Now, I appreciate the effort that goes into organising these kinds of events, and the contribution that is made by volunteers and contributors. Not to mention the fact that it was free to attend, thanks to public and private funding. So I was very careful not to criticise individuals or participants: I was airing my opinion about what I saw as a lack of care in the organisation and running of the events I attended.

I received quite an acerbic phone call from one of the festival organisers this afternoon, who took exception to my comments. As a gesture of good will (and because I like a quiet life), I’ve now edited the original article to remove some of the specifics of my criticisms. Not because the original piece was inaccurate or exaggerated (if you want to see the original, just contact me), but because the tone of the phone call was… well, let’s just say it wasn’t very pleasant.

I’m surprised that anyone would take the opinions of little old me so seriously. But when it comes down to it, that’s just what they are: my personal opinions, and I’m sorry if people don’t like them. Airing my views publicly has got me into hot water plenty of times in the past, and no doubt will continue to do so in the future.

Since our decision to cease the CFN screenings as of the new year, we’ve been really enjoying getting out and about to attend events as patrons for a change. Although our screenings were only once a month, there was a heck of a lot of work involved: liaising with guest speakers, doing PR, researching films, programming films, preparing films, producing programmes – and that’s all aside from actually presenting the evenings themselves. So it’s nice to not have to worry about all those jobs right now, and to spend some time getting out and about seeing what everyone else is up to.

We’ve been to some good events so far this year, my favourite being the first short film evening at Lanternhouse, which I hope is going to become a regular fixture in Ulverston’s cultural scene.

This weekend we’ve been to some of the screenings and talks as part of the Film Insiders Talent Festival in Barrow, hosted by Signal Films. I couldn’t make it to this last year, so was doubly keen to make it along this time.

I went with an open mind, hoping that I was going to enjoy myself. Ultimately though, I was left disappointed. Not so much with the programming – the events themselves had good content, with some interesting people speaking – but the organisation and running of things seemed a bit slap-dash. Easily-avoidable technical problems spoiled proceedings at both of the evening events I attended, and seemed that there was no one person in charge of proceedings.

I know it’s a horrible cliche to say “I could do better than that”. But the fact is that I could, and more importantly, have repeatedly done better than what I experienced over this weekend.

Rather than just ranting about it, I thought it’d be worth posting up some constructive advice for anyone planning to organise a film screening event. We’ve been organising and hosting them regularly for quite a few years, and have learned a lot along the way. Here’s my bullet-proof list of how to run a successful film event.

1. Test everything

It really isn’t good enough rolling up an hour or two before your event, setting things up and hoping that everything will work. You’ll inevitably have some technical gremlins appear, and the only way you can iron them out is to prepare and test everything well ahead of time, and then when you’re happy with things: test it all again. We spent at least three solid days getting things checked and in place when we hosted Rule of Thirds last year, making sure that everything was water-tight, with plan B’s in place to cope with any unforeseen hiccups.

Don’t just hope for the best, because something will go wrong. Even if you’ve tested everything off-site, test it all again in situ at your venue. Technical glitches can seem like small hiccups to you, but can be a real annoyance to your audience, particularly if they’re persistent.

2. Sound is everything

You can just about get away with a slightly under-par picture, but your sound quality is of utmost importance. If your sound is bad, then everything else falls apart. It can create an awful experience for your audience, and can render films completely unwatchable.

This is relevant to both screening films, a Q&A session, or any other kind of presentation activity. Microphones need to be of a decent quality, and tested to make sure they’re working properly before proceedings begin: fiddling with things during the event really isn’t an option.

If you’re going to use a PA system, get someone who knows what they’re doing, and have them concentrate solely on running the sound throughout your event. It’ll save you so many headaches, and give you one less, very important thing to worry about. But, if you hire someone in, get them on recommendation: there are some rubbish sound technicians operating out there in the wild.

3. Respect your contributors

If you have a filmmaker in attendance to talk about their work, then you owe it to them to make doubly sure that everything runs smoothly. They will have invariably gone to quite some effort to join you, and quite often they’ll be a little nervous about speaking. If your event runs smoothly, and your audience are enjoying themselves, then it creates a comfortable atmosphere: you’re contributors will relax, feel more comfortable and ultimately give your audience a much better experience.

