Howells.

Very quietly last week, I pushed live the new version of Creative Journal, which is my blog in which I squirrel away all non-web design inspiration (for web design work, there’s siteInspire).

It’s not quite finished, and probably will always be in perpetual beta, but it is in decent enough condition for it to be let loose.

The motivation for the redesign was actually technical: I began to hate the way I had set up the old site in ExpressionEngine, and posting became a chore. So I redeveloped it in Rails, and gave it a bit of a facelift while I was at it. I have further plans for it too, which would necessitate a more custom application.

Take a look, and I hope you like it.

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I think we’re all agreed that not talking about your ideas and slapping an NDA all over them is never good advice.

Chris Dixon eloquently talks about this in “Why you shouldn’t keep your startup idea secret”.

I would go further and encourage you to talk to absolutely anybody about an idea you have listing in your head, without shape or form.

Talk to people who don’t know your industry, or who don’t know about problem you’re trying to solve. If you catch yourself waffling, or searching for the right words to convey the idea, it needs work.

Email people you normally tweet with out of the blue. They’ll welcome the surprise, and pay attention.

Write about your ideas publicly on your blog. If you’re feeling particularly ballsy, light the touch-paper and stick that blog post on Hacker News. (Make sure you stand well back.)

An idea only grows with a thousand bumps and bruises: rebuttals, criticisms, “it won’t scale” and plenty of “that already exists”. Afterwards, the idea might still be unclear, will take on a sharper silhouette.

Then it just takes execution, but that’s a whole other story…

I don’t really post links on this blog these days, but once-in-a-while an article comes along that I feels deserve more attention than a quick link on Twitter.

Connor Tomas O’Brien write an enlightening post about avoiding medium-sized stuff:

The small stuff is okay, too. Tweets and Instagram photos and Vine clips – stuff that’s easy to create and easy to digest. The small stuff can stay. The small-scale stuff is fun.

…

The medium-sized stuff: projects that don’t really mean that much to me, but that take more than a trivial amount of effort to get finished. Recently, I’ve been taking on a lot of projects with timeframes measured in days or weeks. That’s not long enough to do anything very interesting. These projects are not horrible to work on, but, were I to pan out and see my life on the scale of years or decades, I realise it’s these particular projects that I’ll end up forgetting, these particular projects that will lead me to wonder, “Hey, what did I actually do over this year and that?”

…

Big projects are scary. It’s much more tempting to take on a bunch of medium-sized projects than one huge project, because in doing so you mitigate the chance of failure. But it’s the stuff that could fail that’s the stuff we remember, not the stuff that’s safe.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently and I’m thankful to Connor for giving this thought a shape and meaning.

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The new siteInspire is live, and I’m pretty exhausted.

I started the process almost a year ago, which is an insane amount of time full of ups and downs. So I thought I’d pen a few notes as to what I learnt from the process.

I should also caveat this entire post with the fact that I realise a site that showcases other sites isn’t exactly the most humanity-transforming idea nor is the most complex. But with daily visitors creeping into the tens-of-thousands a day, it seems to be something that people like and so there’s a duty to do a decent job, and ultimately not to screw it up spectacularly.

The redesign went through approximately ten radically different looks, each a knee-jerk rebound from each other and—as a result—I felt each iteration was poorer than the last. In the depths of disillusionment and directionless-ness, it took on the look and feel of a vintage, hipster, restaurant menu. Ugh. That “friendliness” and “charm” was replaced by stark coldness. Ugh. Towards the end I became almost blind to what I was doing and trying to achieve, which was when I had to seek the advice of others before I gave up.

In the end, the site doesn’t look dissimilar to the old version: the same(ish) palette, same typography. There’s nothing clever about it, it’s just a small iteration from the original. Yet paradoxically it took a long time to get to a point where it just felt right.

In true piece-of-advice-blog-post fashion, here are a few take-away bullet points:

• If the design isn’t that broken, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. All it probably needs is a little attention and tweaking. Keep the goal simple.

• If you ask 10 different designers for an opinion, you will get 10 different, polarising opinions. That can only lead to heartbreak and confusion, so be choosy who you seek for advice and be careful when you post on open forums like Dribbble: some feedback I’ve seen for most shots that I have either liked or disliked has been unfathomably bonkers.

• Seek advice of only those whose work you genuinely respect and whose work you admire, otherwise you might as well ask some guy at a coffee shop who’s wearing cool headphones.

