Tom Cavill is a Product & UI Designer in London.

A product idea involving broadcasting to people in your immediate area

Spring hit London a few days ago. Balcony doors and windows were flung open, orange juice and croissants were served. But someone in my apartment block took it upon themselves to spoil things by playing (abysmal) radio music from their window sill. I elected to shut the doors rather than go and confront the issue face-to-face (OK, I’m a lazy wuss). One–nil to Crap FM. I needed a way to reach-out anonymously.

Other instances of local disturbance aren’t hard to envisage or recall; nor is the need to occasionally contact your immediate neighbours with news of some sort. This can be a peer-to-peer thing or come from an organisation. Blanket planning permission letters and such like are common in urban areas. The addressee doesn’t need to be named – they’re interested by virtue of their location.

How can we digitise this – how can we create a hyper-local broadcast protocol? Messages you’re bound (if not forced) to see?

The closest example I can think of something that is achieving this at present is the wifi name hack:

Wifi names are hyper-local, device-agnostic, editable only by the author and anonymous.

But using them as a messaging system is of course inconvenient and overly tech-y.

The use-cases extend beyond complaints and notifications; and would even be useful (possibly more useful) in public areas where presence is transient (think festivals or town squares). The need for paper post and flyers could be reduced.

So my questions are: can this be done? Is it being tackled already? Or is forcing messages upon people too Orwellian and open to abuse?

Send me your comments or tweets (@tomcavill)

This post explains the process behind creating my new product, dsgnjbs.com – the ultimate design jobs board.

As much as I’m enjoying the freelance life, I do like to know who’s hiring in startup land and so keep an eye on several design job boards.

Every day, I’d find myself opening tabs for the job boards of Dribbble, Authentic Jobs, 37Signals, Smashing Magazine and so on. But I’m 21st-century lazy, and find that to be somewhat too much effort – why not have them come to me?

Enter IFTTT. Utilising the RSS to Twitter recipe by Demoine, I set about getting each board to fire a tweet to the newly created @dsgnjbs account when a job is posted. So far, so straightforward.

Some boards however don’t come with RSS feeds, such as the excellent It’s Nice That (for generally London-based positions). So what to do? Screen scrape. Now, those two words form a phrase that strikes me as somewhat above my station in terms of developer knowledge. But there’s a tool for everything, and with a little searching I chanced upon Feed43. Within about 30 minutes I had created an RSS feed for the It’s Nice That job board that could be added to my new tweet stream. I figured that this was ethically sound given that I’m ultimately just linking to their content without any layers of obfuscation.

There are a couple of boards, such as AngelList, that are harder to get a hold of as their pages are generated dynamically with Javascript. I know there are ways but for the sake of launching the service I figured they could wait.

For the dsgnjbs.com site itself, it was simply a case of utilising the Twitter API to pull in my @dsgnjbs feed, excluding some of the content – such as the #design and #job hashtags – programatically as they’re redundant in this context. This allowed the site to be styled in a more visually interesting way than had I just used the vanilla tweet stream widget, though it does impose some restrictions on the number of tweets I can display on the page.

Initial feedback has centred around a want for filtering by location. This isn’t possible, in any reliable fashion, with the current setup; though I have some ideas about how to bring this in over the coming weeks.

The @dsgnjbs twitter account is gaining followers at a decent pace after kind tweets from various sources. I aim to offer the ability for startups to advertise their positions through Dsgn Jbs, to the network of talented folk that’s being gathered in the near future; which will allow me to spend time developing advanced features on the product, and to make Dsgn Jbs the go-to place for those looking for work in our wonderful industry.

dsgnjbs.com

Let me know any feedback via twitter (@tomcavill) or in the comments here.

When Ben Pieratt introduced Hessian to the world last week, I was surprised, delighted and inspired all at once. Reactions have been polarised, but I feel this is an exciting and important innovation for designers.

The work itself is a playful collection of graphic marks and elements, reminiscent of 80s TV brands or children’s electronics of the same era. For me it also evokes a wistful memory of space-based movies and video games that I can’t tie to any particular title. I guess the point is, though, that it makes you feel something.

