Photography is one of my greatest passions in life, it is an art of observation. Ever since I was very little I took pleasure in observing the world around me. I could always find something interesting in an ordinary place. It was this curiosity and a passion to capture the interesting within the ordinary that lead me to photography.

Read the rest of this entry

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) files are great - the lovely little graphic file format that allows for a gradation from full colour to transparency within a graphic. It’s a handy little tool in your kit to help you translate a designer’s vision into a web page.

Well, handy in some browsers. In other browsers it’s more of a “hmmmm, how does this work?” kind of thing. Those “other browsers” being IE6 and IE5.5.

Not being averse to the odd “hmmmm” moment I’ve been trying to use PNGs where relevant, sometimes more successfully than others. But I thought I’d share one of my successes here to hopefully show that it can be done, and relatively painlessly too!

I’ve used PNGs for the main navigation of this site so I’ll use that as an example.

Read the rest of this entry

I’ve been amazed by these photos ever since I first saw them a couple of years ago.

They’re of an art installation in San Francisco called ‘There is Nothing Wrong in This Whole World’. Chris Cobb, a local artist, rearranged every single one of the 20,000 books in the Adobe Book shop by colour.

Read the rest of this entry

Last weekend I found myself ambling through Southwark, walking off a large lunch. As I turned the corner of the street I saw this great sign fixed to the side of a building:

Being a lover of typography and signs that fascinate and intrigue, I couldn’t help but take a picture. This started me thinking about how the language of street signs has changed over the years and how much ‘street furniture‘ contributes to the defacto visual identity of the UK.

Read the rest of this entry

Image courtesy of nswlearnscope

Over the holiday I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s new book ‘Meatball Sundae’, in which he argues that we stand on the brink of a fourth industrial revolution. His chronology goes something like this (I added the clock stuff):

• Industrial Revolution 1.0 - 1760-1840: The big one. Where steam, water-power and pocket-watches begat production and employees.
• Industrial Revolution 2.0 - 1840-1950: Production on a massive scale in more efficient factories. Think Henry Ford, the wristwatch and *much* bigger clocks.
• Industrial Revolution 3.0 - 1950s-present: Time-punch machines. The moment the Service Sector took over. Mass-marketing created demand and communication technologies connected people and ideas with stuff being made. The age of what Seth might call ‘the TV-industrial complex‘.
• Industrial Revolution 4.0 - Now: Welcome to the ‘Web-industrial complex‘. Ten years in, there’s a clock in your face pretty much all of the time. Look at your screen right now. Nevertheless, the technology finally starts working properly and becomes ‘enjoyable’ and cheap enough for everyone to join in. Seth describes 14 trends that result from this, including: infinite on-demand access to just about everything, infinite channels of communication, the atomisation of information (as it can be represented, sliced, diced and piped the way you want it). Most exciting are the effects of power shifting from top-down to bottom-up and consumers getting direct access to producers and each other. Welcome to The New Marketing.

Read the rest of this entry