Writing
Design Practice

Silverback Unveiled

A few months ago Clearleft accidentally leaked the fact we were working on our own application, known as Silverback. I say accidentally because we had just bought the domain name silverbackapp.com and thought we’d better post up a holding page. However the combination of a great logo from Jon Hicks and an amazingly inventive parallax technique from Paul meant the page got far more coverage than anticipated. Before the week was out we had over 5,000 people registered for updates and had started to receive comments like “I don’t know what Silverback is, but I know that I want it!? So no pressure there then!
Design Practice

Design Artefacts: Content Inventory

If you’re redesigning an existing site, and especially if the site is a traditional content driven site, then one of the best ways to start is by performing a content audit. The process involves going through every page on the site and noting what the page is about and where it sits within the existing navigational structure. Looking at the content from a macro level allows you to generate a clear picture of how the site is currently structured and whether this structure makes sense.
Personal

Disconnected in Auckland

Hey sports racers. I'm in Auckland at the moment, on the second leg of my world tour and feeling decidedly disconnected. I'm not sure if it's just bad luck but I've been having WiFi nightmares down under.
Personal

Shark!

A few weeks ago we organised a public speaking workshop for the whole of Clearleft. A lovely chap called "Alex Marshall":http://www.alexmarshall.com/ hosted the workshop, and asked us all to give a 5 minute presentation to the rest of the team. Each session was video recorded and then played back to help us see what we're doing well and what we're doing badly. I've been a dive instructor for several years, and have worked as a safety diver on shark feeds in the Great Barrier Reef. I've dived with all sorts of sharks in my time, from little white tip reef sharks in Thailand to schools of over 50 hammerheads in the South China seas. There is nothing like jumping in the water with a top level predator to get the heart racing. However my first ever experience of a shark underwater was dead, laying on the bottom of the ocean with it's fin cut off. Shark meat isn't worth much, so it's quite common to slice the fins off a living shark and then throw it back in the water to slowly drown. As such, I chose to do my talk on the terrible shark finning trade around the world.
Personal

The Defining Culture of the Naughties?

So another year has gone and we've only got a couple left till the end of the "naughties" and the start of a new decade. Ever since the second world war, each decade has been typified by it's own unique culture, usually a combination of the music and fashion of the day. These cultural movements start small and localised, but the popular ones thrive and get transported round the world via movies, radio, magazines and TV. Prior to the war, cultural movements did exist. They just were more localised and look longer to propagate due to the lack of mass media.
Personal

On Experts and Expertise

We currently live in a world dominated by experts. You only have to open a newspaper or switch on the television to see experts giving pronouncements on everything from parenting to the economy. In a world of multifarious complexities, the need for such experts is clear. We need experts to filter the huge flow of information and simplify it into something more digestible.