Pieratt’s rationale for the project gave me a lightbulb moment. As a designer, what part of the design process do you enjoy most – to which part do you bring the most value? For me it’s in the imagining and crafting of concepts. Sure you can don a number of other hats and switch to developing a front end or working out optimal copy for a sign-up button. But they’re extensions of a skillset that has its foundations in an ability – a knowingness if you will – for creating something from nothing that people will love.

The problem with traditional routes to expressing this are touched on by Pieratt in his post. Doing a startup is a mammoth, all-consuming and life-changing undertaking, with small chance of success. Even if you want to do it, you’ll likely need good people, money, sweat and luck to survive a year.

Working for a startup is frequently thrilling and provides a great deal of job satisfaction, but with a finite lifespan – working on the same product inevitably grates after a time, particularly if success doesn’t come quickly.

Working for an agency and applying your thinking to multiple clients (sometimes at once) can alleviate the boredom factor to an extent, though the problems are far outweighed by the often stagnating framework in which you’re forced to work, and the fact you have clients with their (nonsensical, ill-informed) feedback.

The point is when you know you know what you’re doing – the confidence to imagine and realise something people will want – it’s hard to find an outlet for it that can be utilised while your thinking is still fresh.

When I have an idea deemed worthy enough to spend time on, it finds its life on paper and in Sketch. Its identity is formed there, first, even though I know it should be born out of spreadsheets of tested assumptions and research data that backs up that initial hunch. But I’m a designer, I design.

Pieratt’s proposal is compelling: have a vision, craft a brand and set it free. Let MBAs apply their knowledge to yours once you’re done, but don’t allow them to interfere whilst you do it. He removes the obstacles to designing that exist in every other route.

Bored of redesigning famous brands for the hell of it? Why not design a brand with no product! Failing that, bum around on twitter all day!

— Darren Firth (@Darrenissane) February 6, 2013

The naysayers have voiced their incredulity – what’s the value in an empty brand? But the value is that it’s empty. Not a blank canvas: rather a beautifully rendered work on a canvas, in need of a good wall; a vantage point from which it can be admired.

To me, this feels like a natural path for designers to put their focus into. It feels like the future.

There’s always a debate raging in some corner of the Internet over the best software for designing for screens. Photoshop vs. Fireworks vs. Illustrator is the usual face off. Personally I’ve always used Photoshop, mainly because it’s what I started messing around with at my father’s print shop as kid (well, that and Corel Draw(!)). It’s an incredible program of course, but very memory intensive and overly full-featured for the average UI designer’s needs.

About 5 months ago though I bought Sketch, a tool from Bohemian Coding built specifically for designing for the web and mobile devices. Tellingly, I haven’t touched Photoshop (other than for photo editing) since.

Sketch is intuitive, fast and—after some significant teething problems—reliable. It defaults to vector-based output with a pixel view for fine tuning. It has invaluable tools built in such as @2x exporting and CSS rule generation on any shape or layer. Because it’s built specifically for purpose, things like grids perform their duties perfectly—there’s an inbuilt calculator for widths, columns and gutters, plus a baseline grid generator, all in one modal.

Creating wireframes is lightning fast. Taking those same files and building them into production-ready flats is a joyous time-saver.

The developers are pushing versions very regularly (9 updates in 6 months to date). Initially Sketch was pretty buggy and frustrating, but recent updates have made it a solid app with a significant reduction in crashes. Even when things do go belly-up, the autosave feature usually spares you from any significant loss.

If you’re someone who wrestles with Adobe’s expensive, bloated software on a daily basis, I recommend giving Sketch a go. The 15 day trial they offer should be enough to convince you. At $49, it’s a very compelling proposition.

A number of blog posts and tweets about the flat design aesthetic suggest it is now in the mainstream. Ebay’s purchase of Svpply—probably the first well-known web product to fully adopt the look—can only help to bring the more minimal approach to the fore.

Daniel Howells’ post brought to my attention for the first time a name for the movement—the aforementioned ‘flat design [era/aesthetic]’. I think the term, whilst serving a purpose and being intuitively recognisable, actually does a slight disservice to its proponents.