• Related to this, seek advice only from those who have done similar projects to what you are doing. If you’re creating a web app, reach out to people who have worked on a similar thing and who understand the challenges in both designing and developing one. Designing a product is very different to designing and building something.

• If someone really, really hates your design, it just means they care. Of course, saying something like “it’s shit” isn’t constructive, and they’re probably a bit of a dick, but don’t take it to heart however hard it must be. This is why people get so angry when loved products like Twitter and Facebook are redesigned. Haters are gonna hate, but haters care a lot.

• You need focus. Spending a year on a redesign and redevelopment project is totally impractical and is full of waste. Sprint to the end as fast as possible whilst still taking care, otherwise you’ll lose motivation and focus. This is difficult with personal projects because there is no client to impose any deadline, so try to set one. (Mine was actually Christmas Day, but that came and went, what with the all the food and booze.)

• Try and ditch Photoshop and Illustrator if you’re making a web app. siteInspire is hardly a complex design but I didn’t touch either once apart from creating assets. Having no training in design, they feel like such old fashioned tools to me, and there’s a lot to be said for just diving in and creating everything in HTML and CSS from the outset.

• This isn’t related to this project in particular, but if you want to learn development the very best way to do it is on your own projects. It’s a place where you can make all sorts of mistakes and experiment. I learnt a lot more about Rails, Compass, and responsive development.

Finally a big thanks and warm hugs to Shelby, Allan, Simon, Al, Lawrence, and Rik for all their advice. They’re awesome and you should follow them.

Now for the next challenge, to re-design this blog, the studio site, Creative Journal, and a new, not-so-top-secret project that I’ll talk about soon…

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Like everyone else, this year I’ve had some fun projects, some challenging, and of course some disappointments. But it’s an interesting exercise to analyse the different types of projects against how they came about, who you worked with, and how financially fruitful they were.

One segment of projects that stand out—for the wrong reasons—were the projects I did for free.

I rarely do work for free but sometimes interesting propositions come along for projects I’d like to do for people that I think will turn out into a good portfolio pieces, or would yield fantastic connections that will bear fruit.

It’s surprising when I look at the outcome of my recent free projects, which have yielded no new business, connections, or tangible benefits. This is in stark contrast to all the work that I have done for myself, be it entire websites or individual blog posts, all of which have all yielded interesting opportunities.

Opportunity cost is tricky to recognise and grasp especially given the fairly amorphous nature of what we do. But before you commit to any favours—however exciting they might seem—I would urge you to consider how else you could spend that same time investing in yourself or your business. You might find that the playful mashup you develop in the same time you planned for the freebie might hit the front page of Hacker News, or that the mock redesign of a website might hit the front page of Behance.

Better for everyone involved is to barter. If the person asking you to develop their site is an incredible designer, decide up-front how much work is required and then ask them to dedicate the same time or equivalent to design your new identity. Or if they are well connected in an industry you want to move into, ask to arrange meetings and introductions up-front. It helps balance the professional relationship and then you don’t have to call the work you did, “free”. (And to this point, make sure you enforce the agreement: I’ve been in situations where the other side of the bargain never materialised since they were too busy to reciprocate.)

Taking equity is an entirely different, more complex conversation that I’ll leave to the experts to discuss. But before you even consider this route you need to believe in the project, the other people behind it, the potential for profitability, and stick to it for the long-term. It’d take a lot for me to seriously entertain taking equity in most startup ideas I hear about.

When I started on my own I did a lot of work for free. After most of it, when the valuable contacts or follow-up work didn’t materialise I regret not spending that time on my own projects; honouring them with more care and attention that they deserved. Your own, carefully considered side-projects make for a much more interesting portfolio piece or talking-point than a quick unpaid job you probably had to rush. Investing your time in yourself before offering your services to other for free ultimately yields more dividends than freebies that risk disappointment.

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.

I stumbled on a new UX testing approach which is drastically simple. My testbed was my network for creatives, Fiftytwo.

Firstly, I removed the Activity Feed because I (wrongly) suspected it of borking the server, and wasn’t sure how many people used it to navigate content. Almost immediately, lots of people emailed and tweeted asking where it had gone and how to get back to it. I reinstated the Activity Feed shortly after.

Secondly, I recently removed the “Things” functionality, which allowed users to share bits and pieces of content that wasn’t their own, but which interested them that during a given week. Absolutely nobody noticed: no emails, no tweets. Therefore, that piece of design and functionality should never have existed in the first place.

Instead of pontificating how to simplify your product to its bare essentials, don’t ask anybody and just get rid of aspects of your product; albeit temporarily (just remove links to the resource in your views, for instance). You’ll soon find out if was worth being there.

