What Creative Design Agency » Blog http://www.whatcreative.co.uk Whether you're a top 20 agency or a brand new start-up, we make wonderful experiences for everyone. Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:59:39 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5 Twenty Twelve — A year in review http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/general/twenty-twelve-a-year-in-review/ http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/general/twenty-twelve-a-year-in-review/#comments Wed, 13 Feb 2013 14:34:49 +0000 Chris Skelton http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/?p=2147 Sometimes you forget to sit back and take a look at what you’ve achieved. We’re forever travelling at 100mph; there’s always something to do, someone to see, some place to be. So, although it’s a little late coming (considering it’s now mid-February) I thought that it would be nice to document a few of the things that have happened over the past 12 months.

January

This time last year we didn’t have any employees, nor did we have a permanent address (were running the business out of two home offices). Chris Kemm was in Leeds, having left Brass just 3 months prior, and I was still in Sheffield. Sometimes we worked from Leeds, sometimes from Sheffield, and sometimes from both — it wasn’t the best, but it worked for us at the time.

The year got off to a flying start. We were building an installation for the National Media Museum, designing our first financial services website and branding a new international mechanical and electrical engineering company. We spoke at the University of Huddersfield Barnsley Campus on ‘An Introduction to Digital Marketing’ for the third year running, and of course we attended New Adventures in Web Design, which was brilliant.

Life Online

February

February brought us the opportunity to work on the re-branding of an online property management system, Property Prefect. This was a great project as we played a part in everything from naming the company to redeveloping their sales website and redesigning the management system interface. After several weeks of really hard work TES Foundation was born. (It was also the first time we used a high-resolution logo for the Apple retina display!).

March

After a chaotic start to the year March allowed us a little time to breathe. Both Chris and I managed a bit of a holiday, and we continued to work and build a great relationship with Fuelled by Social Alchemy by revamping a couple of newsletter templates, which have since been sent out to many hundreds of recipients. We also took some time out with friends to tackle the Real Ale Trail (which was a slightly different achievement, but an achievement nonetheless!)

April

For the previous couple of months we’d been thinking a lot about our next move. Nope, this wasn’t the worlds longest game of chess — we wanted to grow the business, and in order to do that we needed to settle somewhere. April was a time for some serious decision making: Which city was the company going to be based in? Should we get an office? Where should the office be? How much can we spend on an office?… You get the idea. It was scary and really exciting, all at the same time.

In the end we opted for Leeds. We had a growing number of clients and contacts in the area and the creative scene just seemed a bit more vibrant. We found a really nice, affordable office and we haven’t looked back since. We moved in on the 30th April, and looking back it seems that we didn’t get much else done that month (other than starting to introduce our new branding)…

What Creative Office

May

We started to settle into our new work environment and continued to build on our long standing relationship with Igniyte, an agency based in Shipley. We built the Platinum Stairlifts site and started work on the design and build for Visual Merchandiser, both of which were WordPress based — definitely an emerging theme for the year! We also extended the Nu-Light LED website that we’d built at the end of 2011 to include their full product range, which we did the photography for, too.

Visual Merchandiser Website

June

June was a bit of a quiet one with lots of meetings and planning exciting projects for the coming months. We designed the logo for Aspect Home Cinema and produced stationery designs to help kick-start the company whilst they built their first showroom. My life got more complicated when my other half got a job in Watford, and Chris swanned off to Sweeden for a week. Very nice.

July

The summer saw us start an eCommerce drive. Most of the websites that we’d produced up until this point were relatively simple ‘brochure’ sites. We had of course worked with other agencies on several bigger projects in the past, but we had nothing to put our name to. In July we began working with OnState, an eCommerce agency, on one of their clients’ websites, started a re-brand and responsive eCommerce rebuild of one of our oldest client’s websites (launching very soon) and won a pitch against several much bigger and well established agencies to redesign another rather large eCommerce store — this time in the fashion sector — however unfortunately due to changes in the company’s management structure this was never completed. We also started working with Iris (now part of 2020), and Technophobia, both of whom are brilliant Sheffield-based agencies.

