If this doesn’t make your eyes bleed I don’t know what will!
Spotted in the wild by Tim, the designer here at Stink Digital the picture is an illustration © by Aart Rost and the full set of the font is available here: http://www.dafont.com/lines.font
Over the last few months at Stink Digital, I have had the pleasure to be able to work on the Shelter House of Cards project, the concept for which was based around a web site to back up a competition, exhibition and auction. In short, the site was built to show off the 51 cards designed and offered up for sale by celebrity artists, photographers, designers such as Marc Quinn, D*Face, David Bailey, Gerald Scarfe, Rankin, Damien Hirst, Terence Conran, to name but a few, and to support an on-going competition to find a winning design from the public for card #52.
Judging by the throng at the Haunch of Venison gallery that turned up to rub shoulders, to view the artwork and to bid on the final works, many of which looked absolutely stunning, the event was a success; and with the final sum of money raised at just over £100,000, it was definitely a resounding SUCCESS for the charitable cause that is UK homeless charity, Shelter.
By way of analysis, it shows an interesting way forward in the form of an semi-online medium to help back up an offline experience – the TV commercial hauntingly backed by Radiohead’s Videotape & the House of Cards exhibition - and opportunity to raise money for a worthy cause. The notion of a celebrity-sourced exhibition is an interesting one and provides a slightly different take on the whole notion of crowd-sourced exhibitions, an idea which seems to have been gaining some traction in the museum community, not least with exhibitions such as Democracy.
Hats off to the teams at Shelter, Leo Burnett and Stink Digital!
I must say that I am so glad that I am back and working in the kind of environment I love. The kind of small team, creative, energetic, productive and zany environment that really gets my juices flowing.
When the work comes in and the production engines have to roll you knuckle down, feel the crack of the whip from a project manager and you drive on and knock the tasks down one-by-one. When it’s time to play, you play, and you all get along great. There is none of the arrogance, and subversive kind of office politics, that pervade much larger firms.
Over the last ten years I have had the opportunity to work with some great and interesting people. I have learned a lot about offices, companies and businesses, how they work and what I like and don’t like.
During the course of the early 2000′s I worked with a small but dedicated team at the Noerr Programs, helping them to streamline their business. The efforts paid dividends and the relationship I had with my client was awesome. In fact i still reminisce about it, and continue to enjoy the good times that were with the company and its 2 great figureheads Judy and Philip.
When the fun ended there and I joined the team of 16 at Last.fm, it was fascinating to see the company grow from that initial pod, to well over 60 in London and who knows how many elsewhere. I was intrigued by the slow splintering of, what was in the beginning, a pretty tight-knit group. A group that, from my perspective, had become nothing more than a set of departments, or better still, cliques, each with their own sense of importance within the overall power-structure, and which personally I tried to skirt between, though as with all things in the end, you never win playing mister nice guy.
Now I find myself at Stink Digital. It’s a great little and energetic team, well bonded and supported by a much larger production house that has been running for the last decade, but which, for all intent and purposes, is its own business. Based out of East London, most conveniently, just down the end of my street in Printing House Yard, the 6 guys I currently work with are a blast.
As I always like to say to others: “Life is one big vacation.” And, if you can’t enjoy it, you might as well be dead!
Intelligent Cloud is the Photo Blog of Zhiwan Cheung and provides an awesome view into the life of Seoul’s youth and inhabitants today. It has only been going a few months but the 150-200 photos already there provide a nice slice and view of the way things are: the grit, the youth, the music, the life, the everyday, and the very fabric of the city.
As an outsider I am intrigued and love what I see. The photos provide some real inspiration and energy to what the city has to offer and very much draws you deeper and deeper in. To some extent the high number of night shots on the blog reminds me, in an odd way, of the film After Hours directed by Martin Scorsese, with its snapshot of a city and the hectic and odd things that happen beyond your vision.
Related Links:
Intelligent Cloud = http://www.intelligentcloud.org/
Zhiwan Cheung = http://zhiwancheung.com/
Having spoken some what in Tuesday’s post about how I loved working in small and creative companies, and that smaller is better, I thought today I would take some time to write about my experiences with Agile as a development and project management process over the last three years.
So the basic question: “Does it actually work?”
In short, the answer is maybe. In fact, I have no qualms about recommending Agile as a development and management process, but in choosing it to govern the rules and best practices of your work team you need to understand its best fit within the context of the size of your team and the type of projects you work on.
The great thing about Agile & Scrum as a means to an end, is that the process is malleable and allows you pick and chose the best parts of it, without having to stick to it with a religious dogma. In my experience, the bigger the team and/or project, the more likely it is that you will find it beneficial to implement the true structure that Agile provides more rigidly. Whilst working in a smaller team, daily scrums definitely enables you to keep up with one another, and deal with any possible blockers, the real benefits of convening sprint meetings are less apparent.
This marked difference really depends on the ability of the project manager to keep a 100% hands-on approach 100% of the time. The more you veer away from this possibility, or the more you add in layers and complexity to the actual project, the greater the divergence of methods. Of course rule Agile purists will balk at any talk of veering from the divined path of the process, but the fact is that most of us live in the real world and the process of development, by the time you overlay it on your team, is never so black and white.
Though Agile helps with the process of development and management it is not a panacea, that is to say that it doesn’t do the job for any one single individual within the team. It certainly won’t mask any ill or lax management, though it does help to keep light focused on the progressing needs of any individual project and its sub-projects, and provides the tools and means by which to keep things moving forward constantly, and in fact in previous roles and on larger teams I have reported back daily to the production manager, in person at the beginning of the day & online at 6pm, before heading off home.
Anything that adds intelligent and informed structure to the development process has to be a good thing and I would be the last to shirk away from such demands of a project manager and return to the good old days of Cowboy Coding. In that respect Agile is more than worth investigating for your team, if you are not following such principles already.
Relevant Links
Nothing Beats Working On A Small Team – Vincent Stinks http://vincentstinks.blogspot.com/2009/04/nothing-beats-working-in-small-team.html
Related Links
Agile Development Process – Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
Scrum Development – Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)
Some interesting ideas on scrum and how to implement them, in English and other languages – http://scrum4you.wordpress.com/
Web-head & art collector, living in East London and huffing on the fumes of the planet since '78. Here are my thoughts.