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These sorts of things don’t sit well with me because I worry that I’m not offering any new worthwhile opinions or content (versus it just being a self-promotional thing), but SAY Media kindly invited me to say a few things on their blog, Say Daily, mainly about siteInspire and general web design-y things.

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I have just returned home after returning the keys to the manager of the office I occupied in Clerkenwell for all of last year.

It was in a very charming former clock factory, now called Clerkenwell Workshops. It was full of charming little companies, from television production studios, to the HQ of a betting website, with a sprinkle of graphic design studios in there for good measure. There was plenty of exposed brickwork, and wooden floors. The Clerkenwell Kitchen (which is needless to say, charming) was situated there: a place that – to Alex Nelson’s surprise – only served organic cola (I had no idea there was such a thing).

All very nice. But recently I decided to let the lease lapse, and end my tenancy. Here’s why:

When I started the lease on the office in December 2010, I had an awful lot of projects on the go. Suddenly I felt I was struggling to cope without needing to hire some designers and developers full time, and as such I needed a space to call my own. The studio was small-ish – about 270sq/ft – but could fit about 5 people comfortably: a perfect place to grow into slowly.

But as the weeks and months progressed, my ability to juggle projects and get work done helped by awesome – remote – freelancers increased. As suddenly as I thought I needed a physical space for the studio, I dreaded the idea of hiring, bringing with it the pressure of responsibility, National Insurance contributions, and keeping track of sick days.

The idea of running a traditional studio was now as appealing as my various, old roles in corporate-dom. I’d lose the time I had to learn and develop, and to keep my hand in all the projects I execute. I’d have to take on projects I didn’t find interesting to maintain overhead (and I should say, keeping a studio in Clerkenwell isn’t cheap…).

So clearly the best course of action was to share the space with the awesome people I have been lucky to work with. Rik Lomas, Al Monk, Gemma Leigh, Severin Furneaux and Lawrence Brown all worked from the studio at various points during the year.

Co-working Spaces

Whilst sharing the space was fun, fundamentally the space wasn’t designed to be – and could never be – “a co-working space”. But with that term thrown around so often it’s often tricky to pin down what it means.

The mighty Studiomates in DUMBO is what I consider a co-working space. Everything else that markets itself as a co-working space, don’t come close.

Studiomates is a community led by Tina and her gang of fun, inclusive, cross-discipline creatives and do-ers. It is the too-ing and fro-ing of interesting people doing interesting things that makes the place so exciting. The space itself (as enormous and cool as it is) becomes relegated and invisible.

It’s this community that is missing from the self-styled co-working spaces that have popped up in New York and London over recent years. With some notable exceptions (New Work City, for instance), the community – or even simply, the “feeling” – is missing. A sea of reproduction Eames furniture and carefully designed desks doesn’t make a successful co-working venue; it’s the community that uses and underpins the space.

I’m not dismissing the usefulness of such places. After moving from my office I signed up with the excellent Club Workspace (in the basement of Clerkenwell Workshops), but I see it more as a drop-in center where I can use the wifi and drink as much of the free coffee as my nerves can handle. Sadly, the furtive whispers of the huddled people in each corner of the space isn’t enough for me to spend all my day there.

So let’s create a co-working space!

Actually, no, let’s not.

I’ve learnt that co-working spaces are organic things that can’t be started like an engine. The conditions under which a successful co-working space can thrive have to be right. The balance of people, projects, want and will all have to be tended first. That’s what Tina has worked on for years.

Further, the economics of setting such a space in London can be tricky. Recently, Ben Stott and I briefly looked at some numbers. A Central-ish location in London can be staggeringly expensive, and that’s before the Vitsœ shelving installation is taken into account. Without guaranteed sublets, the investment required suddenly looks a touch vertiginous.

So with that said – and while day-dreaming of the perfect collaborative space in which sees stuff happening – I’m looking forward to gate-crash various spaces, studios, and offices over the next few months. Hopefully along the way I’ll meet and work with the people who’ll one day help make it happen.

I’m very happy to announce the launch of a new website that I have been working on with my girlfriend Cecilia.

Cecilia is an insanely good cook, and The Whole Food Diary chronicles her culinary exploits through a series of articles and recipes. The focus is on cooking with whole/raw ingredients with as little processing as possible. And while the blog is principally vegetarian, I can guarantee that – as a carnivore – every recipe is as satisfying as you could ever hope for.

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