using my head

This year Diamond Light Source (the UK’s rather fancy and very shiny synchrotron scientific facility) is exhibiting at The Royal Society’s Summer Science exhibition, and they decided they’d like a microsite to help educate people about the talks they will be giving at the exhibition, as well as keeping the dialogue going with visitors, reporting on each day’s highlights and showcasing photos taken at the show.

Because they wanted to be able to easily update the site remotely from the exhibition, and to allow scientists (not just web people) to be able to contribute without needing training, we opted for Squarespace as the platform for the site. The ability to upload a zip file of photos straight from the camera, and have the system automatically unzip and resize them all was a real plus.

I designed the site to match their exhibition stand, and also incorporated some Flash and interactive elements that help people understand more about what the heck a synchrotron is. Have a play around in the Machine section of the site yourself: it’s not quite the same as playing with a real particle accelerator, but it’s definitely a lot safer for us non-scientists!

We’ve also incorporated some audio interviews with the scientists who use the synchrotron and who will be at The Royal Society talking to visitors about their projects. There are some really interesting stories – my favourite is Joanna Collingwood’s study of metals in the brain, and their role in disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s.

I certainly learned a lot on this project… and as a side effect became slightly addicted to playing with the particle accelerator interactives (my fave is the Vacuum). If you’d like to find out more, The Royal Society exhibition opens this Friday and runs until 4 July. Or visit the microsite now… and try not to get addicted like I did!

As it’s Friday, here’s a little chuckle to welcome in the weekend:

Remember the heady days of the 90s, when everyone suddenly jumped onto this new-fangled internet thing, and created multi-coloured, flashing, clashing web pages that would make your grandmother’s eyeballs fall out? Wish you could relive those days now? Well the good news is that you can! Mike Lacher at Wonder Tonic has created what he calls a ‘Geocities-izer’, which converts your shiny lovely website into something that looks like it was designed by a colourblind chimp on acid.

Here it is in all its multicoloured glory: Geocities-izer a-go-go!

(make sure your sound is turned up to experience the full audio-visual extravaganza!)

Today marks the launch of my latest Squarespace website: a charity website for the Confectioner’s Benevolvent Fund (aka Sweet Charity). As they are a small UK charity, the challenge on this project was to create a great looking and functioning site on a tight budget, complete with multiple author/editor roles, embedded Flash and an event calendar. The fun part was using their brand name and industry in a creative way to form part of the design. The result of this is the bag of sweets that pours onto the pages, with different types and formations of sweets representing the different page contents conceptually. The client loves the concept so much that they will be using it on their offline marketing material, which makes us both happy.

We’ll be working together in 2010 incorporating the new look into their e-mail newsletters, and I will also be advising them on how they can use some of the latest gen online tools and web apps to streamline their internal workflow, allowing staff more time to focus on the important things: fundraising and helping people who need their assistance. It’s within organisations like Sweet Charity that I feel these web apps stand to make the biggest difference: they are free or low-cost, quick to implement and learn, and they can replace manual or time-consuming activities, usually without impacting on other internal technologies. In a busy charity, there’s never enough time to do things, so anything that can save time or make people’s jobs easier is a godsend. And there’s nothing I enjoy more than making people’s work lives a little nicer.

Woohoo – how exciting. Those nice people over at Imagine Publishing have put together a nifty guide called the Blogger’s Handbook, which covers all the major blogging platforms, advice on setting up and designing blogs, and info about how to make blogging work for you. And yours truly is featured on page 114 in their feature on Squarespace.

It sure is nice to be recognised out of the millions of bloggers/designer-developers out there. And speaking of Squarespace, I have set up a showcase of my Squarespace projects, so hop on over to UsingMyHead on Squarespace if you fancy learning a bit more.

This December I have had the pleasure of taking on a few new small business clients, whom I’m really enjoying working with. In larger organisations, my work can sometimes be several steps removed from decision-makers, things tend to move slower, and there are more interested parties to keep happy. Not that it’s a problem or anything, but it has been refreshing to work with people who are juggling the same issues and wearing multiple hats like me.

Speaking of hats, I have also had the opportunity to dust off my web design hat, as I’ve been designing websites and HTML email campaigns for these shiny new clients… and in fact I have also spent a couple of days this Christmas break redesigning my own photography website, to boot. It’s been a real design-fest this month!

This is a website I designed for Bubblegus, who specialise in management consulting, personal coaching and event management. As the client wanted to be able to update the site themselves, and to have the flexibility of adding new pages and sections without having to get a designer involved again, I opted to create the site using Squarespace. Squarespace is a neat little online CMS/blogging platform that has really nice Ajax drag n drop design tools built in. The administration on the back end is also very user-friendly, with lots of drag n drop functionality and helpful tips right on the page. There is a monthly fee involved, but the cost is on-par with decent web hosting, so there’s no real disadvantage to using Squarespace over free CMS/blogging tools. Although creating the design took longer, the site build only took a matter of a few hours, and I was able to tweak the design via Squarespace live in a client meeting to get things ‘just so’. I’ve been really impressed with the speed of deployment as well as the ease of use, and I would wholeheartedly recommend Squarespace to small businesses as an alternative to Wordpress. In fact, I have 2 other Squarespace projects on the go as I write.

As mentioned, I have also redesigned my photography website, which was in need of some TLC. For this project, I opted to use good old-fashioned HTML and CSS, with a little bit of Flash & XML thrown in. It’s been a great exercise to brush up my hand-coding skills, as well as giving me the opportunity to fiddle around with the photo galleries built into Adobe Lightroom. If you need any photography, please have a look at my site and get in touch .

I reckon this is my last posting of 2008, so here’s to having a great New Year’s Eve and an even better 2009!