Scream if you're brilliant

Nay worries. I'm decidedly mute.

I'm in our library, but it's awfully loud in here. I mean screamingly loud. It's in my head.

And when it calmed down and I decided to hit these keys, I thought:

The singular most powerful idea you have is YOU.

Now this sounds atypically oxymoronic. **** you might even think narcissistic, and best of times, stupid.

We spend our times chasing the tornado and each time it eludes us. It has to.

The quick fixes we search for, only fix a short term habit. The long term solutions require more thought, considerations and commitment.

Look, see, consider, share, act.

Ideas to share
The best idea is You because you know what it is that lights your fire. You're just, a bit like me, a bit flummoxed, how to find it. And when you don't know where it is, the best person to help you is the conversationalist.

Society got so ancy about it, they called them Psychiatrist ~ someone who evokes talk.

A room full of people - all with different needs. Some will inevitably leave a conference bitterly disappointed. Those that don't often attend in the first place to hear what it is that makes them think about themselves.

Scenario 2.

A room full of people, with the same aims. I'd just let them talk to each other, and then come to a consensus. Stand-ups do it much better. "Oi you, what's on your mind?"

In presentation, it's not what you've done for yourself, but what the people present, will do for you.


Twittering on
I speak at a fair few dos, and each time I think: "What it is I would like to know, seated in the audience". In shape shifting mode, I begin to wrestle with myself. Damn it hurts.

Tips here, facts there - all good, but the overall tempo has to be one where the presenter is giving, engaging, clarifying, and making You feel that the world will not come tumbling down on you because 0.7 secs ago, you had not been on twitter.

Or that google wave came and went and you missed the set.

Good CEOs and managers, I learned, leverage their strategies by allowing the flow of modules one at a time. And these often take weeks, months, but what they give you upfront is the ability to start thinking about the differences.

OK, stop!

Why does this matter, because frankly, you're not supposed know everything. Unless you're a self appointed polymath.

I bet Steve Jobs can't shoot documentary as well as you. My point explained. If you're a tweet king or queen, great. If your video skills aren't ace, don't beat yourself up, and vice versa.


Plumbline
Lizbeth Goodman, the Dean of our Phd programme refers to it as your plumb line and circle of influence. Your plumb line is fixed. That's the thing YOU do exceptionally well. It's your comfort, no matter what happens you keep coming back to.

I'm obsessed with visualisation and narrative. My mind works in visualisation the same way I think I speak. It's not rocket science, If I have made/cut/produced some (5)000 videos.

Now you see, if I want to go web design mad, codecs n' all - I know a thing or two about them - I'd have to forgo my love affair with film.

Am I bored? Or plain mad.

Your circle of influence says as you grow your knowledge, expand beyond the realms of your comfort, you'll absorb all this new stuff, but your circle of influence, where you can make a change is the core.

And frankly I'm happy with that. It has nothing to do with tunnel vision, narrowness, but that each step that elevates or comes down supplements your core skills or depreciates it.

In a couple of weeks I'm about to shoot a series of films that last 20 seconds inspired by twitter.

You gave me that idea through us talking. Thank you.

You, You, You.

Postscript.
Now that I have got that out of my system, it's time I went home.

News paper and broadcast Journalism Innovation

At thirty thousand feet the world looks a different place.

Some people however don't need physics to give them a seated lofty view of the world.

Duncan Whitman, who I have pinged a few times is back in London. And it hopefully looks like we/us could be closer to a utility that will firstly disrupt the broadcast/new media industry and provide a mezze of broadcast utilities into your hands.

Yesterday whilst supervising some students, another game changer crossed my path.

Some graphic students in their final 3rd year submission had asked me to take a look at their work. Some months earlier one of them had mentioned something, with me muttering something like: "look forward to seeing it".

Good Grief: Nothing short of genius. The beauty of their design, with graphic boards, copious notes on the technology and animated video shows an emerging plausible future for newspapers and broadcasting merging.

I'd love to show you, but I was the first to say, they need to find a way of protecting their design, yet at the same time placing it under the noses of those who might see what they see.



At a conference some years ago I interviewed two entrepreneurs/ technologists designing different systems: one the tablet, the other flexi-screen app.

What the graphics group at the Uni have done is unknowingly elegantly merge the two with their own innovations.

Hope to bring you some more when we've figured how to do so in their interests.

Viewmagazine.tv parallax

Back to one of my favourite themes, so if you stand at a distance, the illusion is that there's another site sitting behind the front page. Now all I want to do is see how I can manipulate the spatial geography of any perspective page, without it becoming annoying.

The cube gives another concept. See Im6, which faciltates video hyperlinking as reported in The Economist

The win win scenario - Prisoners Dilemma

It matters very little whether you're in journalism or business because in some sense you've already been practicing PD

If you think you haven't here's a salutory tale.