Mac Imports Website

August

Business was going well and we were starting get a bit concerned with the workload. We’ve got great relationships will all our suppliers and subcontractors, but we decided that it would be much more effective to bring someone else on board full time — a placement student. This posed two problems:

  1. Where were we going to find a eager and enthusiastic student; and
  2. Where were they going to sit

We got in touch with the University of Huddersfield (which is where both Chris and I studied) and enquired about moving to a bigger office. By the end of the month we had Adam (our first employee), had moved over the hall to a 5 person office (which we also share with Fuelled by Social Alchemy), and were expecting David, a freelance developer (and good friend) to take the other desk in a couple of months time.

September

Wow. What a lot of change. We spent time training Adam, got used to sharing the office with more people, started to learn how to be real Bosses, and built a little responsive blog for Connection. We also decided it was about time to get an employment contract in place and update our service contract to a much more official-looking bespoke Terms and Conditions document, which was quite an eye-opening experience.

October

We turned 3 in October — which we couldn’t quite believe — and started work on a new responsive website for Fuelled by Social Alchemy. David started his freelance career on the 8th and all of a sudden, just two months after moving into a bigger space, all our desks were full!

November

Time to knuckle down. We designed and built the ERS Medical website in around 6 weeks in order to hit their tight deadline and launch the company for the start of December, which pushed us to our limits but was really enjoyable at the same time. We also continued our working relationship with our office neighbours, Calls9, who gave us the opportunity to work with them on building some HTML templates for one of their apps, which was pretty exciting.

December

Christmas was nearly here and so was the end of 2012. Thankfully once we’d launched ERS things calmed down a little and we were able to wind down before the holidays. We closed from the 23rd December until the 2nd January and came back raring to do it all over again.

I’m not afraid to say that we achieved a hell of a lot in 2012, and I’m incredibly proud. I love this business and I love this industry and I can’t wait to see what the next year brings.

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New Adventures in Web Design 2013 http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/reviews/new-adventures-in-web-design-2013/ http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/reviews/new-adventures-in-web-design-2013/#comments Tue, 29 Jan 2013 14:17:17 +0000 What Creative http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/?p=2122 Last week we attended New Adventures for the second time in two years, and we loved it. Here are a few of our thoughts following the conference:

New Adventures Conference

- Adam Murray

What’s more warming than listening to thoughts on designing for the digital? Being in conference with hundreds of geeks representing the same fashion taste in numerous variations of colour. Yet, all sharing a love for the same industry and eager to discuss any topic that comes their way. It’s a thing of beauty.

As this was my first New Adventures ‘experience’ I wasn’t quite sure how much I was going to take from this however, the excitement started as soon as I walked through the Albert Hall doors. I was pretty impressed with how much inspiration, thought and enthusiasm (oh, and cupcakes!) I absorbed from just one day.

The speakers all touched on similar issues yet, all added a little more to the pot. I categorised these into three:

Risk Averse

From good experiences, come ideas – W. Hemingway

Waynes’ addition, was probably my favourite of the entire conference mainly because his entire talk was to challenge those whom are risk averse to see the possibilities they’re neglecting. Sticking within our comfort zones, minimising risk and keeping within constraints is something we’ve all been guilty of doing from time to time. We know our boundaries, we’re happy within them and it keeps the ball rolling, right?

Wrong. Being risk averse is limiting your creativity, it’s following the crowd and it’s something as an industry, we should look to steer away from.

Joy

Following from this, Seb and Jessica both touched on topics close to my heart; finding the joy in what you do and encouraging steps into the unknown. We’re consistently learning in this field, although the ‘learning’ process may never be the greatest aspect, when it clicks, something magical happens. We start rebuilding those tired boundaries and moving constraints because we want to learn and more importantly, we want to do more.

We learn, we refine, we experiment and then refine some more.

Refinement

We also had the pleasure of listening to Jason Santa Maria and his stance on ‘process’. Getting from A to B isn’t something we struggle with, it’s how long it takes us to arrive there, and how self-inflicted constraints cause such delays.

Fuck fidelity. Ideas want to be ugly.

Ideas don’t need to be dressed up, they need to communicate a solution. Focusing too much on an ever-changing design is a core cause for time consumption. Use sketchbooks, browsers, walls whatever it takes to get your idea out there in front of you (even if it’s terrible!)

