site (which was already five years old by then) and decided that, really this time, it needed to move with the times.

Unfortunately, when you’ve got a building full of creative perfectionists, getting something everyone is happy with is close to impossible. The design team were feeling creatively constrained by the web process (grey-box models, wireframes, techy talk, and more acronyms than you can fit in a pillow case and smother a print designer with) – so we asked our designers to travel to the top of a mountain, free themselves from any constraints, and come up with their own website-zen. Wow did we get a varied set of work!

Soon after everyone had gotten fired up and were delivering little bits of design magic we hit busy-season and had to put the new View site down. As it turned out we didn’t get chance to work on it again until Christmas. You can see some of those initial ideas at the bottom of the post, and in the end we’ve taken concepts and elements from pretty much all of them in creating a final design.

During the Christmas period we got a visual nailed down, the HTML/CSS/JS mock-ups complete, and the majority of the Expression Engine build finalised. The site as you see it now was largely complete by the end of January 2010, before yet again we got too busy and had to put it down. This history of having to delay our own site so often is the main reason why it’s live right now. We know that it is not quite as polished as we want (did I mention we’re all perfectionists?), but until our site went live it could be put on a back-burner. Which in turn meant it would never go live. Which is why we made a tough choice and spent the last week feverently polishing as much as we could (even our desks), fixing issues, adding more content, shooting photo’s, and then put the whole lot live when we thought most people would be seeing what we wanted them to see. We’re going to continue improving the site during spare moments, whenever we get them (my personal hit-list includes re-shooting the rather rushed “web” section of the portfolio, a redesign for iPhone sized devices, iPad enhancements, further Internet Explorer refinements, and a properly designed print style sheet).

Looking back

17 months before going live, discussing the new site ideas

One of the nice things about being your own client is getting to push the boat out as far as you can. We’d like to think that we’ve done so at all levels with this new site. From a design perspective we think we finally hit the perfect balance between the two aspects of View’s core business: print work, and web work. The site echo’s both without feeling compromised to either, which was a major design goal.

We’ve taken Expression Engine and pushed it a long way to allow us to quickly update any section of the site, pull in information from external sites, and generally manage the content in an intuitive and flexible way (I should mention that Joel is giving an Expression Engine focused talk at the EECI conference 2010 in Leiden if you’re a techie and fancy learning more).

From a front-end perspective I got to play with HTML5 for the first time and use some advanced CSS (If you’re using Chrome or Safari, you’ll get the full experience, less capable browsers diminish in line with their reduced capabilities). Sadly Internet Explorer was yet again a thorn in my side, and the more semantic HTML5 elements had to be dropped due to a lack of time to find fixes for The Little Browser That Couldn’t

In the end, I’m proud of the site we’ve managed to create, and it’s nice to have pushed some boundaries while we did it. Let us know what you think.