Whilst I wouldn’t be so bold as to think I could suggest an alternative, I do think it should be rooted around the efficiency of such interfaces. Gradients, drop-shadows and other skeuomorphs are capable of providing subtle hints or highlights to a UI. But, when used irresponsibly or in too great a quantity, can lead to a dramatic drop in the efficiency of the interface. Ultimately, an interface’s job is to facilitate interaction. Anything that gets in the way of that is superfluous.

Rendering CSS3 features like box-shadow or gradients can lead to a jittery, fan-inducing browsing experience, particularly when combined with other processes like lazy-loading or rendering font-face type. Individually these actions have small footprints, but collectively can add up and spoil an experience—especially on mobile devices.

Skeuomorphism is intended to help users relate their experience to the real world, but in its ubiquity has turned into something of a drag (in various senses).

Flat Design Aesthetic will probably do as a name for now. But moving forward I hope that this positive step is less of a trend and more of an evolution, and that all UI can become Efficient UI.

I was chatting with the founders of a new company the other day about successful British tech start-ups. It’s difficult to count many headline-makers, or think of more than three or four poster children for the industry that have come out of London. Huddle, Moo and more recently Mind Candy are the press’s go-to businesses for talking tech.

There is, though, one company that seem perennially overlooked. A purely tech company that have quietly come to revolutionise a huge sector, have expanded internationally and have multi-million pound revenues. You are almost guaranteed to have given money to them at some time. Probably on several occasions.

Headquartered in Paddington, JustGiving was founded in 2001 by Zarine Kharas and Anne-Marie Huby. Their service enables charities to collect donations online, most often through individuals requesting sponsorship for a run or climb or some-such.

The charitable bent is, of course, why JustGiving don’t make a hoo-ha about their success. But just how well are they doing? It doesn’t even take a look into the company accounts on Duedil to get an idea. Here are some numbers pulled from justgiving.com:

• Number of charities donated to: 13,543 (though JG state 8,000 registered charities currently)
• Monthly cost to said charities of membership: £15

So that’s somewhere between £120,000 and £200,000 in revenue per month before we’ve looked at donation income.

Now consider the following:

• Percentage cut from each donation: 5%
• Donations received up to March 2012: £1,000,000,000
  Source and more stats

~£55m in revenue from an Internet start-up, in just over ten years of trading. It’s not a world-beating amount, but the numbers are, by comparison to other online-only UK companies, hugely impressive. Recent deals and product innovation, such as the JustTextGiving partnership with Vodafone, should see their position consolidated in the face of challenges from Virgin and others.

JustGiving are a great British success story that have generated profit and benefitted thousands with real innovation. They deserve more press and adoration. But maybe they don’t want it.

Here’s a new product myself and Chico Charlesworth have built over the last two weekends.

T-shirt ordering sites are bloated and can be cumbersome. Our belief is that any message looks great set black on white in Helvetica on a high quality tshirt—who needs all the extra clip art and dodgy icons?

Our solution? Helvetitee

I’d be really interested to hear your feedback. We’re very much in alpha so there may be a few bugs. Having said that, the site is live and taking orders, so please give it a whirl.

One of Harmony’s great hidden features is its ability to pull in data feeds and let you do interesting things with them.

Twitter is built in and ready in just a few clicks, but Instagram takes a little more setting up; so here’s a guide.

First, you’ll need an API key. Sign in to Instagram at http://instagram.com/developer/ and hit ‘Register your application’. Register a new client and use your Harmony site’s domain for both the website URL and redirect URI.

In Harmony; navigate to Data Feeds in the side bar and hit ‘Add a data feed’. Ensure JSON is selected in the dropdown menu, and name your feed InstaJSON or hipsterfeed or whatever else.

In the JSON data url field, paste in this path:

https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/[X]/media/recent/?access_token=[Y]

Now you need to ascertain what your user number and access token is. The quickest way is to use this handy tool from David M Register. Replace [X] and [Y] in the JSON data url field with your user number and access token respectively.

Save your data feed and go to your site’s theme documents in Harmony. Create a new template, or open the template in which you want your Instagram feed to appear.

Use the following code to output your latest ten Instagram photographs.

