James and I went along to the Council House yesterday evening to hear about the latest developments planned for the city.
The meeting itself was held in the Council Chamber which is stunning – green leather seats set along semi-circled steps around the room, with microphones dotted along the ledges in front. It felt like being at a summit meeting or something.
There were some interesting things discussed – not least some pretty major changes for the Jewellery Quarter, including a 10-year development planned along Carver and Pope Streets, just round the corner from us. We’ll be looking forward to seeing how it all progresses and, hopefully, boosts the city.
Another interesting tidbit was the hint that a rather high-profile television chef is in talks about possibly opening a restaurant on the top floor of the forthcoming Cube. I’m sure that the food would be a far cry from anything you’d get in a school canteen, for example ...
I’ve just signed up to a new scheme that Arts & Business have set up called Young Professionals on Arts Boards. As the name suggests, the scheme aims to bring together professionals and arts organisations by placing people such as myself onto a group’s Board.
It’s a great way for me get involved at some level with an arts organisation and to hopefully learn about all of the goings on, on a Board. Of course the arts groups hope to gain from our extensive industry experience and in my case they’ll have a wealth of design knowledge that will inevitably dribble from my mouth at some point.
Anyway A&B are in the scarey matching phase at the moment so watch this space.
As alumni of UCE (now Birmingham City University) we like to have a nose at what the current students are getting up to so we went along to the opening of Cure Zone, an MA Visual Communication show at the Curzon Street Station building in Digbeth. There was some interesting work there, which was presented particularly well we thought, and the building itself is truly fantastic. I’d never even seen it before so it was a bit of a surprise actually.
Future use of the former station is up in the air at the moment but I hope that whatever it becomes it stays open to the public – it’s a stunning space.
I spent two days this week at MediaContent Lab taking part in a Web Accessibility course they’re running. I was initially very apprehensive about the exact nature of the sessions and had no idea at what level it was going to be pitched, but I must say it couldn’t have been more useful.
It’s quite refreshing to know that the sites we build aren’t as bad I feared they might be and that technically we’re doing a lot of things to make accessible websites. However it’s given me a completely new point of view as to how sites should be created with accessibility in mind from the ground up. Before I thought accessibility was all about alt tags, ugly colours and oversized buttons, now I’m starting to think it might mean better sites for everybody.
Much of it is about breaking some of the thought processes taken from print design and looking at web content more fluidly. It’s certainly put accessibility right at the front of our minds for sites we build in the future and I feel a lot more confident that we’re giving people a solid result.
BLOG: Four strings; for the win - a logolele for Moselele http://t.co/pvHcvA2H
2 days ago