When your contributors arrive, make time to have a sit down and a short chat with them, even if you have a 101 other things to do. Make them feel at home, and explain the itinerary so they know when and where they need to be, and what to expect when they’re plunged in front of an audience. Technical or logistical hitches with a guest speaker is not only embarrassing for you and for them, it makes your audience squirm.

4. Don’t cause distractions

Once an event is underway, everyone should be seated or in position to do whatever they need to do. And that includes organisers. It can feel tempting to hover around at the back, or wander in and out looking busy. Once proceedings are underway, you should find yourself a seat closest to where you need to be, and stay there. Noise travels, particularly in a room full of seated, attentive people, so if people are moving around, or fiddling with things, it causes a terrible distraction for your audience.

If something needs fixing, it’s really best not to try to fix it until you have a natural break. This is particularly important while people are speaking: any kind of technical tinkering can be a horrible distraction, and can throw your speakers off their stride. If you do have something to sort out, don’t try to do it while your event is still running: wait, call a break, then fix it – you’ll get things sorted much more quickly, and you won’t look like such a shambles.

5. Have a master of ceremonies

I can’t stress how important this one is. Have one person in charge, curating the event and acting as host. They should be in charge of making sure the evening runs smoothly, dealing with any problems and generally keeping everything in check. Your event is destined to fail if you don’t have some kind of hierarchy and allocation of responsibilities.

I’ve witnessed far too many badly run events due to a simple lack of communication and planning. If nobody is in charge, then there is no focus for any crew or volunteers helping with your event, and problems are compounded.

And just hoping that people will be where you think they should be doesn’t work. People aren’t always under your jurisdiction, so you need to double-check they know where and when things are happening, and if you need to have someone with them, to give them guidance and support. It has the added advantage of helping you to deal with the running of things at lightening speed.

6. Don’t cause yourself problems

Always make sure you know where your assets are (without them, there is no screening), and always, always have a backup. Loosing a disc is unforgivable, and a coherent running order is a must.

And whatever you do, if you have lost a disc or something show-stopping has happened: never, ever announce it to your audience from your seat. Get up, stand at the front, apologise, and tell everyone you have a technical problem which you’re sorting out as quickly as you can – your audience need to be kept informed.

And one last, easily-avoidable headache: don’t swear. People haven’t come to your event to be sworn at, unless it’s during the course of open conversation with a contributor – but the use of bad language is entirely unnecessary, and a lot of people really don’t appreciate it.

7. Have a good presenter

If you’re running a Q&A session, it’s really worth trying to find someone who has a good presentation style – preferably someone who is personable and knowledgeable, someone who can connect with an audience. It’ll help your whole event to “gel” and is the best way to present an air of professionalism – and is a sure-fire way of getting people to return in the future. They should be well-dressed – not too formal, but at least make a bit of an effort – and should be full of energy, attentive and alert, with good posture (no slouching!)

8. Run things to schedule

Wherever possible, make sure that you run a tight schedule. Sometimes it’s necessary to delay things a little if you’re still waiting for audience members to arrive or iron out final logistics, but you need to weigh up the pros and cons of keeping everyone else waiting, at the expense of a couple of people having to shuffle in late. Some people don’t like to be kept waiting, so if you do have a serious delay (and I consider serious to be anything more than 5 minutes) you need to make an announcement.

Probably more important than starting on time, is finishing on time. It can be very inconsiderate to keep people around for longer than they expect, because they generally have places to be: a train to catch, a childminder to relieve, friends to meet, a parking ticket about to expire. Running everything to time puts across the impression that you’re running a tight ship, and keeps everything feeling sharp and dynamic, not lazy and lacklustre.

9. Thank everybody

Thank your contributors, thank your venue, thank your hosts, and most importantly thank your audience. But don’t let it turn into a lengthy oscar speech, you should keep it brief. By wrapping up with a round of “thanks” you nicely bookend your event, and prompt a hearty round of applause from your audience. There’s nothing worse than going to an event which isn’t concluded properly, and where things just dwindle.

