• Open data, open to all

    Here’s a write-up of some interesting open data projects showcased at Manchester’s FutureEverything conference in May. There was an overarching theme at this year’s FutureEverything of ‘cities’ – what makes them unique, what drives their development, how people live in…

  • You beauty!

    Is data visualisation getting a bad name? I was pleased to see graphic design in the news this week, for reasons other than the usual public and tabloid outrage over massive fees for ‘just a logo’. Data visualisation was the…

  • Can a brand have as many voices as customers?

    Could technology drive a bespoke brand experience? I touched on this notion during my talk at Future of Web Design, but didn’t have the time to explore it further. There seems to be a shift towards very specific personalisation when…

  • Perfection is hard to love

    Is it the imperfections we see in things which endear us to them? My very first post on this blog was on the notion of ‘perfection’ in design, and how if you look at certain, often mundane things objectively, it…

  • We are the virtual preservation society…

    Should we try and preserve web sites as part of our cultural history, or should they be left to rot, like a ruined building? Thoughts on this subject have been blowing around my head recently, mainly because of two things.…

  • Designing and building for the future

    I have always been a fan of post-war architecture, and its attempts at doing things differently. I admit this is partly due to being a child of the 1970s. I grew up surrounded by these kinds of buildings in Birmingham…

  • A new way of seeing music?

    Having been letting iTunes’ most recent music visualisers caress my eyeballs and synapses recently, I’ve been thinking about how visual representations of music could be taken forward. Sure, Apple’s latest visualisers are absolutely beautiful – graceful, colourful, and very slick.…