Firstly, I’ll just mention that I did not fully sign up, don’t have an account and can’t log in to their site. I did however enter my email address (although I didn’t agree to receive emails).

1. From who?
So, first up is the important info you see when you first get the email, the from address.

It’s from “support@lovefilm.com”, not ‘LOVEFiLM’, which is a pet peeve in itself, but that’s not the worst part. Reading further down the email you’ll find this piece of text “Please note. This email was sent to you automatically, so please don’t reply to it as it will not reach anybody!” Come on LOVEFiLM, it’s got the word ‘support’ in it, and I can’t reply to it!?

Also, nothing feels more impersonal (other than a ‘no-reply’ from address) than automated emails sent at 4:10am.

2. No web version
We all know that sometimes our emails can look a bit wonky in some email clients, so the usual fallback would be to have a link to an online version someone could look at. Not LOVEFiLM though, oh no. THIS is their fallback—

“If you are having difficulty reading or displaying this email, or you wish to enable your email software to display emails in your preferred font size, please log-in to your My Account page and change the option under ‘email preferences’ to ‘Plain text email’.”

And what makes this even worse? On an iPhone, this is the largest peice of text in the entire email—

Worse still is this – As I didn’t complete the sign up procedure, I don’t have an account, so I can’t login to do this anyway. Even if I wanted to.

3. Language
So as far as I can tell, the aim of this email is to get me to continue to sign up to the service. So you’d expect there to be a big obvious button with ‘SIGN UP’ on it. No, instead LOVEFiLM prefer to use this wording “Yes, I would like to get films”. Now, not only is it not really a call to action, it’s doesn’t even make sense. It does not encourage me to click through.

4. No unsubscribe!
And finally, the most frustrating thing about this email – You can’t unsubscribe. There is no link to click on. Anywhere. And I can’t login and stop emails, as I don’t have an account! I guess LOVEFiLM aren’t aware that it’s a legal requirement to give people the option to unsubscribe.

This is my first experience of LOVEFiLM and it’s not been great. As a brand, they have fantastic potential for creating great interactions with customers, and potential customers. At the moment though, they just make me want to hit myself in the head with my shoes.

If you start a tweet with ‘@username…’, only people who follow both the person sending the tweet AND ‘@username’ will see the tweet.

If you want all your followers to see a tweet about someone, you can’t started it with an ‘@’. Any other character is fine so this could work:

“- @tomalloyd just did a twitter 101”

and so would this:

“Great twitter 101 by @tomalloyd”

That’s it! I told you it was short, but it’s amazing the number of people who don’t know. Feel free to link them to this post to explain!

As I mentioned in my previous post this was my first speaking gig at a conference, so the day was filled with anticipation, nerves, excitement, many bottles of water and an entire pack of Wrigley’s Airwaves to help combat the heavy cold I’ve had all week.

I think it went well. Neither myself or my speaking partner Rob completely screwed up, no one threw anything at us, and some people even laughed. Those are good signs, right? People said some really nice things and twitter was buzzing on the #p80n hash tag.

I’ve just added our slides to Speaker Deck, so if you want to take another look, please do. If you have any questions or comments (good or bad) about our talk, drop me a tweet or leave a comment. I promise not to cry. Probably.

I know Joel and his team are taking a well deceived break, but at some point there should be some pictures, audio and video being added to the Port80 Events site. I’ll update this post when that happens.

I’m sure Port80 as a conference is here to stay. If what happened yesterday is achievable by 1 man (and his helpers) in the space of a few months, what happens next year will be pretty special I reckon.

For the last couple of years I have had a little voice floating around somewhere in the top left hand side of my brain saying “go on Tom, tell people about the stuff you love”. Then one day I was flicking through Twitter and I saw a tweet from another web-chap called Joel Hughes saying something along the lines of –

“If I organised a web conference in Newport, would anyone speak at it?”

Well, that was it. That was the perfect opportunity for this little bugger of a voice to say “Go on then Tom, get up there!”. Could I speak at a conference? Did I have the confidence, the knowledge or indeed the kahunas? There was only one way to find out. Rob Mills, our Studio Manager also had the hankering to get up on stage and talk, so I broached the idea of doing it together.

Since the early days of Bluegg, I have been fascinated by personality in communications, whether it be branding, marketing or on the web. Like most, I find the personality of brands like Innocent and Mailchimp enticing and intriguing. I’m always looking for the next cheeky little slogan or quip to grace the bottom of a bottle of smoothie. Rob shares my fascination. In fact he wrote a book about invisible communication which looks at how colour, type and tone all work together to form a personality designed to attract and inform.

We have a mutual interest into how brand personality can be effectively communicated online, far away from human interaction. Over the years, we’ve learned a quite lot about it. We actively promote it to our clients, and we felt like a good subject to go with, so we offered ourselves as speakers. We saw this as an opportunity to try our hand and test ourselves in front of a small local crowd, in an office somewhere, with a couple of other first time speakers. Ha, yeah good plan. Soon this mini web conference had a name, a website, was being held in the impressive University of Wales, Newport Campus, had a line up of seasoned speakers and had sold all the bloody tickets. 140 of them. Shit.