The most emphasise should go to anybody who has contributed their time or resources for free – those are the people who have really made your event a success, and if you don’t thank them, they’ll be really cheesed off – and rightly so! I make a list before I present any kind of event, to make sure I’ve got everyone covered, and that gives me the rest of the time to figure out if I’ve forgotten anyone. It’s that mantra again: check, and then check again.

I wish I could round all these points up with a tenth, but right now, I can’t think of anything else. Those are the key areas I think: follow those words of advice, and I don’t think you can go far wrong.

As part of the North project we’re developing in partnership with folly I needed to produce a new web presence. It was quite a quick job, as time and resource were at a premium, but I thought it would be fun to do a screen capture of the design process. I’ve condensed the entire process, which was about 5 hours spread over 3 days, into just under three minutes.

You can watch it below, or head over to Vimeo to see it in glorious HD.

This was a really quick job, implementing a design which is flexible and which can be developed over time. The foundation is a fairly rigid grid system with a strong emphasis on typographic style. I went through three different iterations before arriving at the final blue/green version. Most of the work was done in Photoshop, with some of the graphical elements sketched in Illustrator.

I really liked the second iteration, with the paper plane sketches, but it just wasn’t cutting it with the rest of the team. I’ll shelve that idea for a future project though, as I really like the aesthetic.

I hope this is an interesting little insight into the way I develop concepts when working on a new design. Feel free to let me know what you think, and whether you found it useful/interesting.

If you want to see the finished design in all it’s HTML markup glory, or just want to know more about North, then head over to the website.

Al in all, I consider myself to be a pretty responsible practitioner of web standards and web accessibility. It’s something which I consider to be of great importance and it’s become an integral part of my design and development processes. It’s not an afterthought, it’s slap-bang in the middle of every design decision: whether technical or aesthetic.

So when I came to think about what else I could do, I was at a bit of a loss. I fell like I’ve ticked all the boxes for being a responsible web practitioner, but where can I go from here?

There’s been some tremendous work carried out over the years by various working groups and researchers, to raise the bar on web accessibility. It’s great to see that good accessibility has become an example of best practice within our industry, which in turn has had a positive impact on the workflows of designers and techies alike. Some might say that accessibility has dumbed-down creativity and made the web bland – I’d argue that we just haven’t been creative enough.

I came across this note recently, from an article written by Brian Kelly, summarising a paper he has co-written:

Disability is therefore a social construct and not an attribute of an individual. In particular, resource accessibility is the matching of a resource to an individual’s needs and preferences – and is not an attribute of a resource.

That really got me thinking about our perception of accessibility, and in particular the ways in which we view the people we are trying to help.

Accessibility is generally considered to be a way of helping those members of society who have a disability. We often think of users of websites as use cases, rather than individuals: a particular demographic, in a particular geographic location, or a group who behave in a particular way or have common interests.

And it’s often quite easy to fall into the trap of thinking of someone with a disability in a similar way – as a generalised group: someone who is blind, who is deaf, who is a wheelchair user. The fact is that not every disability is the same, and the acuteness and combinations of a disability can effect people in so many different ways.

For example, it may well surprise anyone who knows me to learn that I’m registered as blind. That doesn’t mean that I have no vision, it means I have low vision. Technically, I’m referred to as “blind/severely sight impaired” – there is a point at which my clinical diagnosis puts me into a particular group and classifies me as disabled.

But I’m a web designer, I make films, I do all sorts of outdoor pursuits my doctors cringe at – how can this be? Well, the fact is that because of the complicated nature of the various eye conditions I have, although my distance sight is useless, my near vision is pretty damn good: I might not be able to see a face across a room, but when I’m working with pixels, I’m on an equal footing.

I don’t really consider myself to be disabled, because I’ve spent my whole life learning to adapt and compensate. Out of necessity and downright stubbornness, I’ve had to shape my world to make it fit my wants and needs.

And that, I think, is a good starting point for a new way of looking at web accessibility, and why Brian Kelly’s words struck home so hard.

We, as practitioners of the web, should be creating experiences which are not just accessible to all, but which are intelligently designed to be adapted to a user’s own specific preferences.

And I think this is important to start thinking about now, because the way in which we all engage and interact with the online world will continue to evolve at a rapid pace. Our experience of the web is changing: from one where we visit websites, to one where we access services and information through our personal choice of digital devices. Our experience of our online world will become ever-more personalised and ubiquitous. And if we don’t consider the wants and needs of people with disabilities, then we run the risk of marginalising huge swathes of our society.