A friend, Rochel, in the NY has a problem. The new shiny website required by her CEO is due the next day. The designs have come in and the CEO is mad. They're not up to scratch.

Meanwhile, the designer who's been working flat out is exasparated. Wayne, the project manager, who appears to have dragged his feet has left the project.

So Rochel who's been brought in with T-18 hours has been asked to fix this. Yep she's been dumped upon.

What is one to do??

Firstly couple of things emerge. The original project manager, Wayne, had little experience of managing web based projects and his knowledge of design in this area appeared limited.

Secondly, the designer Todd has been crying out for content which looks like it was not forth coming and his time on the project has run out. In fact he's just eaten in to his own budget by pulling in two Flash designers.

Thirdly Rochel has been asked by the CEO to ring this designer up and balls him out.

Not a recipe for game theory win-win.

What do you do?

All the above help, but they form a larger part of the problem, You're seeking a solution. Mantra, solution not problems.

So the first thing I'd suggest is to put yourself in the designer's shoes.

Most likely by now Todd's fed up, frustrated, mad, has had sleepless nights and easily blames the Wayne -project manager who said to him: "I know your work, do what you can".

So you need to get the designer back on your side, because in reality, you may well want him to go beyond the call of duty, with no extra funds. Do not go nuclear on the phone. If he walks you're all up **** creek. Be firm and polite and offer solutions.

If you have a friend who is a designer even better, get him/her to help shape some designs on your existing one. Don't ask for radically different designs as a) It'll involves too much work b) The designer doing the work will get mightily cheesed of.

My suggestion was a brief polite phone call to clear the air with the possibility of either repeat business (something you're CEO would want to avoid) or recommendations that the designer has crisis management skills.

Most business like someone who can pull out of a crisis with no collateral damage.

All designers have a vested interest in their work, so want to do the best.

If you can get him to send you the design with modifications to colour, font, and layout, then get the CEO and a couple others together.

In many cases it's about ownership. The CEO wants to know she made the ultimate decision. Options help her do this.

From there make some add on - subtract suggestions: an image here, Flash component there. Remember the clock's ticking.

Return this to your designer and execute a number of toll gates throughout the day. You're at the end of a phone/skype, so each time he moves forward on a page template and daughter pagers, you get to sign off.

As it happens, there was no sign off regime in the last relationship.

If it looks good praise the designer. That's important. The more confidence he gets back, the more he'll rise to the challenge.

Don't wait for all the content to come your way to send over. Send it over with specific instructions where it should go. As its taking shape ask the desiger what he/she thinks.

If they're negative, then don't blame them, you plough ahead. If they're positive you've got them on your side.

If you're now planning the big favour - can I have video here? - Make it known this a "transation in the bank" - I owe you one.

With all this said and done, it may get sticky on the way. Whatever yo do, don't go nuclear. Unless that is you have another designer on stand by.

When it's all done. Hold that post mortem and if you feel in the end the designer was not ultimately at fault. Most designers do what they're told to do, make it up by a token, gift and a warm thanks.

David worked as a creative director and project manager on various high profile projects for re active - a soho based interactive ad agency - managed by a former head of TV at Saatchi and Saatchi.

New Designs for the web

Viewmagazine.tv 2007 now


Viewmagazine.tv 2006- 2007



Six weeks into the Masters programme for Online Journalism and the students have impressed. But something else happened that only perhaps other lecturers/teachers will recognise, they gave something back. Perhaps it was not so overt. We opened up the web further to look at redesigns and spoke about Gillmore.

How can we influence that which has not been made. Part of Gilmore's book about We Media is about projection. Yes it looks back at a scholarly timeline of the media, but it only serves to ask: what now?

In examining, The Mirror, Telegraph, The Sun, The Times et all, a couple of things are emerging.

Sites are becoming more televisual- that was bound to happen see blog/article here from two year back.

But also some pros are sensing a greater cleaness about design. Under the bonnet that's CSS, but the aesthetic is more scandanavian, than Brit or even US/Chinese - which tends to favour portal dense sites.

Opening a site means using spatial colours. In selling a house, marrigold, according to a recent survey in Britain from Estate agents is preferable. It creates the illusion of space.

Space, weight and symmetry are the parameters, and more, that hold the grid for design together.

So late last night I looked to change some of these parameters on my own site.

The colour has been one I have long admired and once purchased a suit from the excruciatingly expensive but de rigour designer, Ozwald Boateng. There's something about pastel, what I call offset colours. The Times has executed that brilliantly with the lime green colour scheme it now employs for its new site.

So what do you think? The classic black - which will always have a place - and the hexidecimal 6600cc colour.

Also without making the site any more dense with images, it's now occurred to me there can be a far greater use of the front page with a popularity index and further links highlighting blogs.

Having said all that I will want to on occasion revisit the predominant panoramic quadrants, but am also aware that the new structure sets up a natural hiearchy.

So a start, but I have my students to thank. :)