The closer we get to the day, the more excited I’m feeling. I’m sure I’ll be a bag of butterflies on the day (especially as we’re last on), but I’m looking forward to the experience, however it goes. If it’s horrible and I freak out and run off stage crying, as least I can say I’ve tried it (and Rob can always finish the talk). On the other hand, I might really enjoy it and look for more opportunities in the future. Only time will tell.

I’ll post an update when it’s all done. Wish me luck!

Yesterday evening (UK time) Apple held a media event and announced the highly anticipated 3rd generation iPad. Interestingly Apple has now dropped the numbering system it introduced with the iPad 2 and continues to use with the iPhone. This new iPad is simply called ‘The new iPad’, which of course will change to just plain ol’ ‘iPad’ in time.

I for one think this is the right move for Apple. I think they should have dropped numbering for both iPad and iPhone long ago. The more quickly they release products the more confusing and unnecessary the numbering becomes. Unlike a company like RIM or Nokia which have tens or hundreds of models, all needing differentiating from each other, Apple only has one phone and one tablet. I really hope the next iPhone (5) is just called ‘the new iPhone’.

There’s little point in me going into huge detail about the new iPad, as that’s already been done here, here and here.

The most important upgrade to the iPad is undoubtably the introduction of the Retina display as seen in the iPhone 4 and 4s, which will most likely find its way into every other tablet device over the next 12 months. This has caused quite a reaction around the web design world. The question now is:

“How can design take advantage of a retina display?”

At a time when there is so much change in the web industry, with movements toward content first, content strategy, mobile first and responsive web design, the introduction of high resolution displays adds another thing to consider. The balance between download speed, data consumption and providing the best possible visual experience just got a whole lot harder to manage. There’s a really interesting article over at .Net Magazine and Brad Frost has written an article called ‘iPad 3′s retina display will wreak havoc on the web‘ which is worth a read.

The term ‘responsive’ has exploded across the web design community over the last year or so. It’s pretty much the buzz of the industry right now, and for good reason. But it’s nothing new. In fact, as human beings, we have witnessed responsiveness since the day we began life as single cell organisms, 3.4 billion years ago (ish).

Responsive by nature

The very nature of… well, nature, is to be responsive. To respond, change tact or direction, based on our environment.

Think of a caveman called Bob. He’s wandering about, looking for some stones to bash together to make an axe, and suddenly a bear pops out from a bush. Bob’s brain produces adrenaline, which makes him more aware, faster and stronger and changes the chemical balance of his body to help him escape before getting eaten.

Think of childbirth. I can’t think of a single more extreme example of responsiveness. The way the body can respond to the situation, physically changing shape, size and chemical make-up to accommodate a baby.

This, to me is the ultimate in responsive design. It’s the body, a living tissue, responding to its environment to deal with a situation.

As humans we crave responsiveness. We like things that mold to situations automatically. We build things that make our lives easier – doors that open automatically as we approach, windscreen wipers that start when it rains and headlights that come on when it gets dark. All make our lives easier – all responsive design.

Looking forward

I think (along with many others) that we are at the mere tip of the responsive iceberg. Until now most designers have been beavering away trying to work out the best way of getting websites to change form, in order to look better on smaller devices.

For me the really interesting stuff comes when we talk about context – how the actual content and message of a website changes depending on the context of the user. For this, we need sensors – a way of knowing certain factors based on information we can collect. As Mark Boulton wrote in a recent post, we’re currently limited by these sensors —

“At the moment, all that we can do reliably (well, fairly), and knowably, is use the browser as our single sensor by which to sense. We have one sensor. We need more.”

For me the exciting stuff is really all about sensors and how we can use them in the future. Think about current smartphones. Most have the following sensors:

1. Ambient light
2. Orientation
3. The accelerometer
4. Location via GPS
5. A compass
6. Time

What’s to say that future sensors won’t include heartbeat monitors, temperature gauges and many others people more clever than me will think of?

The more sensors we have available to us, the more accurately we can predict the context. For instance, by using GPS, accelerometer, compass, time, heartbeat and temperature, it might be possible to tell if someone had just been for a jog, how far they went, how long it took them, how fast they ran and the condition of their health. The important thing is that all of this could be determined without the user entering any information, or doing anything at all.

Outlook

At the moment, I think there are lots of questions being asked about how we deal with responsive web design from a business point of view – from the effect on workflow and timescales through to how to charge a client for it. For small agencies like mine these questions are vital, as is educating our clients about the importance of future proofing.

The way I see things moving is into two camps:

Responsive design:
Changing the look of a website to give the best visual experience on different size devices will just become ‘web design’, just like standards. This will be built into our project planning, workflow and estimate of cost. We should talk to clients about it and its benefits, but shouldn’t be making it an optional extra. Over time it’ll just ‘be the way’ websites are designed – And we can stop using the term ‘Responsive web design’.

Contextual design:
This is different. Really looking deeply into a website project and proposing ways that the website can change its content, message and function as well as form, depending on the users context shouldn’t be standard. This is going to take extra thinking, extra research and in some cases a lot of extra work. For me this is where our expertise as communicators and information architects becomes really important and brings the ‘magic’ back to the web.

