Howells.

Around this time last year at Brooklyn Beta, Keir Whitaker and Elliot Jay Stocks told me they were going to create a book of the same name as their excellent series of talks/meet-ups, Insites, which was to feature a series of in-depth interviews with notable people in our industry. This was to be the first project of Viewport Industries, their new venture which was their break from the grind of client work:

Earlier this year we organised Insites Tour together, and with all sorts of ideas for products — both digital and physical — bubbling around every time we went for a beer, we eventually decided to form a company, ditch the majority of our client work, and make some cool shit.

They asked me whether I wanted to sponsor the book, and I said yes for two main reasons:

• Keir and Elliot are two of the nicest and up-standing gents in our industry. Always humble, respectful and supportive of others.
• It’s very exciting to see two people follow-through on their dream of doing their own thing. We all want to do that, but so few follow-through and execute.

I’m excited to see that Insites the book is now ready after many months of hard work and graft, and looks terrific as this Flickr set shows.

So congratulations to Keir and Elliot: I’m excited to see what they do and make next, but in the mean time I’m sure the book is going to be a succes and will inspire others to do their own thing.

Ultimately the moral of their story is, be nice and make nice things.

☛

As perhaps some of you know, I run a small web design and development agency called Kulör, based in London and I have been working under this moniker since later 2010. It was born out my want to work in a collaborative way with many superb designers and developers I have met via siteInspire.

But when I say it’s a small agency, it really is. In fact it’s just me. As such operating under the name has never felt totally comfortable, since it felt like an attempt to look and feel bigger than it really was. Having to explain this to almost everyone I met and discussed it with was difficult.

From today, Kulör is no longer going to operate as a brand, and instead I’m going to operate under my own name since ultimately, all my clients deal with just me, and I am responsible for every part of the work I create.

It also marks a new way that I want to work. When I look at the projects I’m most proud of and enjoy, it’s clear that the direction I want to move towards is the building of compelling user and editorial platforms and apps. Increasingly I want to work with startups and established companies in a consultative manner to help them realise their ideas and ambitions using technology, and help give ideas form and function through prototyping and refinement.

I want the new Studio section of this website to convey more transparency. It no longer uses the “Royal We”: ultimately I prefer my clients to understand that it’s essentially just me that they’re dealing with. At the same time however I’m still as keen as ever to collaborate on projects, and I’m always open for discussion with designers or developers to explore new projects.

So please do get in touch with me if you have any ideas or projects to explore: I always love hearing from interesting people and companies.

As part of my ongoing efforts to spew contribute hopefully useful content onto to the Internet, I have decided to launch a new personal blog. By way of an inaugural post, I just want to summarise what you might expect to see if you visit this site every week or so.

Firstly, I want to talk a little more about what actually is that I do. Alongside my agency of one – which designs, develops and produces websites for clients – I keep my evenings and weekends Fun Free by focusing on a number of personal projects. I’m currently buffing out the (many) kinks of my latest project, which I hope to divulge more on soon. Through doing this hope to share knowledge, advice, and terrible mistakes I made along the way.

If you follow me on Twitter (which if you don’t, you should), I spend a great deal of time trying to attend as many events and conferences as possible that interest me (usually guided by one of my other side projects, Creative Everyone) and I’d like to capture what I get out of these events more formally, and hopefully coax my spider-crawl notes of my Moleskin. I also sometimes find myself travelling abroad to attend some really awesome events too, so want to cover these, and talk about my trips as a whole.

On my various travels I’ve been lucky enough to meet some very awesome people and small companies who are doing some wonderful things, and whose projects I would love to talk about more beyond a sporadic tweet or a re-tweet. And often, I simply unearth, think of, or discuss in the pub with friends, some ideas that I want to expand upon and share, or want to start a discussion about to understand how we can contribute to creating Cool Stuff.

Make sure you keep up to date with new posts, by either subscribing to the RSS feed, or following me on Twitter. If I know you in real life, let’s be friends on Facebook.

Until the next post…