Technology - Craig Jamieson

Crafting Digital

Last week the digital industry came together to celebrate the 2013 bookmarks awards and it’s great to see some great work being produced.The focus seems to be integrating campaigns and more around the idea, as it should be. But I feel that there isn’t a very high standard of traditional digital craft.

I went through all the award-winning work on 10 and 5 and there are only a handful of agencies who are really standing out for me. The thing that stood out most is that no one is caring enough about craft. Most of the supporting sites on campaigns aren’t great and simply functional. But there’s no real love for beautiful design, clever code, fast loading mobile friendly sites or any advances in technology. Hardly any of the sites I visited were responsive, reduced in file size or anything resembling the standard of design I have a spent an entire career trying to replicate. The best designed stuff came out of Ogilvy Cape Town, who are a traditional Ad agency, but in my opinion, in the running for the top digital agency too. Not that I’d take anything away from the teams at HelloComputer, Native VML and Quirk who are really coming into their own and crossing that line between traditional digital and integrated full service agencies.

At the end of the day, I totally understand that clients don’t really care about using SVG graphics so that things scale beautifully on retina displays and are tiny in file size, but as the digital industry, we should care, we need to set the standard. If work cannot be crafted by the time it needs to launch, the beauty of digital is that it’s easy enough to polish after the launch and we can always continue to refine our stuff and let’s be honest, if we are going to use it to promote ourselves, then you don’t need a budget signed off to show your work some love.

What I’d like to see from the bookmarks are categories that look at high quality web design and development, best interfaces, mobile apps etc. These need to follow best practices, be light, adaptive and certainly not follow the cooky-cutter format most of them currently have. They also need judges who understand this. While I have a huge amount of respect for the senior representatives from the previous winning agencies, they are not necessarily qualified to be judging work that is technically brilliant as important as it is aesthetically pleasing.

I like that the bookmarks award individuals in categories like User Experience Designer and Strategist, but what about best interface designer, digital designer, front-end developer and so on.

I feel bad writing a post like this, because I have never entered the bookmarks, I also haven’t been producing as much work over the past few years, but I do believe in craft and I do believe in our industry, so whether I’m producing the work or not, I feel I have a responsibility to motivate the industry to do better work. Yes I’m a kak writer, my rambling here isn’t going to inspire much, but if the lack of gold compared to the huge amount of bronze awards are a sign, the level of work is worse than my writing, with the exception of a handful of talented folk, we have a way to go, so let’s not forget about craft.

The Digital Diet

If you’ve read any of my posts that list the Kindle books that I have on my iPad, you’ll know one of them is the brilliantly written The Digital Diet by Daniel Sieberg which helped me reduce the amount of time I spend attached to my digital devices. I have read two great articles today, one talks about giving up email and the other talks to ~~quitting using twitter~~*. While I’m not sure I’m brave enough to do that just yet, especially given that I’m the digital guy at M&C, but there has been one thing I gave up years ago and for much more practical reasons. I do not have email setup on my iPhone. By now you must think I am nuts, given that I travel a lot in my current role as National Creative Director.

Well it was pretty simple for me, I got hit with the extra data costs of downloading email the first month I got my first iPhone and I made a decision then to remove email off my phone and have simply not looked back since. Between my personal and work emails, I quite easily rack up over 200 mails a day, so you can just imagine what that costs to download and while I have set up wi-fi, just about everywhere I can, I still use a huge amount of data already when I have to resort to 3G. I believe mobile phones are already far too invasive, dog whistles for humans, call me and you’ll see how briefly I talk on the phone and I mostly only message people when I communicate. If you haven’t, give cutting out email on your mobile device a try, hell there is so much duplication between devices anyway, it frees up so much time, similar to how things were in the old days where you either answered your land line or you didn’t and people tried you later.

*link no longer valid

FNB are quick to respond but are they responsive?

Earlier today I commented on a tweet which mentioned FNB will bring the new iPad to South Africa. Simply, I was curious as to why FNB, not Apple (The Core Group) were bringing the iPad to SA, given that I know FNB as a bank, they handle your money etc. Promptly I received a response which I noted because someone I respect had a good chuckle at my expense.

