Inspiration - Craig Jamieson

Be Kind. Expect nothing in return.

Every day, do something selfless for someone else that takes under five minutes. The essence of this thing you do should be that it makes a big difference to the person receiving the gift. Usually these favors take the form of an introduction, reference, feedback, or broadcast on social media.

But yeah, do something that’s not for yourself, every single day. Expect nothing in return. Over time, these random acts of kindness will really add up.

I took the above quote from an article published in time magazine on how to be productive, successful and smart. Despite being taken advantage of people from time-to-time, I believe in being kind and generous in the ways I can. While I cannot give into everything people want, I like to help where I can. I have been in tight situations, I have had low points and wish someone just said it is ok to ask for help; even if it’s just retweeting something, listening or making an introduction. So if I can help you in some small way, please feel free to reach out, I will do my very best, and honestly I expect nothing back.

The 32-Hour Workweek

Back in 2002 I first met Ryan Carson at a Macromedia Flash event in London, (although he probably won’t remember that) but somehow through the industry and social networks we have crossed paths. I think at the time he was involved in the BD4D (by designers 4 designers) projects, but he has since gone on to do amazing things, most importantly Treehouse, my go-to resource for online learning. He has always come across as a genuinely nice guy, and would treat his staff fairly. So it’s no surprise to me that he subscribes to the 32-hour workweek. Inspiring stuff.

Theres no rule – you have to work 40 hours, you have to work more to be successful.

Nobody Tells This To Beginners

We all had to start somewhere, and we all find ourselves wanting to give up because we are just not getting the results we want, the work we do isn’t as good as our ambitions, but we have to pay our dues and never give up.

‘Nobody Tells This To Beginners’ is an inspiring animation for creatives who are just starting out in the various innovative fields.

Created by 18-year-old Saar Oz, the motivational video is based on an interview with radio personality Ira Glass.

[youtube id=”E1oZhEIrer4″]

via Design Taxi

Pursue the things you love doing

You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don’t make money your goal. Instead pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off of you.
– Maya Angelou

via swissmiss

2015 Web Design Trends

I recently taught a web design fundamentals course and at the end I shared some of the most common web design trends I have noticed during 2015. I have not and will not attempt to predict what will come, but there is certainly two obvious directions we seem to be going into. Firstly there’s the rich multimedia experiences, that care less about download speeds, but offer visitors something entertaining, something like Flash websites used to do, before Steve pulled the plug. I have a huge amount of respect for the efforts these teams have gone to, given how difficult this is to do with todays technology. The second trend is just he opposite, super simple sites that focus more on content, speed and minimalism. I recently ~~re-designed~~ re-aligned my personal site and unconsciously added a few trends without even realising it. I simply had no consistent images I wanted to use, so I decided the use of colour, large fonts and minimalism would suit me better. Hope you like my list.

Hidden Main Menus

With only a hamburger menu on the right hand side, the navigation is hidden, only on selection to reveal a full screen navigation that is hard to ignore. I’m sure there are other’s who may have done this before, but I first noticed that Teehan + Lax were early adopters of this technique.

Make it Big

Large full screen backgrounds are nothing new, but large fullscreen videos that seem to load relatively fast, are just epic.

Multimedia Experiences

The team at ultranoir have crafted an amazing online experience, the likes of which I have not seen since Flash ruled the rich media experience online.TimeSifht165 is a Digital & Interactive Fan Artwork inspired by the exceptional story of a unique French car : The Delahaye 165s and the amazing thing, is you can drive the car with your desktop keyboard or through your phone.

Patterns

I’ve started spotting patterns everywhere as a way of breaking the large device focussed stereotype layouts that were all of the web over the past couple of years. They re not only gorgeous, fill the screen, but they can be interactive. The light vector graphics also help with speed, but still offer a richer visual appearance.

Typography Microsites

It’s interesting to see a font get an entire site dedicated to it. Font microsites are popping up everywhere and none as slick as the FS Millbank microsite, which is gorgeous on any device.

Flat Design

Flat design is everywhere and with SVG being the preferred image format, I doubt flat design is going anyway any time soon. Love it or hate it, it makes sense in our multi device world where speed and vectors are king.

No more Boxes

It’s fantastic to see html sites breaking out of their grid like structures and telling stories in new ways. Again similar to how Flash sites were built, this is another tribute to the interactive era of the past, or maybe the beginning of an exciting future.

Simplicity

Simple, clean, content focussed sites that purely drive the message home make sense when we consider how despite faster internet bundles, the internet just seems to be getting slower.

No header background

Almost every template you find these days has the same large image background, and while we love the large format video experience, sometimes it’s simply lovely not having a large image in the background. Another great example of simplicity.

Very Large Typography

Someone commented during my course that this site reminds them of the mad men era ads, where there was a huge focus on copy driving the campaign message home. With the use of web fonts, we can pretty much use any BOLD font we like and do something beautiful with words and type.

Speed & Performance

I love how Google have stated that performance is a feature. Speed is super critical to users, UX people cannot stress enough the importance their research has identified speed as one of the most important things to users. But it’s more than that, with pages filled with all sorts of animation and other functionality, how fast these services perform is equally as important. People want a fast, smooth experience and taking into consideration speed and performance will ensure your site is a hit, not only with users, but with search engines too, who now rank you on both speed and performance. I think this will be the biggest trend going forward and as you might have noticed with the minimal websites above, simple is influenced by speed.

Learn to study

One of the most common questions I get asked over the years is how to stay skilled up as a designer. Well it’s rather simple, I keep studying. Now everything we do is a learning curve, and that almost seems natural as a designer, but learning also comes from studying. I have no formal education, I have a masters in nothing. But I have committed a lot of my spare time, to learning through studying online courses.

