Carsonified

Last week we released 100 of our custom made journals and jute bags. They literally flew off the shelf. Ryan is currently knee deep in Jiffy envelopes, boxes, bags and Sellotape preparing the deliveries.

This week and just in time for Christmas we bring you the Carsonified T-shirt. Mike, who designed the tee, describes it as “a call to arms to ditch the computer and get back to basics with a pencil and paper”. We just think it looks cool and as my mother would say “it washes well”.

Once you have your tee you’re going to need to know how to fold it. Learn from the master, here’s Steve ‘Buzz’ Pearce from Poke showing us the perfect Top Shop folding technique.

The perfect way to fold a t-shirt! from Carsonified on Vimeo.

The tees are made from 100% pure cotton and are available in small, medium, large and extra large and are priced at $15 + p+p ($5 to the UK and $10 to the rest of the world). Orders will start shipping week beginning 10th November (after we all get back from Future of Web Design New York 2008).

Choose your size and shipping destination
Small (Shipped to UK) $20.00 Medium (Shipped to UK) $20.00 Large (Shipped to UK) $20.00 X-Large (Shipped to UK) $20.00 Small (Shipped to Rest of World) $25.00 Medium (Shipped to Rest of World) $25.00 Large (Shipped to Rest of World) $25.00 X-Large (Shipped to Rest of World) $25.00

We also have a handful of FOWA Expo Crew T-shirts available. Bright red and featuring the FOWA target on the back you are sure to be a hit with your friends.

Choose your size and shipping destination
Large (Shipped to UK) $20.00 X-Large (Shipped to UK) $20.00 Large (Shipped to Rest of World) $25.00 X-Large (Shipped to Rest of World) $25.00

Add your pic to our Flickr group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/carsonifiedtees/pool/

As soon as I blogged about the Carsonified Journals we created for FOWA attendees, we had a mob descend on us asking to buy them.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll be doing a 1-day workshop for anyone building a start-up. It’s Dec 12th at Carsonifed HQ, and there’s only 12 seats.

Leaving your 9 to 5 to launch your own company is exciting but a bit scary - especially with the current financial climate. However, downturns in the market are always the best time to start a company, and we can give you the advice you need to succeed. With everything riding on your success you need to make sure that you have the best advice from the folks who’ve done it all before - that’s where Start-up Clinic comes in.

Hope you can make it!

Recently, we’ve been compiling a few of our websites together. This is a really cool idea, because it allows us to use more of our data in more intelligent ways, and to keep a cleaner, more DRY codebase. It also means we can start to replace some of the parts of our systems that possibly aren’t as helpful as they could be. Case in point: the 500 page!

Now, don’t get me wrong - this page is pretty informative. It clearly shows you that something’s gone wrong. However, it’s not very helpful. It’s simply a message. So I thought to myself, “What would I like to see on an error page? Clearly this error isn’t my fault - so I should have some options here.”

Changing this error page was, in my mind, a big thing. This error message has been at the company longer than I have. Does it get a severance package? I mean, it doesn’t take Fridays off. It never turns up late. It always stays behind and works while we have parties. It doesn’t even play Guitar Hero. Short of monit, it’s probably one of our most diligent employees. Even if it stopped working, I’m sure it’d show itself as its own error page. That’s commitment… or, possibly, infinite and fatal recursion.

So what could replace this trusty workhorse of a page? I put myself in a user’s shoes. Well, I thought to myself, I’d really like to notify the  developer directly. That would mean that this might get fixed, stat. Does that mean a phone number on the page? An anonymous email address? Both of these things seem far too difficult. For instance, I cannot work the Carsonified desk phones correctly; they have many, many buttons. Once, my particular unit started typing letters instead of numbers. And OSX seems to enjoy stalling whatever I’m doing by opening Mail.app every time I click a mailto link.

Nah, let’s put a FORM on it. One that sends the message to an independently-hosted site to process. That way, if the site were to go down, Dreamhost-style I’ll still be able to get hate-mail from all our users.

That’s not going to be enough, though. If I’m clearly not to blame for this evident failure, I’d like to know who is… so there should be some sort of backup contact details. Details that clearly aren’t just a blatant ploy for fame, admiration and Twitter followers.

Now, the worst part about making a 500 page is that, if you do your job right, nobody will ever see it. But things do inevitably go wrong, and a good 500 page is a useful tool to have around for when they do. This is 2008 - hiding behind a blank error page just isn’t enough. If you care about your users, and your application, you need to know when stuff goes wrong.

Current number of 500 page emails: 2

We are only two weeks away from Future of Web Design New York which takes place on the 3rd-4th November. The whole Carsonified team are working hard to bring you another great show this year.

Our workshops have proven to be more popular than ever this year and have virtually sold out. However, there are still some conference tickets available with lots on offer throughout the day, including sessions from Ryan Singer (37Signals), Daniel Burka and Joe Stump (digg.com) and a series of inspirational talks from artist Hillman Curtis and Nick La (webdesignerwall).

Our very own super-talented Carsonified designer Mike Kus will be holding a Photoshop workshop at FOWD, along with doing a short presentation on ‘Whatever happened to the Art in Design?’ So in the lead up to the conference i asked Mike if he had two tips for making your design look handmade. Here are his thoughts.