<section class="instagram-feed">
  <h2>Instagram</h2>
    {% feed 'instajson' %}
      {% for photo in feed.data.data limit:10 %}
        <a href="{{ photo.images.link }}" target="_blank">
          <img src="{{ photo.images.low_resolution.url }}" />
        </a>
      {% endfor %}
    {% endfeed %}
</section>

Use the data feeds link at the foot of the Harmony chrome to browse through the data available to you; the above example uses only the link and small sized photo; but you have access to likes, comments, larger sizes—the whole shebang.

Would love to see some examples of this in the wild, so let me know in the comments. You can see mine on my info page.

I’ve always struggled with working sat down for nine hours straight. Since beginning to work from home in July I’ve experimented with a standing desk setup and have been surprised by the results.

My hacked together solution is far from refined but was designed to help evaluate the idea of investing in something more permanent. An old school desk forms the base, with a Habitat Tam Tam stool on top with its seat–cum–lid removed. That is flattened off by a 12” record (Flesh + Blood by Roxy Music :)) on which the laptop sits. My MacBook Pro 13” (no external displays or accessories) is then at about chest level, so my hands are comfortable typing for extended periods. The display has to be tilted back a fair degree.

As I said this is not a permanent solution — in reality I’d want an external monitor, mouse and keyboard so a proper height–adjustable desk would be preferable.

Results

The good

I feel far lest restless standing and working. Gone is the guilty feeling induced by sitting. Its replacement is a sharp focus—the most unexpected and surprising benefit from standing is how I simply don’t stray from work anymore. Ordinarily an hourly checkup of Twitter, Instagram or Reddit would occur and rabbit–hole one’s time. Since standing that simply doesn’t happen.

A more expected benefit is the reduced back–ache and heavy-arsedness (is that a term?). It doesn’t completely remove that thirst for gym–time that a desk job brings (and I wouldn’t want it to as standing is hardly exercise), but it’s an order of magnitude better.

As a result of that, relaxing in the evening with an epsiode of Breaking Bad or whatever is more enjoyable, I actually look forward to sitting as a sort of reward for a day’s work.

The not so good

I feel faintly ridiculous standing up with a laptop. Alice is incredulous and thought it was a joke for the first few hours, but as a chef hasn’t experienced the dread of full–day sitting. I’m unsure how a standing set–up would transfer to a busy office environment where everyone else sits.

The biggest issue is the pain caused to my heels. The floor is a hard wood so wearing running shoes is essential for cushioning. In the recent hot weather though that’s caused some discomfort, so I’m considering the purchase of an ‘anti stress mat’, which will only add to the nerdiness.

Conclusion

Once you get over the unfamiliarity of being stood up, the standing desk is actually quietly revolutionary. It feels natural and seems to encourage—and be harmonious with—work. It is easier to walk away from the desk, so breaks do increase. But it’s also easier to resume work—you just walk to the desk and carry on. On an anecdotal, unquanitified level I’m definitely more productive with it.

If you find yourself frustrated with a sitting arrangement I’d encourage you to give standing a trial. Hack together something that will give you a flavour for two or three days. It could save your life(!).

We went to Bologna this summer and found it to be a friendly, accessible and beautiful city that has somehow remained relatively un–touristy.

Bologna’s known as Italy’s food capital and is nicknamed ‘La Grasse’ (the fat), so our food expectations were high. We did eat very well, and got the impression it’d be quite hard not to. A couple of notable trattorias were Osteria dell’Orsa in the student quarter and Marsalino which is close to the main square. We didn’t pay over 30 EUR for any meal, including wine. It’s all simple fare, as the best Italian cuisine generally is — but the local produce is so good that it’s really not necessary to go to any great lengths with it.

We found our AirBnB apartment to be well placed at the Southern edge of the city walls. This meant it was quieter than the Northen quarter with its busy train station, yet only a ten minute stroll to the Piazza Maggiore. En route was a small coffee house that baked its own brioche, making for a perfect light breakfast.

The Piazza was being used as an open air cinema, showing Hitchcock films for free as part of a culture festival. In the day it’s a grand sight but remains peaceful, and the cafés aren’t tourist traps with jacked–up prices.

We took the train to Venice for the last few days. As beautiful a city as it is, the rampant tourism is impossible to escape — that’s all it seems to exist for. Bologna is a working city with its own distinct identity, locals and food. It’s very well worth a visit.