To approach every project like you’re learning from a cooking book is a clever way to get from A to B quickly and it’s something I hope to adapt into my design process. Cheers, Jason!

Cupcake tower

- Chris Skelton

The highlight for me was listening to Jon Tan speak about typography. I have massive admiration for his work, and considering I missed him at the very first New Adventures conference back in 2011 it was great that Simon and Greg asked him back for a second time.

I learned a couple of new things about current browser support for ligatures which was interesting, and got a bit more of an insight into how much goes into preparing a font for use on the web. I really hope that he releases the slides because there were a lot of books mentioned that need to go on my (constantly growing) reading list.

Other highlights were Seb, simply due to how amazingly entertaining he is, and Wayne Hemingway, the founder of Red or Dead and Hemingway Design - because he has been on such an amazing and inspiring journey. It was just a shame that he only had 30 minutes to try and fit his life into.

Overall I think it was fantastic. There was a perfect range of speakers to keep it interesting, but who all touched on common subjects at some point or other in their talk, which gave the day a wonderful flow. I’m really disappointed that it won’t be coming back next year, but here’s hoping that we find ourselves at other, equally friendly, inspiring and affordable conferences in the not too distant future.

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Webkit Input Placeholder Overflow Bug Fix http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/general/webkit-input-overflow-bug-fix/ http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/general/webkit-input-overflow-bug-fix/#comments Fri, 25 Jan 2013 14:02:21 +0000 Chris Skelton http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/?p=2080

We’ve done a couple of responsive sites lately that use 100% width input fields throughout all viewport sizes and we’ve come across a very strange bug that until now had us stumped.

Initially we thought it only occurred in Mobile Safari, but we’ve since realised that it might be a wider Webkit issue. We found that the page displayed perfectly until the viewport was resized twice. On a mobile this might be switching from portrait orientation, to landscape, to portrait again, or on a desktop it might be sizing down your browser window, and then sizing it up again.

When you do the second ‘resize’ the page randomly appears to be really wide, showing a lot of whitespace on the right hand side and displaying scrollbars in whatever browser you’re using, which is really annoying. We trawled the internet for answers and eventually found only one article that helped us find the issue.

The problem seems to occur when you have an input field, with a percentage width declared, inside a floated container… so something like the following:

HTML

<div id="container">
    <form>
        <input type="email" placeholder="Enter your email address" />
    </form>
</div>

CSS

#container {
    width:100%;
    float: left;
}

input {
    width:100%;
    display: block;
}

If you remove the 100% width it fixes the problem, but for our responsive designs to look their best we can’t set a width in pixels, so this isn’t an option.

The solution is actually nothing to do with the CSS, and as far as we have tested it can’t really be fixed with CSS at all. The problem is with the placeholder text on the HTML. If you remove this then BOOM, the problem disappears! Very strange.

We like using placeholder text in the HTML, it’s useful to the users and nice and easy to add in, so we don’t want to get rid of it. We did have limited success by adding overflow: hidden to the form element like so:

form {
    overflow: hidden;
}

But that doesn’t always seem to work in mobile Safari…

Unfortunately the only way to get around the issue (that we’ve found) is either to not float the container (not usually possible), don’t use placeholder text (not ideal by any means) or use JavaScript to insert the placeholder text like the good old days.

It’s frustrating, but I’m happy we’ve at least found the cause, and hopefully the bug will get ironed out eventually.

UPDATE March 2013

We’ve found that the best way to fix this issue is to apply position:relative AND overflow:hidden to your container element like so:

form {
    position: relative;
    overflow: hidden;
}

Hurrah!

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Starting out in mobile development – what testing devices should you buy? http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/website-development/starting-out-in-mobile-development-what-testing-devices-should-you-buy/ http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/website-development/starting-out-in-mobile-development-what-testing-devices-should-you-buy/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2013 13:52:12 +0000 Chris Skelton http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/?p=2061

I’ve just finished listening to the first episode of Unfinished Business, a podcast by Andy Clark and Anna Debenham that tackles topics on the business side of being a freelancer / running a design agency. It was an interesting first show, but one discussion in particular caught my attention. It was about what mobile devices you should aim to have on hand for testing, and it got me thinking…

They both agreed that it was important to have a range of devices that offered different user experiences. You can therefore get a much better idea of how people might be interacting with the things you make – this could be a desktop computer, a mobile phone, and a games console such as a Wii U, which would give you a nice broad spectrum over just 3 devices. And considering that most people now have a smart phone and desktop / laptop it only means one extra purchase – great for anyone running a small business!