I try and study something new just about every day. Sometimes it’s just reading articles online, sometimes it’s trying a technique or an idea I have had, but mostly I use a couple of really good online resources.Some of my favorite resources to study are

Treehouse, for a wide selection of design, development and other soft skill courses
Udemy, for specific application and skill courses
Skillshare, which is good for just about anything, someone who was brave enough to teach, was willing to share.

Granted this doesn’t give me any sort of certification, but in an industry where it’s probably better to do good work than have any certification, studying daily, is a pretty good thing to do. If you’ve read my blog thoroughly over the years, you’ll know I also read, a lot, so I will be sure to share a few of my latest finds real soon.

The tip here is to become disciplined in your approach to staying skilled up within our industry. It doesn’t matter that as a Creative Director I might not use most of these skills, it just challenges me to think differently and fills me with knowledge about things I might have to give direction on.

Another thing is to at least learn something, be it a chapter, a full discipline or just a workshop, try and study something every day.

One last thing is to learn new things, stuff that makes you uncomfortable, challenges you and is something you never even considered you could do.

I am genuinely interested in design, in all it’s forms, it’s as much a hobby to me as it is my career, and seriously no one has ever really had to hold a gun to my head to get me to learn more. I think due to my lack in formal education in my youth, I have learned to love studying.

11 Lives

I have been unsettled in my career for a while and I have been making plans to re-align my skills to get back to living the kind of life I choose to live. It’s easy to want to just stick to what you feel you know, but thats never been me, I always want to challenge myself, learn new things and grow, caring more for the love of the work I do than the salary I earn, despite being piss poor and in a world of hurt financially. So I was surprised to find a really great comic about life, that helped me understand my life cycles.

Basically it talks to the idea that we have several lives, not one and it is based on the theory that it takes 7 years to master something.

View the full length comic

So for me my lives went something like this …

Self Discovery: 18 – 25

I dropped out of college, tried many different jobs, travelled the world, partied hard and eventually decided what it was I wanted to do with my life.

25 – 32

I started designing club flyers, then websites, became a multimedia designer, interactive designer and every other name you can think of to describe what turned out to be an interesting life working under the handle Digiguru, where I got to collaborate with and design for a whole variety of clients/brands across the globe.

32 – 39

I wanted to use my skills to lead others as a creative director at some of the top local agencies including Ogilvy, M&C Saatchi Abel and Black River FC, expanding my skills into to creative strategy, ideation and integrated campaigns.

39 – 46

I’m onto my next life, which is looking to return to a more niche discipline, focussed on user-centered design, hopefully as a product and user interface design director. The jury is still out on the title, but I’m excited to get back to a more hybrid role as designer/leader.

What are you going to do when you die?

Material Wealth

If you are interested in learning user interface and user experience design techniques, then a good place to start, given the wealth of useful knowledge shared, is the Material Design site by Google.

We challenged ourselves to create a visual language for our users that synthesizes the classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science. This is material design. This spec is a living document that will be updated as we continue to develop the tenets and specifics of material design.

I consider myself fairly seasoned when it comes to interaction design, but if for no other reason than learning how to articulate the points made, Material Design has plenty of learnings, information and inspiration.

Focus on the project, not awards

It’s my opinion that creatives in the ad industry are focussed on the wrong things and they’ve lost site of the experience you go through actually working on projects. Too often I hear people start a project with statements like, “we need an award winning idea”, “this is an award winning campaign” and “this is the agencies Cannes entry” and honestly while it makes sense to keep your eye on the prize, let’s not forget the journey, so to speak.

I guess however, I can only really talk for myself. So I’ll try and explain things as I see them. I enjoy being recognized by my peers, the industry and even our clients. I love my FWA certificate, my Pixel Award etc. it’s good for my career, good for my reputation, my ego even. Most importantly, awards are good for business.

But I enjoy making stuff even more. I’m a journey guy, I appreciate what I and the team I work with go through on a day to day process as we craft our project. Sure there’s a lot of headaches in between, but getting us through that shows the kind of metal we’re made from. Each iteration we go through, every step we go through, brings us another step closer and sometimes further from our end goal, passionately pushing around pixels, debating ideas and figuring out the code. It’s this sort of stuff that makes me excited to do what I do every day.

Of course if you know me, although I see work as play, it’s not all work, I’m a clown, I always have time to laugh, to make an ass of myself, pull pranks and to do midnight food runs. We play together and we hurt together, but we’re in it together and those bonds are the lasting ones.

So I’d be so brave as to suggest you put on your big boy pants, you roll up your sleeves to get the job done and forget about your shiny shoes and monkey suit. Enjoy your work, stop focussing purely on the end reward, if you do great work that should be reward enough, and besides when you do great work, more often than not, you will get the recognition you deserve.

Legocy

Today is Mandela Day in which we celebrate on Nelson Mandela’s birthday every year. I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to share with you the Legocy project which I had a hand in earlier this year.

In support of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, YouTube asked agencies to enter a competition by making a short film as a tribute to Nelson Mandela. The smart folk at Quirk Jozi came up with doing a short Lego stop frame animation to one of Nelson Mandela’s most famous speeches. The hope is to get enough signatures and send a request to Lego to make a Freedom Fighters Lego set. As I have been collecting Lego for a personal project for a while, I was asked to help with the cast, and of course being such a huge Lego fan, I jumped at the opportunity to have a play date with the team at Quirk. In addition I helped build them a responsive one-page site, provided the domain and hosting. They won the competition, and below is the end product.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tdheV2I_Vw?rel=0]

Please add your name to the list www.legocy.co.za