1: Always carry a small digital camera with you wherever you go and keep an eye out for nice textures. You might find them on and old wall, a skip or a bit of rusty metal. These are great for importing into Photoshop and using a background textures or to overlay on an object in your design to give it that handmade/old look.

2: Try and sketch elements of your design i.e. the navigation or the header or whatever you want really. Scan them in and use your hand drawn sketches as part of your design.

Dan Mall (Happycog) will also be joining us at FOWD to discuss ‘The Experience Layer: Using Flash, JavaScript and other technologies to engage users’.

Dan spilled the beans on his talk, here’s what he said.In cognitive psychologist Don Norman’s book, The Design of Everyday Things, he tells a story where a friend of his was trapped between two sets of glass doors at a post office because he didn’t know how to operate them. Doors are such an essential part of our everyday lives that they should be intuitive to use. Norman even elaborates on how simple they should be:

“…some doors have signs on them: pull, push, slide, lift, right bell, insert card, type password, smile, rotate, bow, dance, or, perhaps, just ask. Somehow, when a device as simple as a door has to come with an instruction manual—even a one-word manual—then it is a failure, poorly designed” (87).

It sounds like common sense, but we do the same thing when designing for the web. Haven’t we all skipped over a button because it didn’t look like one? Or maybe just the opposite: everything on the page fights for attention, and you’re overwheled as to what to do? How often do we see a button with the text “Click here”?

That’s exactly what my talk, “The Experience Layer”, and my workshop, “Magnetic Interactivity”, will focus on: creating interfaces that people know how to use based on their expectations, instead of learn how to use through blind stabs. I’ll also be showing how to make that usable design a beautiful one by focusing on very basic design techniques like typography, motion, and depth. Hope to see you there!

Join us in NYC - register over at the Future of Web Design site.

With this years Future of Mobile conference coming up in a months time I have been looking at the key areas of change in the mobile ecosystem since last years event.
Last year the Future of Mobile discussed the question “Will content be King”. Since then the focus from both Operators and handset manufacturers seems to have been on improving the music capabilities of the phone itself and offering enhanced services to buy music. SonyEricsson have expanded their range of handsets with a shake to shuffle capability. Nokia are launching their Comes with Music service this week.

We have seen many mobile music services come and go over the last few years. This begs the question, what is the key differentiator between success and failure? Nokia have big pockets and are continuing with their Windows only DRM embedded music. T Mobile and Google have sensibly partnered with Amazon to deliver DRM free music from a vast catalogue to the G1 phone. Apple are holding a middle ground with iTunes content for the iPhone but do make it a deliberately obtuse process to move any content into other media players and devices.

The increase in the onboard memory of mobile handsets seen in the last year is typically eight fold, meaning that many users now see their phone as replacing their mp3 player. As with all aspects of mobile the user experience is the key to success. Will users really take to a service that can fill the phone up with music, but locks it in there so they can’t knock up a virtual mix tape and pass it on to a friend? I doubt it, since the launch of the cassette tape people have taken great pleasure from sharing music with each other.

New services such as Didiom in the USA really understand what users want from their music collection and the collection of devices they have in their lives. This interoperability is the key to a successful service. The insightful J P Rangaswami perfectly summed up why DRM is always destined to fail on his Confused of Calcutta blog this week. Companies that really get it are going from strength to strength like the UK’s Indy Mobile who build lasting relationships between the record labels and mobile consumers.

At Future of Web Apps in London last week I had the pleasure of discussing the mobile future with Stefan Fountain, founder of Soocial, who is one of the most astute mobile theorists there is. He says…

“The future of mobile is not about a device, it’s about the service, maybe not even that. It’s about what you want to do”.

This quote is taken directly from his FOWA presentation which is available to watch, embed, and share right here.

(Photo credit: Chuckumentary)

[Update: We’ve decided to release 100 to the public. We didn’t want to sell them, but so many people asked to buy them we decided to give in. The journals are expensive to produce and it’ll help us offset some of the costs.]

We wanted to express our gratitude to everyone who came to FOWA this year. We know that you have to commit your valuable time and money to hang out with us, and we really appreciate it.

So we decided to design and craft something special that we’d give to every single person who came to FOWA, so we came up with the idea of a limited edition Carsonified Journal.

Mike spent weeks designing and crafting the packaging and journal. We didn’t want a single sponsor logo or any overpowering Carsonified branding on it - just a simple gift for you all to enjoy.

We included a pencil and a sharpener in each box, so that you can sketch and write to your heart’s content. We chose a pencil instead of a pen because it’s the epitomy of analogue, which we miss in our everything-is-digital world.

To hold the journal box, we wanted to give you a bag that was climate-neutral and not smattered with FOWA logos. We found this amazing company that makes Jute bags, which are completely compostable and we added a simple ‘Carsonified’ tag. It’s got enough room for a laptop or anything else you might want to carry. The idea is that you’d actually want to keep it and use it, instead of chucking it straight in the bin.

We also spent a bunch of time writing hand-written thankyou cards for everyone who came to FOWA, just to let them know we loved them.

So … thanks for coming to FOWA! We appreciate you. Here are some extra photos of the journal …