Tuesday 25 January 2011

Words in the clouds

So how was 2010 for you? It was certainly full of variety for us! Looking back across all our news posts of the year (you can see them all on one page here) we certainly dealt with a wide variety of projects and clients - and whilst many have struggled during this difficult year, we seem to have kept ourselves pretty busy each month.



As a nice visual way to try to make sense of all that news we've create a 'word cloud' - built from all the news we sent out to you in 2010 (word sizes are based on how many times that word was mentioned). As you can see, 'new' featured quite heavily - which we take as a positive sign!

You can also see another word cloud taken from all our 2010 blogs (and just in case you missed any of them, they can all be read below!)

Although we'd love to take all the credit for the painstaking creation of these, we actually used a nice free service called 'Wordle' - http://www.wordle.net - this site lets you copy and paste any text (or import an RSS feed) and build a word cloud image from it - letting you tweak the layout and colours till you're happy. Give it a go - it's a nice way to add meaning and typography* to something that could be a little dry otherwise. Of course, for more customised ways to design and visualise your data, just give us a call.

We look forward to seeing what words define 2011 - in the meantime, we'd love to hear about the 'keywords' that defined 2010 for you.

Ben Jackson, Head of Digital Media

*Oh and talking of typography, did we mention our latest little free game and iPhone app..?

Friday 21 January 2011

Appy we tried

'I Shot the Serif' was our first proper foray into the design and development of a new app for the iPhone - here's some of the things we learned in the process.





















As part of a loose campaign which started with the design of our latest calendar (it's a bit of an institution with us – this year we're focusing on simple typography and the idea of bringing design terms to a wider audience) we had the idea of a purely type based game to explain the difference between serif and sans-serif typefaces.

An original idea by one of our designers, Mark Stevens (and with a nod to Tom Gabor) it was then turned into the full game by Ben Jackson our Head of Digital. As soon as we started playing it ourselves we knew it would translate brilliantly onto the iPhone. From initial idea to seeing the app appear on iTunes, it took a little over a month – but that's including the week and a half of nervous nail-biting while we waited to see if Apple thought it met their strict (and mysterious) guidelines. We got it out just in time for our monthly Christmas news update – the timing couldn't have been better.

With little UK coverage we were surprised when it was picked up by a widely read blog in the US and within a few days we had a huge increase in hits to our site (with visitors playing the web version of the game and then heading off to the App Store to download the iPhone version and plenty also browsing the rest of our site). This week, a couple of influential design based sites in Canada picked up on the game through Twitter and again traffic has increased significantly. Because of all this, hits to our site in January are up around 400-500% on our month average.

As a game it is quick and fun (and pretty addictive if all the tweets are to be believed!) but with the increase in traffic, we are now getting work enquiries. These are coming from overseas – for branding where people have investigated our site after playing or passing on a link to the game (we've had inquiries from Moscow and Brazil in the last few days).

This was our first major experiment with app development and has so far proved to be quite a success. Because the core game was really quite simple, we were able to create an online (Flash based) version and then turn this into a fully fledged iPhone app too (if only the iPhone supported Flash - but that's a whole different discussion!). The outlay in time taken to develop the game was fairly negligible and has taught us a lot about the app creation process – aswell as the terrors of the notorious Apple review system. To be fair, they never rejected it - it was really just the tense moments wondering if the man from Cupertino would say 'yes!'.

It's great being able to hop onto Twitter and see people mentioning it and passing on the link - especially within the design community where it has naturally found a bit of a niche. Whilst certain news sites have kept the game buzzing around the world, we're starting to see Facebook as the most common place for people to hear about it and link to our site. This is very interesting as we've always assumed that as a smaller B2B company, Facebook isn't really for us – but perhaps it's time to re-assess this? (Our fledgling Facebook page starts here!)

I hope this positive feedback prompts other agencies to look at more than just Twitter and Blogs to generate flow to their site and interest in their own 'brands'. As this year's campaign theme continues to develop we'll certainly be looking into additional ideas, maybe there's even room for a sequel? 'Episode 2 - Revenge of the Serif'? Yeah, I bet you kern hardly wait.

I Shot the Serif - latest version (1.4) has just been approved for release, get it here

I Shot the Serif - Flash version can be played here

written by Ben Jackson, Head of Digital and Simon Hutton, Managing Director

note for Android owners, the Flash version plays pretty well on higher-end phones (Android 2.2) – try it here