I think the word ‘interact’ is the thing that interests me most here, because I don’t necessarily think it’s the most important thing at the moment. I think performance and browser compatibility is.

Now obviously it’s nice to future-proof things and I think it’s great that people like Anna are researching and testing devices like games consoles and TVs because as time goes on these things are only going to get more popular, however if I was to advise a freelancer or small agency on what devices they should be buying and testing on first, I would most definitely push them in the direction of a couple of older mobile phones – the iPhone 3GS and the Samsung Galaxy S. Both are a couple of years old and reasonably priced if you get them second hand, you’re covering the two most popular operating systems (iOS and Android), and there are still a hell of a lot of other similarly powered devices out there (in terms of processing power)… So you’re covering a lot of ground. The older Androids also throw up some interesting CSS issues too, as illustrated in this post on SVG images.

iPhone 3GS Samsung Galaxy S

We’ve got both of these phones as part of our testing suite and I think the lessons learned from them far outweigh anything else that we use.

Obviously it depends on who you build most of your sites for, (and some broad analytical research might help you choose), but with more and more JavaScript and advanced CSS3 being used in every day development, especially when trying to imitate app-like gestures and animations, performance and rendering is extremely important. It’s all very well a site working on your brand new iPhone 5 or MBP, but what about all the other hundreds of thousands, even millions of people who can’t afford to upgrade every year and are still using these slightly dated, but perfectly functional mobile phones to browse the Internet with? (And probably still will be for the next couple of years at least).

Following on from these two devices I’d probably go for a mid-size tablet like a Nexus 7 that’s really useful for testing responsive websites on (especially in portrait orientation), because it’s about half way between a desktop and mobile.

Our full list of in-house mobile testing devices is as follows:

  • iPhone 3GS
  • iPhone 4S
  • iPhone 5
  • HTC Hero
  • Samsung Galaxy S
  • Samsung Galaxy S3
  • Nokia Lumia 710 (Windows Phone 7)
  • iPad 1
  • iPad 3
  • Nexus 7

When the Nokia Lumia 620 (Windows Phone 8) comes out at the end of the month we’ll be getting one of those, too. And then after that we might invest in a Blackberry because both the interaction and performance on these devices is quite different to anything that we’ve currently got. Having said that, unless the market share of Blackberry increases significantly we probably won’t concern ourselves overly with them so long as things don’t look too bad (unless specifically requested by a clint), but I do think that learning their limitations will be very useful. Following these additions I think it would be great to get a games console or smart TV.

I’m absolutely not saying that Andy and Anna’s friendly advice was wrong. I agree that interaction is extremely important too, I just think that performance (and cross-browser compatability) are bigger issues at the moment and the cost of buying a couple of older second hand phones compared to a games console or TV is a bit more manageable for someone just starting out with multiple device testing.

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Our new (hopefully temporary) online home http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/general/our-new-hopefully-temporary-online-home/ http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/general/our-new-hopefully-temporary-online-home/#comments Tue, 08 Jan 2013 20:22:21 +0000 Chris Skelton http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/?p=2040

We thought that it was about time we made an effort to update our portfolio and get something different online, so we whipped up this design and got it built just before the Christmas break.

We designed and built the previous version of whatcreative.co.uk back in mid-2010 and have barely changed anything since! We’ve also been promising a revamp for some time and the delays are just getting silly now – so here we are.

We needed something more up-to-date, easy to add new projects to, clean, simple, and responsive (of course). So although this will hopefully be a temporary solution whilst we develop a website that shows off our work to the fullest, as well as providing more of an insight into our process and culture, it’s something that we’re more than happy to send prospective clients to.