@MichaelJordaan: A real Guru wouldn’t ask “@Digiguru: What the hell does FNB have to do with iPads?”

This was met with quite a few retweets by people who were either laughing at me or at the cocky response from @MichaelJordaan – CEO of FNB. Not taking it too seriously, without hesitation I replied…

@mikestopforth @michaeljordaan LOL I’m not a real guru, but would hope that FNB was a bank and not a Apple distributor 🙂

I quite appreciated the sensible responses from a few other people who informed me how FNB are trying to encourage clients to make use of electronic channels as a medium to do banking. If that’s the whole truth, I applaud their efforts. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I decided to visit www.fnb.co.za as I wanted to see how they were offering the iPad. I arrived at their seemingly well designed home page and after clicking on an iPad image, I read that FNB gives you an Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy or Smartphone at a reduced rate, with your Cheque Account. 24 Months to pay. As long as you’re a FNB cheque account customer, you probably qualify for their deal. This isn’t empowering anyone any more than it is signing people up to their business. This I understand, given that I know a little about marketing and advertising. Good for them and it answers my question “What the hell has FNB got to do with iPads?”

I know a designer who works on the FNB brand and wasn’t too surprised that their site looks quite descent on the surface. As far as banks go, FNB seem like a forward thinking bank, I have noted they have an App, which is fantastic in a geeky way, but it’s device specific and not the only way to access their content from tablet & mobile devices. As typical South African standards go, I wasn’t too surprised that the site is not responsive, it doesn’t adapt to multiple devices, making it quite difficult to bank online on mobile phones etc. People don’t seem too bothered about viewing sites on their tablets, when held horizontally they look like they do on computers browser, but what about when you display it vertically (portrait) and on your phones which have an endless amount of screen sizes? Thats where it would be in their best interest to have a rethink of their existing site and perhaps design it to adapt better to the devices they say they the want to empower people to use.

iPhone 4 portrait screengrab

iPhone 4 landscape screengrab

I honestly don’t believe that FNB care any more about empowering people by using devices like the iPad any more than they are building brand loyalty through association, leveraging the cool factor. That’s great marketing. However, if they were concerned about empowering, they would already have built their site to adapt better on devices, make the buttons etc large enough to be selected on touch devices, legible enough to read on smaller screens and reduced site speed by removing the +- 40 images that make up the page and rather used CSS, as phones accessed the internet well before the iPad was released. But they’re cool, @MichaelJordaan has many fans who would sooner laugh at his response to my comment than actually think about what FNB are, and what they are supposed to be doing, which in my opinion is banking. I’m not in a battle with FNB, I quite respect their marketing efforts, they seem like they’re ahead of the competition, sociably they seem to be doing the right things too and I’m certainly not going to get into it with every retweeting fan, I’m smarter than that.

I’m no social guru either, and nothing can be taken back, but now that they have this gem of information from me, the right way to deal with my response online would be to acknowledge what I’ve said and say thanks for the advice, we have noted your point about our site not being responsive and we’ll look into it.

For anyone who cares, let this be a lesson to you. Don’t expect to get an informative answer from brands, you might just get a cocky response. People you respect and others you don’t will point and laugh. But maybe you’ll get lucky – like I have, by actually getting an opportunity to turn this around and hopefully make a suggestion that could actually benefit the brands users.

I buy Apple products, from Apple. I bank, at Standard Bank.

2011 a short look back

This past year has been an interesting one which on the eve of the new year, could sooner be forgotten if it weren’t for some really significant events.

Steve Jobs
Online it must have been the most significant event in history when Steve Jobs passed away on October 5th. He seriously left a huge dent in the universe and I think people are waiting to see the first significant Apple release without the creative genius driving the company.

Facebook Timeline
Love it or hate it, as of the December 22nd, Facebook officially rolled out Timeline. As an early adopter it took me very little time to really start appreciating the life event display of my personal information. While there are some people who aren’t as happy about the changes, personally I look forward to further enhancements and also seeing Timeline used for page profiles.

Google+
New to social media was the much hyped release of Google’s latest social platform Google+ which has been released publicly, but to date is still very much a geek network. Google also rolled out a really significant UI redesign across most of its platforms, which has significantly improved the look and feel and unified many of their online spaces.

