Know Design

There are some new additions to the work section: Eddie’s Essentials, Rosewood Associates and Saint Caffe.

If you’re one of the lucky people whom i haven’t yet pestered about Likemind then keep reading.

Put simply (as there have been more complex versions) Likemind is a coffee morning that takes place at 8am on the last Friday of the month in over 40 cities across the globe. It was started by a design agency in New York inviting anybody who wanted to come along before work and chat with interesting people over a nice cup of coffee – and it’s spread to Birmingham, where in fact I’m co-hosting it at Hudsons Coffee House on Colmore Row in town.

You can find out more at likemind.us or email me if you’d like a reminder for the next one. So there consider yourself pestered!

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. 

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.