Hope you like it as much as we do…

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Create Super Crisp Vector Web Graphics with SVG Images http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/tutorials/create-super-crisp-vector-web-graphics-with-svg-images/ http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/tutorials/create-super-crisp-vector-web-graphics-with-svg-images/#comments Thu, 03 Jan 2013 17:16:22 +0000 Chris Kemm http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/?p=1701

We always strive to use the latest technologies and techniques in all our work, especially on digital projects. Technology changes and moves so quickly keeping up to date can be difficult, but it’s essential in the web industry, and luckily I love experimenting with new code.

We were ahead of the game with responsive web design and we’re now developing this further with responsive e-commerce solutions. A common issue with responsive web design is serving the correct images to relevant devices. To try and get around this we approach our web builds “mobile first”, so this avoids the issue of loading large core images on smaller devices, but with more and more devices having high dpi screens such as the new Apple MacBook Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S3 we now find ourselves in need of four image types: mobile, mobile retina, desktop and desktop retina.

Up until recently high dpi displays were only a major concern on mobile devices, but Apple’s MBP has now brought it to a desktop device, and it’s only a matter of time before other manufacturers follow. We need to be ready.

Getting Started

There are a number of different techniques for serving the correct dpi images; using a CSS media query to detect the device-pixel-ratio, Javascript scripts such as Retina.js, and services like ReSRC.it (which goes step futher with bandwidth detection). The Javascript approach works well for replacing and improving body images, but logos and diagrams are often vectors and being able to serve these graphics in a vector format would fix the issues regarding pixel density – HTML text renders beautifully on retina displays so our vector logos and diagrams will too.

I decided to set aside an afternoon to experiment with SVG graphics, but more specifically I wanted to find out about using them to serve a websites h1 logo graphic. I researched and read a number of posts online and then started to experiment. Ideally I wanted to style the h1 tag with CSS and serve up the SVG graphic as a background image, then use CSS3 background-size to adjust the logo depending on the device screen size. In theory I would then only need to create one image instead of four…

h1 {
	
	display: block;
	background: url("svg-logo.svg") left top no-repeat;
	background-size: 100% 100%;
	text-indent: -99999px;
	width: 127px;
	height: 65px;

}

photo-8

The first couple of experiments worked well. The SVG logo I created was only 4kb, scaled up perfectly on my Mac and looked super crisp on the iPad’s retina display – the logo also resampled and stayed crisp when zooming in on the iPhone. I then started to test more thoroughly on desktop machines starting with Internet Explorer, and surprisingly SVG graphics aren’t supported!

Overcoming Problems

photo-4
I needed to replace the logo with another graphic that would display on IE8 and below so I used a conditional comment and separate CSS to achieve this, but I soon realised that there could be a number of other devices and browsers with the same lack of support. After further testing on several Android devices that we have in the office I ran into a couple of issues:

  • Galaxy S3 – Android 4.0.4: Renenders SVG graphics and background resize but doesn’t resample well on zoom (however resampling on zoom isn’t a major issue as zooming isn’t really necessary on a responsive website)
  • Galaxy S1 – Android 2.3.5: Doesn’t support SVG
  • HTC Hero 2 – Android 2.1.1: Doesn’t support SVG graphics or background resize (Oh dear!)

The lack of support on the Galaxy S1 was the biggest shock considering we don’t have any problems at all with older Apple devices – I’m puzzled as to why support wasn’t there from the first version of Android. However, our testing flagged up a number of issues with other devices too so we need to detect if the device / browser has support  for SVG or not and serve a PNG (or similar) instead.

png-background-size

We use Modernizr at What Creative to get older browsers to play ball with HTML5, which adds a “.svg” class to the html element if the browser has support, and “.no-svg” if it doesn’t, therefore allowing us to create a CSS selector to serve a PNG graphic. If you aren’t developing in HTML5 (which you should be) then you might argue that it’s unnecessary to load the whole thing, but it’s only 15kb so it doesn’t take many large PNG’s to outweigh that argument! (Besides, you can customise your Modernizr toolkit and just include the bits that you want)…

html.no-svg h1{
	
	background: url("svg-logo.png") left top no-repeat;

}

Due to the fact that newer devices with high dpi screens have support for SVG we don’t need to worry about a high dpi PNG, we can simply resize the SVG depending on the device screen size using a combination of background-size and media queries. However, as older Android devices don’t support background-size we’ll need to create PNG graphics and use media queries to swap the file depending on device screen size.