As we develop new devices, new applications and new experiences, there’s going to be a need for a more integrated, considered and downright innovative approach to design. But by taking that leap, by daring to think about inclusiveness and allowing the design process to be informed by more than just aesthetics and one-size-fits-all usability, there might be huge benefits to be gained by everyone, able and disabled – we will all be enabled on a level footing.

If you’re sceptical about these yoghurt-knitting ideas (and yes, they’re vague, but they’re just that: ideas) then head over to the Accessibility section of Apple’s website, have a good browse around, and then ask yourself: why would one of the premiere designers of digital technology commit so much time and resource to building accessibility into their products?

North is a series of events and activities taking place throughout 2009 and 2010 aimed at inspiring creative professionals to do things differently. We’ll be announcing more details, and info on how to get involved when the website launches.

While we weather the transition from the old (lacklustre, temporary) site to the new, it’s necessary for us to put up one of those really annoying “under construction” messages. I wanted to keep it brief (all efforts are on producing a fully fledged website with lots of whizz-bangs) but still pleasant to look at.

So, I ended up throwing a few web conventions out of the window and implementing a “stretchy” design. You can see the current holding page here, and if you resize your browser window, you’ll see the whole background resize with it.

“Holy heck Phil, how the devil could you conjour such wizardry, when CSS doesn’t support scaleable backgrounds?” I hear you cry. Well, lawks, it was quite easy really: I cheated.

The background is actually just a div containing an img with it’s CSS dimensions set to 100%. Backgrounds don’t stretch, but elements do, y’see.

Then I bunged in a PNG fix, so that the logo could be rendered with an opaque PNG file, set up some quite simple rules for centering everything, and there you go: a nice stretchy page which goes against some CSS conventions, but looks nice, is semantic(ish) and accessible.

here’s the CSS code for this witchcraft, if you’re interested

body {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}
#background {
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  position: absolute;
  left: 0px;
  top: 0px;
  z-index: 0;
}
.stretch {
  width:100%;
  height:100%;
  vertical-align: middle;
}
#content {
  position: absolute;
  top: 50%;
  left: 50%;
  margin-top: -75px;
  margin-left: -139px;
}

Let me start by saying that this is neither a critique of Shaun or his new app. Shaun is both a very talented web designer and an innovative developer, and his work is held in high regard – and rightly so. Fever looks like a really great app which looks to be a beautifully conceived idea which opens up all sorts of new ideas.

What really struck me though was how the launch and subsequent fire-fighting played out in the public eye, and it got me thinking about the potential perils of transparency and honesty when running a small venture.

(Fire-fighting is what we used to refer to as the unpredictable period of time prior to the launch of a big website release – when you think you’ve tested thoroughly and covered all eventualities, only to realise that you haven’t. It’s a frantic time of desperately trying to patch bugs and fix overloaded systems whilst your new code is out in the wild causing mayhem.)

Shaun has been very open and honest in describing the little gremlins which crept into the system post-launch, which I think is great: much better to have an honest, human reason for a problem than the standard “technical issues”.

to everyone awaiting an Activation Key, server is getting pounded, PayPal sluggish.

what a wonderful time for a unanticipated spontaneous server configuration change.

Gah! Firefox doesn’t allow you to submit a form to an iframe and instead opens it in a new window? wtf?

also, loving the understanding and patience of early adopters as I work out the un-beta-able kinks.

These kind of insights are not only informative, they’re also an interesting look inside the workings of an app as it launches.

Here’s where I think it gets dangerous though: when this kind of dialogue becomes personalised and opinionated.

Don’t get me wrong – being personal and opinionated are great things, and are what make our global digital culture the wonderful, throbbing democracy it is. But if you’re going to use Twitter et al to self-promote a product or service, then do you need to apply a bit of a filter to your musings? Does being too transparent mean that people might get to see things you otherwise wouldn’t want them to?

