Our first She Says viral goes live!

Entitled Cannes Party - Check out Sebs crazy dancefloor moves ;-)

My interview on FWA

This took me so long to write and rewrite - It's just never good/funny/relaxed enough when you're writing about yourself - Every time I rescan this I feel like a knob...

The debacle that was the Online Marketing Show

I spoke at the Online Marketing Show at the Design Centre in Islington last week - and it was perhaps the most shambolic presentation I've ever did.

• Firstly, though I arrived with an 1/2 hr to spare as requested for technical run-through, the session before me was running late. This meant that the speakers entered the room at the same time as the audience, and with no checks.
  
• Secondly, two out of the four speakers were a no-show (Chris was getting married so thats a pretty good excuse but still...)
  
• Thirdly, Flo (Heiss, from Dare) and I were met with a technician who's exact words were "No one told ME that anyone needed a computer". This for a talk about Best in Show - cutting edge online marketing. I wonder what he thought we were going to be up to? I had already been told there was no internet access (at an Online Marketing Show?!) and had spent hours compiling a presentation that would have taken 10 mins to put together if it could have run live.
• Next, the machine he dredged up from under the stage didn't read my memory stick, so I had to copy it to an audience-member's machine and then to the said laptop.
• Finally thinking that I could start unhindered, I clicked on my first link, to find that Windows Media Player had never been installed, and the PC was to old to play .movs, so I had to jump out of my presentation, install the software and play the MPG1 format vids I had brought as a backup.
• So, there I was playing the videos, and then I came to the 2nd part of the presentation - only to find NO Flash Player installed, and no internet connection to get me some.

I ended up describing the pieces of work through the power of animated hand gestures and verbal diarrhoea...

Lucky Flo just had JPGs.

Happily for me, Flo found a review of the talk online which cheered me up a lot...

these little piggies went to market...

Place:The Royal Agricultural Show at Warwick.
Reason: To spend some time observing children on the McCain Potato Story bus, before getting started on the site design proper.
It reminded me so much of school - the smells, the men wandering around with farm coats and wellies... and with jousting to boot it was a pretty spectacular day trip - just a shame it was dumping down for most of the day...
Had some great sausages from Thirsk in Yorkshire, and brought home 3 packets for a fiver. Highly recommended, from Debbie and Andrews.
It was an incredibly grounding experience, standing in the drizzle, with sausages in hand, looking at these gorgeous little piglets and thinking about the importance of understanding and respecting where your food comes from...

glue Loves London

This Saturday saw the glue annual festival extravaganza kick-off, with a barbeque and hot shoe shuffle at The Green in Clerkenwell, followed by a mad open-top bus mission down Oxford St to the O2 Festival in Hyde Park.



Here we see fine examples of the frivolity - happy husband and Leila "no, really, I think that guys would find this moustache sexy, like they're thinking "Could I be gay?" It's tantalising" Naghashi.


Thanks to Marky (who lent me a collapsible chair) and Dan (who carried it for me) I was able to get through Plan B, CSS, LCD Soundsystem and the amazing stageshow of Daft Punk, even with a baby on board. And although waiting in the queue for the portaloos almost drove me to tears (and pulling pregnancy privileges) we had an incredible day, topped off by a walk through the gaggle of war memorials in the roundabout at the bottom of Hyde Park - a hitherto undiscovered gem of a place.

glue Private View makes it into Computer Arts

Pity about the poor photograph! Where did my lips go? Thanks to Sam Gilbey for the opportunity to contribute to the article.

Kingdom of Fools

I've been hitting the speakers trail this week:
Firstly, attending the lasy day of the Wildfire - Flammable thinking event in Brick Lane...
secondly seeing Crab speak at an NMK event on the future of digital design...
and thirdly, Ale and I ran our 2nd She Says night this week.

A week of really interesting (and not so) thinking, and a real energiser for me in the development of She Says as something that will really help to change the industry.

So, to Wildfire, and Tom Savigar from The Future Laboratory.
He spoke about the "yoof" generation... pulsing through some really interesting insights coming from his recent research...
I won't recap everything in full here, just publish some of the cooler, more interesting and quirkier finds:

THE FUTURE IS NO CERTAIN PLACE - fear, uncertainty and doubt is normal and they live in a benchmarked culture where they are constantly measured. In fact, ranking can be seen in stores such as Tokyo's Ranking Ranqueen, which sells only the top-ranked products in a vast array of catagories... and in sites such as ethiscore.com where consumables are ranked according to their green creds.

They all equate creativity with real financial worth, and are hungry for creative careers... and they WILL TRY ANYTHING ONCE.