Conclusion

So, we now have to create an SVG for high DPI screens (mobile & desktop), a PNG for mobile, and a larger PNG for older desktop/tablet browsers (you may also need to create another PNG for tablet devices depending on your design)… not quite our ideal of having one-image-fits-all, but 3 is better than 4!

You can view my SVG test page here

Quite frankly, using SVGs instead of multiple PNGs doesn’t save development time as we need to support older browsers and add PNG fallbacks, but it’s a future-proof way of knowing your logos and vectors will look perfectly crisp on all the latest and devices.

Reducing load times on a mobile devices is key to successful responsive web design and as more desktop machines move to high dpi screens SVGs will be key to keeping file sizes down and achieving super crisp graphics.

AddType image/svg+xml svg svgz 
AddEncoding gzip svgz

Note: You may need to add the code above to your .htaccess file to get SVG working on your server.

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Rework Book Review http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/reviews/rework-book-review/ http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/reviews/rework-book-review/#comments Thu, 13 Sep 2012 08:17:38 +0000 Chris Skelton http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/?p=1687

Rework by 37signals is a book telling you how to run your business. More specifically, it’s a book about how they got started in business and the choices they made that resulted in them becoming extremely successful. It’s around fours years old now, so I’m a little late to the party, but I’ve been wanting to read it for a while now and have only just had the opportunity.

Photo of rework book

37signals make online products, the most famous of which is Basecamp. Most people in the design industry will have heard of Basecamp, but if you haven’t it’s one of the best project management tools out there, used by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world.

Now, I started off by saying this book tells you how to run your business, and I mean exactly that. It TELLS you, rather than advising on things that might help. Don’t get me wrong, I like that it’s straight talking – I am too when it comes to things I care about – but I can imagine a lot of people being put off, especially those who’s business is mainly run offline, because it might not all seem that relevant.

I read it over two trips down to London, totalling about four hours reading time – and I’m definitely not the quickest reader in the world. So to put it nicely, it’s easy to digest. To put it not so nicely, it may sound a bit simple to an intelligent business owner looking to gain some real insight. But I enjoyed it. It’s more like reading a giant list of bullet points than a series of paragraphs and chapters, and it kept me engaged for two hours at a time, which is more than I can say for a a lot of books.

It was a bit strange reading it to be honest, because (by the sounds of it) we actually run our business very similarly to how 37signals do. Many of the points raised are ones that me and Chris completely agree with. We’re very friendly and open, we send relaxed, conversational emails and there isn’t a corporate bone in our bodies. We focus on quality not quantity, and we love to share everything we know and teach our clients along the way.

Though in my opinion a lot of it is common sense I do find comfort in the fact that it’s worked for them, and therefore should carry on working for us.

However, I do have a few quibbles. Much of the chapter entitled ‘Go’ should come naturally to anyone who’s actually passionate about what they do – work hard and don’t make excuses. And there does seem to be a slight contradiction between two of the chapters that confused me a little. There’s a section titled ‘Don’t confuse enthusiasm with priority’ that says you shouldn’t get carried away with new ideas right away. If you think of something new that you believe to be fantastic then sit on it a little while before doing anything about it, just to make sure it is actually a good idea. But then the very last section titled ‘Inspiration is perishable’ says the complete opposite; “If you want to do something you’ve got to do it now”. So what should I do? Act now or wait a bit? The whole thing seems a little narrow minded, too. The kind of thing that would spark serious debate in the comments if the chapters were a series of blog entries…

Overall there are many valid points made that any business in the world can take from, even if much of it seems obvious to me. It’s definitely worth a read, especially considering its so accessible and quick to get through. If you take just one thing from it that changes the way you run your business and makes you more successful as a result then it’s more than worth the minimal price tag.

You can buy it on Amazon here.

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University of Huddersfield Reactive Light Installation http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/recent-work/university-of-huddersfield-reactive-light-installation/ http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/recent-work/university-of-huddersfield-reactive-light-installation/#comments Mon, 30 Jul 2012 15:24:17 +0000 Chris Skelton http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/?p=1677

It’s been three years since we left the University of Huddersfield, got our hard earned degrees and set up What Creative. It doesn’t seem that long, but I’m happy to say that we’re still very much in touch with one or two of our favourite tutors.