As I mentioned earlier, Fever looks like a great app, and I would have absolutely considered paying out for it. My main problem is that it is a self-hosted application – you need to install and run it on a PHP/MySQL server. It’s totally up to Shaun how he packages and licenses the app – I“m not here to start criticise someone for their business model. I did post this comment on it though:

http://feedafever.com/ looks great, but doubt I can be bothered installing it on a server. Surely @shauninman is missing a trick?

Then I read this tweet from Shaun later:

To all the self-hosted app haters: People said the same thing about Mint. Different strokes and all.

That got to me a bit. I know he’s not refering to me directly, but to be refered to as part of a group of ”haters“ made me feel a bit… put off. This came across as a little bit defensive and confrontational, and probably bought on by stress and tiredness. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about posting things when stressed or tired, and it’s that you just shouldn’t do it. You can come across as incredibly condescending and insulting without even realising.

Then it started getting a bit ugly:

Waiting for my Fever (http://www.feedafever.com) license to compare against Feedly. Hurry the fk up Inman!

.@nevercertified what a wonderful thing to wake up to. I don’t do business with people who curse at me. Expect a refund shortly.

A little shrift I thought, and a bit uncomfortable, like watching a fight at a wedding. But again, this is Shaun’s venture, so he’s perfectly entitled to do business with whomever and however he likes. But as a potential buyer, it made me think ”do I really want to give this guy my cash?“ Particularly when I read this:

I have no patience for impatient people. So we have something in common people.

So what am I trying to get at here? Well, it made me think of three things:

1. Can transparency and honesty go too far when you’re using Twitter for business? Shaun seems to be using it for three things: to post his musings, promote his products and provide product support (in the form of status updates). When personal and professional threads start to mix, it can start to get confusing from an observer’s point of view, and maybe even potentially hazardous to the reputation of you and your services.

2. I’m all for honesty and transparency, and advocate them as central virtues to the way that my own business is run. But I wonder whether honesty and transparency can give way to being casual and flippant sometimes? I guess this comes down to whether you can be open and honest whilst still maintaining a certain amount of professionalism.

3. I won’t be buying a license for Fever. Sorry Shaun, as lovely as it looks and as talented as you are, I’ve been put off.

The whole 40 second sequence took three weeks to complete, and was created mostly in After Effects.  What’s most interesting is the approach he took to dealing with high resolution images in a short timeframe:

But still time was an issue, especially when it came to producing 2K images. “Because I work as a digital artist on films everyday I knew it would be very difficult to deliver the film on time if I worked at 1920×1080 because every second of the film was going to be VFX images,” Michel explains. “So I decided, after making some tests, to work in 1280×720 pixels and then resize all the film at the good resolution (with some sharping and graining process) and it worked pretty well. At the end nobody can tell if it is truly 1080p images or 720p streched…It just works. You can see the result on those 2k images. The second reason why I choose this format was to be able to see all the images in my 4/3 computer screen without zooming/dezooming! Everything is good to save time.

You can find outmore by visiting the website at www.north2009.com.

The main theme will be to explore innovative and creative approaches to working, using technology and new methodologies. There wonʼt be a focus on any particular discipline – instead the onus will be on exploring new ways of thinking about and developing ideas for the future.

Speakers will be sourced from a range of disciplines – from design to technology; the arts to commerce; businesspeople to academics. A particular area of interest will be people who have used their foresight to use logistical or geographical setbacks to their advantage, or who are using unconventional work methods to get things done.

It’s funny how you work with stuff for so long, and you become very entrenched in a certain way of doing things.  You follow the trends because that’s the consensus.  You ocassionally push the boundaries in small ways, to create distinct designs and user experiences.  But there are certain guidelines you set yourself; basic rules you adhere to.  Many times it’s subconscious: you do things a certain way because, well, you’ve always done things that way, everybody else does them that way, so there’s no reason to change.

That, I think, is there very defintion of complacency.  It’s creative apathy.

I’ve been fortnate enough to be able to spread a little more creativity around with my web designing in the past 6 months, and I’ve found myself slowly moving towards a new design aesthetic.  It started when I began to revisit Edward Tufte, and began using grids as a design foundation.  I’ve very much moved away from designing with pixels, putting things in boxes and placing restrictions on content – instead I’ve begun to think a lot more about flexibility, expnadibility and getting a lot deeper in the exploration of the beauty which can be extracted from the content.

