S8080 Blog

We have worked with Welsh schoolchildren to create a game, allowing pupils to create their ‘perfect school councillor’.

The game was designed an built by our illustration and Flash teams, based on sketches and ideas from pupils at Ysgol Niwbwrch, Anglesey, after the Schools Councils Wales ran a competition to win prizes of up to £1000 for their school.

The youngsters’ ideas were amazing – and the presentation of their game was first class. We have heard that they are very happy with the end results. Tough customers indeed!

Mike Harvey explains why you should bother, for the Times Online.

What is Twitter?
At its simplest, Twitter is a mini-blog where you record your thoughts or what you are up to in 140 characters or less. The enforced brevity of the service keeps the chat pithy; users often highlight favourite stories on the web, post pictures or talk about news or TV shows.

My guide

1. Sign up and make your first Tweet… “This is my first Tweet”. Everybody does.
2. About 30 people will suddenly follow you.
3. Wahay – you have followers – be prepared to lose between one and three days of your life telling these 30 strangers your every move (they are ‘follower spam’, but you won’t care, you’ll be in denial) .
4. Start following Stephen Fry. Everybody does.
5. After a short while, you’ll probably realise that nobody really cares that you have just read Truman Capote or had Lincolnshire sausages for breakfast (and you’ll probably realise you don’t care what Stephen Fry has had for breakfast either).
6. You’ll then go back to what you were doing before.

The big ‘BUT’

If you have something interesting to say, something people will find useful, well that’s a whole different ballgame.

Search for a guru in your field, follow them and you’ll see why they bother. If you are a consultant, Twitter can be a very important part of building up ‘Me Inc.’

If you run a restaurant, tell people about that fantastic organic smallholding that is supplying you – tell them when to come in for the best leeks they have ever tasted.

If you run a tourist attraction, tell people about the special events, give some ‘locals only’ knowledge, give your followers special offers.

Keep it chatty, keep it informal, keep it interesting, make sure it’s valuable to someone, don’t sell – give, keep an eye on the effort you put in – and what you get back out of it.

Finally, brand up your Twitter page and find a way to publish your Tweets  to your website or blog.

Just don’t post about your breakfast.

Clever advert for Eurostar found on Inspire me, now!

My kids (like most little kids), love tunnels. This would have them hyperventilating and Joe would probably grab the handbrake.

Whilst doing some research on mobile web design, I was looking for information on how to cater for the wide range of devices and screen sizes that are out there, and came across a useful article at mobiForge.com: Effective Design for Multiple Screen Sizes.

It provides some handy statistics on the most common screen sizes for mobile devices; I was amazed that 128 pixels is the most common width for a mobile (I would’ve imagined it to be a little bigger). It actually turns out that most devices share one of three widths: 128, 176, or 240 pixels. These values are generally getting bigger year-on-year – especially with the advent of the iPhone in 2007 (which has a 320 pixel wide screen).

The gist of the article is that by targeting your design at a medium screen size, and using good, clean, semantic markup, it’s fairly straightforward to make a site that degrades gracefully to smaller screen sizes, and can be progressively enhanced to provide extra functionality/styles to more capable devices.

Here’s a neat article from Smashing magazine summarising whether to open a new browser window or not:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/01/should-links-open-in-new-windows/

A quick summary / rule of thumb is open links in a new window only if:

• The link is to a non HTML document e.g. a PDF, XLS, MP3 etc, in this case use a popup window without browser control toolbar
• The link provides help / assistance (so the user doesn’t have to navigate away fro the page they are currently on)
• The link interrupts an ongoing process (e.g. filling in a form, checkout forms) so a user doesn’t lose information that they have already typed in
• The link is to a large image which takes time to load (opening the image in a new window allows the user to read the content while the big image is loading)

Everything else should open in the same page unless explicitly stated that links are opened in a new window – and don’t open a new window unless there’s a really good reason.

S8080 recently launched the Holidays Unpackaged website for Visit Wales. The site is the destination for traffic sent via the TV commercial and DM, fronted by the brilliant Welsh comedian, Rhod Gilbert.

The campaign, which broke in mid January, was created by Wieden + Kennedy and Partners Andrews Aldridge and features the TVC and four ‘web films’, produced especially for online delivery.

The campaign focuses on a key step change in the way people approach their holidays these days. Visit Wales believes that people want a much richer experience – they want to immerse themselves in local culture and the environment, they want to get involved and learn new skills. Gone are the days where a holiday is about being a spectator or where your 5 star hotel is the same the world over. Wales believes that they embody and offer this seismic shift in what people want out of holidays. The integrated campaign is designed to create debate and start a new holiday movement, which Wales have coined ‘holidays unpackaged’.

The website was designed around the four films – Food, Made in Wales, Learn and do and Active – each having its own section in the site and providing links to relevant TV programmes, blogs, articles and events.

S8080’s Technical Director, Matt Howard said the hosting had to be considered very carefully. “We looked at lots of specialist video streaming partners, but one, Astream, came out head and shoulders above the rest, giving us the confidence we needed to deliver the massive bandwidth”.

S8080 Creative Director, Chris Cowell said “We have masses of experience working with the Wales brand and are continually working with the Visit Wales digital team, pushing the envelope on what can be achieved online”.

The IA, creative, implementation and technical teams at S8080 were tasked with the website information architecture, design and build and the construction of the email executions. Many creative treatments were considered, but a subtle hand drawn style was easily the best fit.

“We experimented with hand drawn illustrations and type – these add to the informal and friendly nature of the site. It was fun for our illustrators to loosen up a little as they are usually working on much tighter projects”, said Chris.

We’ll let the website have the last word…

Talking. Learning. Doing. All at your own pace.
No tick boxes, no itineraries.
Just you, and everything Wales has to offer.
Wind. Caution. Throw.

Go on unpackage your holiday

WhatTheFont is a fantastic online service that helps you identify fonts. Simply upload a picture, tell it what the text you’ve uploaded says, and WhatTheFont should come back with some suggestions as to what the font might be.

MyFonts have just released WhatTheFont for iPhone, which makes it really easy to identify fonts on the go. Just snap a picture, highlight the text, and WhatTheFont will provide you with a list of similar fonts. You can then e-mail information about the found fonts to yourself in a couple of taps.

The app seems a little glitchy in places (in particular when ‘merging’ characters together), and is thrown off a little by bad lighting – but the font matches it finds seem pretty accurate. Best of all, it’s free.

[via SwissMiss]

Sometimes you see a link and you are dead sure you know what information you’ll see when you click on it – other links you just haven’t got a clue. When you are searching for information and have a specific goal the extent to which you can predict what you will find if you follow a certain path and links through a site is called the ‘Information Scent’.

‘Information scent’ is part of the information foraging theory which uses the analogy of animals hunting for food to ex plain how users interact with a web site.

In the same way that a hunting animal is sure that that following a stronger and stronger scent will mean that they find their prey at the end. Your visitor clicking through your site searching for specific information or with a specific goal will continue to do so if the information scent is getting stronger and they keep on finding links which take them closer to their goal.

This is why it’s important that the navigation is clearly defined, labels state what they will find, that the language is plain and easy to understand, and why its great to add trigger words as cues within your links – all to make that information scent particularly smelly!

Google Earth 5 now lets you explore the oceans too…

With ocean in Google Earth, you can:

Dive beneath the surface and visit the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench

Explore the ocean floor with top marine experts including National Geographic and BBC

Learn about ocean observations, climate change and endangered species

Discover new places including surf, diving and travel hotspots as well as shipwrecks

You can check out the HD version on YouTube

Being a hiker and a biker, I am loving this…

And it’s orange.