A couple of months ago the University asked if we were interested in a commission to build an installation for the Digital Media Design and Graphic Design courses’ final year show, and we jumped at the opportunity.

We’re always on the look out for installation commissions – we recently created a piece for the Life Online exhibition at the National Media Museum in Bradford. (A piece that’s been unashamedly copied by EDF for the 2012 Olympics, boo). Ours is going to be there for 10 years though, which is pretty cool.

Anyway, we had little time and little budget for the Uni piece, but we managed to work with the event organiser, Jonny Lindley to create a paper
/light sculpture that reacted to movement in the room. The brief was to create something that drew people into the space, so what better than a giant glowing sculpture that got brighter the closer you got and faster you moved!

Even though it was an evening show we were a little concerned about the brightness of the sun through the windows (considering its the height of summer and there aren’t any blinds on the in the exhibition space… You sort of need it to be dark for a light-based installation to work). But once we got the OK from the Drama department to borrow 4x 700W stage lights we no longer considered it an issue!

The sculpture housed a DJ and also provided the backdrop to a couple of lovely ladies with iPads for faces. They were there to serve drinks and direct visitors between spaces, obviously. It was a bit of an odd setup, but it worked on the night.

Here’s ‘the making of’…

Bizarro Installation from Jonathan Lindley on Vimeo.

All in all the whole thing was definitely a success. The installation caused a stir and was definitely something for people to remember – and we’re dead pleased that we managed to pull it off in such a short space of time.

Check out more photos here.

Or if you’re interested in our other installation work you can check out the original Status 2.0 piece that we adapted for the National Media Museum here.

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To the future… http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/general/to-the-future/ http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/general/to-the-future/#comments Mon, 23 Jul 2012 15:18:49 +0000 Chris Skelton http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/?p=1670

I dread to think about the number of blogs that start by apologising for the lack of posts over the last few months. I’m not going to do that, instead I’m going to start by saying that this is a conscious effort, and the first step towards pushing our company forwards. We want to be better known, and we want to grow.

Blogging is just one of the things that has so far helped us along the way, so I’ve no idea why we stopped posting. I suppose it’s because we’ve been so busy – but that’s no excuse. You may have noticed that we’ve been tweeting more recently, too. That’s another thing that we want to do more of. We have all this knowledge about online marketing, and we educate our clients and push them to do all these things, yet we don’t even do them ourselves. If a client asks if this stuff works, what better example to use than our very own company? But that’s not going to happen if we keep making complaints about being ‘too busy’.

3 weeks ago I moved to Watford because my better half got a new job down there. I’m living in Leeds during the week, though, and travelling down on a Friday night, and back up on a Monday morning. In fact I’m on the train to Leeds right now… It’s a perfect time to write (except when I end up on a table of four, I don’t like that). It’s beautiful outside for the first time this summer, and the rolling hills between the North and the South are an endless source of inspiration. The iPad is the perfect size for the tiny little tables in the back of the seat and AI Writer is the perfect distraction-free writing application. I’m feeling positive for 8am on a Monday morning and I can’t wait to find out what tomorrow, or even today for that matter, will bring.

And so, onwards to the future. We’re going to Dribbble more, blog more, tweet more, and send our our very own monthly newsletter. We’re moving into bigger offices (just over the hall) and we’re talking about hiring. Big things lie ahead and we’re really excited.

Check out this Dribbble for a taster of our new responsive website!

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Our new home: Leeds http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/general/our-new-home-leeds/ http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/general/our-new-home-leeds/#comments Tue, 29 May 2012 16:29:33 +0000 Chris Kemm http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/?p=1651

Hello, We haven’t blogged in so long and we feel bad! We’ve made a lot of changes recently moving citys, we have a new office and we’ve rebranded. The blog has therefore suffered, we are still planning on writing posts and giving back to the design community don’t worry!


Our new home: Broad Gate

The website hasn’t changed apart from a new logo, we’ve been working on that too (we have been busy) as well as lots of projects.

So we hope you like our new branding and we look forward to sharing the new website designs and more importantly sharing new tutorials!

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