Twitter
Twitter redesigned.

Digital Monarchy
Marianna and I decided we were taking the leap from full-time employment and started our own little digital studio. We were originally going to call our company Harakiri, but the timing was too close to the Tsunami which hit Japan, so we settled on Digital Monarchy. We have no plans of taking over the world, we simply want to do good work. While only being in business for 9 months, we have worked on some great brands with some brilliant people.

FWA
I spent my December holiday in 2010 redesigning my personal website, choosing to try my hand at a responsive html5 design, which won me FWA Mobile Site of the Day on March 16th. Digiguru has now existed for over a decade and will continue to improve while showcasing my ever-increasing portfolio.

2012
With the new year, brings with it new optimism, may your 2012 be full of fun, excitement, success, laughter, good health, peace, love and happiness!

Thank you

Friday finds + friendly tips

Just when I thought I was growing tired of things online, (I actually even tweeted that I was bored with the web) Google and a few other companies have dropped some serious bombs and there are now a bunch of interesting things online worth exploring. With all this geeking it up, even an old hat like myself can learn a thing or two, I feel worth sharing with you.

Finds

Google+ launched and has already got 10 Million+ users. It’s still by invite only, so send me your gmail address and I’ll invite you.
If you have email overload, then perhaps Shortmail’s 500 character limit will help. No attachments, no junk mail, no folder management. Just pure text. Claim your name @shortmail.com
Adobe released the Flash Player 11 beta for desktops. This particular build brings with it Stage3D APIs, for “advanced” 2D and 3D rendering, 64-bit support, H.264 encoding, and 7.1 surround sound.
+1 buttons let people who love your content recommend it on Google search. Follow the instruction’s and easily add the +1 button here.
Kevin Rose decided to point his domain kevinrose.com to his Google+ account as it gives him more (real time) feedback and engagement than his blog ever did.
Over 36 000 businesses may have already signed up for Google+ which will launch later this year.
State of the Internet 2011 is an interactive infographic created by Online Schools.
If you like infographics, then you need to visit Visual.ly, the world’s largest community for exploring, sharing, creating, and promoting data visualizations.
Plus buddy analyzes your public Facebook profile and provides recommmendations of who to follow on G+
You can register for DesignSignoff, a new elegant tool for design presentation & review.
For interesting stats and to discover and Find People on Google+
Tweet my Plus is a service to tweet your Google+ posts.

Friendly Tips

Don’t tweet at 2am about yawning, you might have yawned several times tweeting, but no one will be around to respond to your curious questions.
Keep your url’s short by using the Google url shortener
Despite being irritated when receiving calls from blocked numbers, answer the phone, apparently clients might be calling your from PABX systems etc which will block the number.
Create a short URL for your Google+ profile on http://glpl.us
If you are a client, please don’t call, email us so we have a record of our conversation. If we talk, we’ll do it face to face, I promise we play well with others.
Learn how to redirect your homepage /+ URL to your Google + profile like this http://digiguru.co.za/+
Lots of functionality not available in Google+ can be achieved by using Google Chrome’s extensions
If you hit the home button on your keyboard, it scrolls to the top of the browser (Yes, I really didn’t know that)
If you’re not sure what is going on currently on Google+, don’t worry, the hottest topic is currently people are talking about Google+ as it’s full of early adopters.

Get your head out of the clouds

There has been a lot of talk about cloud computing, today I noticed some tweets about Apples iCloud service. After a filling a few hundreds gigs and adopting Terabyte drives more frequently, the thought of storing data online, accessible from anywhere, sounds great. So does streaming off someone else’s server, running software online and so the list goes on. But I live in Africa, which means bandwidth is notoriously slow, un-reliable, pretty limited and lets not forget, grossly expensive. So anyone who thinks we can benefit from cloud computing, really does have their head in the clouds.

iPad in the house!

I’m so glad it’s cold today, good reason to stay in doors and play with my iPad. We were up early, ready for the stampede at the iStore as apple fans tried to get their hands on the iPad2. Lucky for us, we bumped into a friend who told us to skip the queue and go to Incredible Connection and get them there. Good advice, it took all of 5 minutes and we were iPad owners.

Yes! This post was done with the wordpress app on my iPad.