The coolest teen trend is a growing movement of teenagers dubbed the "Mad Hatters" with over 9000 members worldwide. Inspired by romantic stories of siting in cafés having real conversation and debate (think the original Avant Garde.) They collect through social networking sites to drink English Breakfast in bone china and chat over tea - in the real world. I tried to find them online, but I'm obviously just not under 20 anymore - I couldn't find a thing. The idea was so appealing though - completely what I would have been into at the (this) time! I found myself longing for floppy hair, art school and Artaud again...

The other comment that really hit me is something that I have often felt (and still feel myself) is the idea that people constantly re-invent/rework/resample themselves these days - tha change and mutation is the norm - the feeling he captured from the 20somethings he spoke to: "Can I just have some time off before I re-invent myself again?" Its something I feel myself periodically...

Finally, a great quote from someone's 5 year old daughter at a live football match, when she had to get up to go to the bathroom - "I need to go to the loo, can I pause it?"

It reminded me that there is a book about teenagers coming out in July by a girl called Jelly Ellie (often pulled out at the token teen by the BBC since about 2004) - "How Teenagers Think" . I hope this will prove just as insightful as today's research - and hopefully a good read too.

He wrapped up the final discussion with the comment that we are living in a right-brain world: a feminine world full of empathy, joy and fun, but I have a real issue with the event organisers on this point: if its SUCH a feminine-thinking world, WHERE ARE THE WOMEN ON STAGE? Man after man strutted their stuff, but as usual, there was hardly any female representation... one woman on the first day only. Surely, not all the industry's best brains have rampant nasal hair? OFFF festival last year was just the same, as was the NMK talk and most others I attend.

The other notable talk was by a Creative Social mate of mine from Anomaly in NYC, Johnny Vulkan (who agreed with me on the above point btw...)
One of his first points is that we haven't managed the debate around our own industry - we're seen as the bad guys.
Again, too much info to go into detail about here, save to say that apart from getting in a reference to GOLGAFRINCHAM his talk can be wrapped up in his final tips:
Make it easier for people to be good
Ask more questions
Expand your thinking/role/business
Help good companies grow, help bad ones change
Accept contradictions, learn, move on
Be good to your mother

Here are some interesting links from his talk:
www.janchipchase.com
www.core77.com
www.designcanchange.org



Unfortunately, the NMK discussion left me a little disappointed, though I must remember to use the quote "design has never been a profession where you have to wait for permission"... Crab had an interesting point about what happens to digital designers in a world where non-design or utalitarian design (eg. MySpace) is the norm... do we become the designers of the systems to allow people to publish rather than the publishers ourselves?
Unfortunately it relly wasn't the environment for a real debate or discussion about this (I see Crab's point but have a lot that I wanted to add in favour of doing both) as the audience consisted mainly of traditional designers who were struggling to get digital in the first place - and I had to agree with Crab here that they just need to get on with it or miss the boat - you don't solve anything with inertia...

She Says Mark 2 was a great success... you can read more about it on our MySpace page, but we had about 35 women there for almost 3 hours of informative discussion and informal chat...
We called the meeting 'BECAUSE YOU'RE WORTH IT' as it was about how to take your career further and get what you want in terms of professional development.

The speakers were:
» Laura Ormerod - Creative Services Consultant - at Propel
» Tina Brazil - People Director at Profero
» Emma Witkowski from AKQA
» Rhiannon James - Graduating Creatives Manager at D&AD

Tina and Laura spoke about: 'How to choose an agency that is going to help with your professional development' and 'how to handle work reviews and get the most of out them'.

Rhiannon spoke about women in the industry and how find the right agency for you and engage with them - as well as a little about D&AD itself.

Finally, Emma covered 'Switching between disciplines inside an agency'

Tina's talk in aprticular garnered a lot of interest! Our next event will be (hopefullly) at glue, on the 30st or 31st May.

glue private view - photos from the show...

Here are some photos from the glue Private View, the exhibition of artworks by staff that Emma and I organise at work every year. This year we had over 300 people at the event: staff, clients, family and friends. Even though I couldn't drink my way through the cocktail list like usual, I had a brilliant time... Big thanks go to Lina from Lime Events for helping us with the event co-ordination... and canapes!!!
We've not only been at different times clients for one another (I designed a site and print work for her about 3 or 4 years ago) but have also become great friends... Check out her company website - and book her for your next London event!!!
Big thanks also to our glue Designer Leal Bao, who took the great photos below. Check out his site at: http://luvpixel.net/.