What do I mean by that last bit?  Well, I guess it comes down the fact that I’ve grown to have a much better appreciation of how text, images and other media can really shine as the basis of a design.  Far too much web design (and I’m wholely guilty of this too) is based on the principle of creating a container which looks beautful and which functions wonderfully, but with less consideration for what is going to be contained therein: the content.

The best analogy I can think of is this: if you have a beautiful painting, you wouldn’t want to house it in a frame which overwhelms the picture – you want something which complements the painting and accentuates it’s beauty.  The painting is more important than the frame.

And so it is with websites.  The usual process for creating a website is to start with the structure, and the design.  Consideration is given to the content which will be contained within it, but it’s usually hypothetical.  From my experience, website copy is normally the last thing to be written, at the last minute, in a rush and with a “that’ll do” attitude.  In most situations, that’s the nature of the beast.  But I think that as the web matures, and as we move forward with new design ideologies to fit in with the evolution of people’s expectations of their online interaction, that is something which will need to change.

And I think that change will manifest itself very much in a move back towards the first days of the World Wide Web: when the value was in the free exchange of information, without bells and whistles; back when there was nothing to consider other than the content; no distractions, no advertising, no over-zealous design, no whizzy graphics – just pure-and-simple, straight to the point content.

Now, this may sound like I’m advocating a return to a Neolithic version of the Web – an age where everything is just boring text and ugly underlined links.  I’m not at all.  God forbid!  What I’m advocating is, as web designers, we need to back up the truck a little, and take stock of where we’ve come from in the relatively short life of the Web.  We need to think a little more philosophically about how we approach the design of information and how that information is applied.  The iPhone has already begun to show us a future where a device dictates how people interact with information, and the design principles which need to be applied to faciliaate that.  The Web has been confined to the computer screen for all these years, but that is all about to change.  And with it, I predict, will come a huge shift in the approach to interactive design.  Don’t know what, don’t know when, don’t know where – but it’s coming.

And so, how is this relevant ot my epiphany?  As I mentioned at the start of this post, I’ve been casually aware of a shift in my design aesthetic.  It wasn’t until I read this post by Wilson Miner, that it suddenly struck home, and I realised where I’d been heading:

After years of wondering why browsers defaulted to 16pt text sizes I’m starting to be convinced that long text really is significantly more readable on screen at precisely that size.

In that post, Wilson references a post by Oliver Reichenstein, in which Oliver introduces the 100% Easy-2-Read Standard.  The main point he makes seems so glaringly obvious: the text size on most web pages is too small.  Wilson provides a brilliant visual example.  As the resolution of our monitors has increased, the size of the fonts used on web pages has gotten smaller and smaller, and through that complacent attitude of “having always done it that way”, us web designers haven’t considered compensating for the change.

Duh.

This was the final peice of the jigsaw which I’d seemingly been trying to put together in the back of my head.  I have a whole bunch of other unwritten rules which I follow (working with grids, clean document structure, progressive enhancement etc.) and now, this new one has been added to the imaginary list:

• Use a relevant and readable font.

And so, to Websites & Sausages (a phrase blatantly lifted from an episode of The West Wing I was watching recently).  I’m working on a couple of online projects at the moment which are allowing me almost complete creative control – mainly because they are in-house projects – and I thought it would be interesting to take one of them as a kind of case study, and to document the process I go through to bring it to life.  I’m going to consider my preconceptions along the way, and consider new ideas to refine my process.  I hope that the result will be a vigorous insight into my thought processes, and help me to question some of own habits.

And maybe, along the way, I’ll cause a small epiphany for someone else.

I always think of Muji as the kind of store likely to appeal to readers of early Nicholson Baker, a man who could wax lyrical for pages on the origami-like beauty of a milk carton spout. But in fact it’s cyberpunk sci-fi writer William Gibson who really nailed its appeal: “It calls up a wonderful Japan that doesn’t really exist,” Gibson wrote, “a Japan of the mind, where even toenail-clippers and plastic coat-hangers possess a Zen purity: functional, minimal, reasonably priced. I would very much like to visit the Japan that Muji evokes. I would vacation there and attain a new serenity, smooth and translucent, in perfect counterpoint to natural fabrics and unbleached cardboard.”