One thing in for sure, this is a seriously exciting time to be involved in web design, and I think context is going to be the biggest change to our industry since Tim Berners-Lee got bored one day and started fiddling about with HTTP and a server.

Shortly after the event was announced the internet broke a little bit, with the shrieks and yelps of many web designers who saw the whole thing as a elitist, meaningless ego massage for the ‘web celebs’. Although I can see some issues, the meltdown the web world went into was pretty ridiculous.

The Premise
The idea of the day was to have a small number of people (mostly friends and contemporaries) to meet up to talk about how responsive web design is affecting their workflow, process and business. It was also an attempt to look forward, to put ideas out there and to find out what’s next. There was a form on the website for people to suggest topics for discussion, which would later be shared with the wider community.

The Good
Every industry needs people to do and try things before others. Every single industry has them, from cookery to technology to wine making. Some people call them pioneers, or forward thinkers, I prefer to think of them as people I can learn from. Personally, I have no real interest in being one of these people, as I have a business to run and a family to enjoy, and would really struggle to find time. But I do appreciate the fact that some are dedicated to trying something new and are making my life easier by discovering new things I can learn (or ignore if I wish).

The way I see the Responsive Summit is just a meeting of people trying to break new ground and make all our lives a little easier by sharing their findings. These sorts of meetings are good for our industry. They help all of us.

The Bad
There was however, some key things that were wrong about the meeting. One of the main criticisms was the fact that the meeting had a name and website. The people involved have now agreed that this was a bad idea. The reason this caused such a stink was because it made a private meeting public, and it became exclusive rather than inclusive. Simply by giving the meeting a ‘brand’ made it a tangible thing that people should have been able to get involved in. Instead it created an entity that only included the people who were at the meeting.

The name was a bit of a disaster too. The word ‘summit’ and image of world and military leaders around a table made the attendees look like they thought of themselves as the leaders of our field – more important than everyone else. I’m sure that this impression lead to the next part…

The Ugly
Well put simply, twitter went mental. I’ve always known that the web industry could be a bitchy, competitive and ego driven environment. Just like most other creative industries – think of advertising and, well… Steve Jobs. But this time, it all went a bit sour. There was a pretty strong backlash against the aforementioned brand that had been created. That backlash soon turned nasty and the name calling started. To be honest it was all pretty schoolboy-esque and reasonably pathetic.

Many people spoke out against the name calling, saying that they couldn’t believe such insults were being slung in such a public manner. The truth is, we’re all on Twitter – a public communication service – If there are going to be insults thrown, it’s going to be public. The ‘leaders’ in this case have to realise that they’ve stuck their hand up and said “I’m going to try to improve our industry”. They’ve put themselves on a public stage (literally in many cases) and anyone who does that is going to piss some people off – that’s just life I’m afraid.

That doesn’t excuse the general attitude toward the people involved in Responsive Summit. There may have been some errors of judgement, but overall they were all there to try to make the web better. We should be grateful that people take time to really push our industry forward – and then share that knowledge with everybody who wants to read it.

Maybe next time, just keep schtum and meet in a café instead.

So, firstly I’m Tom. I live in south Wales with my lovely wife Kelly and my increasingly awesome son Joe.

In 2002 I graduated from an old red brick art school called the GCADT (Glamorgan Center for Art and Design Technology). Pretty frickin catchy huh? I loved that place, and spent five happy years there, burning stuff, gluing stuff, breaking stuff and getting covered in ink and candle wax.

This is where I became a graphic designer. When I left college I bobbed around doing freelance work for friends and picked up a couple of clients. One day, one of my ex-class mates, Mike Jordan rang and asked if I fancied starting a company. I said yes, and we started Bluegg. That was 10 years ago.

For those 10 years I’ve been busy, along with my amazing team, trying to build Bluegg into a great company, by creating brand identities, marketing materials and websites for hundreds of (mostly) lovely clients.

I thought it was high time, I had a place of my own to talk rubbish and share my thoughts, away from my company. That’s why this blog is here.

To be completely honest, I’m not totally sure what I’m going to do with it. I don’t have a strategy or plan; I just have stuff to say. To give you an idea of the sort of things I might cover, I’ve come up with this list of rules for myself:

It’s about design & communication
That’s what I do, so that’s what I’ll stick to. It might be about web design, branding, industrial design, social media or everything in-between. I may stray now and again, but generally it’ll be designery talk.

It’s for me
I’m not looking to win awards for saying world-changing things, so this is mainly for me. If people like it, then that’s great.

Constructive Ranting
I’m not a particularly ranty person. I don’t really go into meltdown over issues in our industry, but I do have strong opinions on some things, so they might pop out from time to time.

It’s not an advert
I’ll do my best to stay impartial. I’m not really hoping to become a famous blogger and I’m not going to bang on about Bluegg all the time (although we are great).

One last thing – I’d like to extend a massive thank you to one of the finest gents I’ve met – Paul Goodfield, who helped me put this WordPress theme together. He’s great.

That’s it really. This is my venue and you’re invited to the party. You’re welcome anytime.