Of Blacklock Jewellery & reflected glory
We love it when clients we've worked with so closely, get recognition for what they do. Blacklock Jewellery have just been featured as 'Retail Stars' in Professional Jeweller's Hot100 for 2010. The Hot 100 "is a roll of honour for the retailers, jewellery and watch executives, established and emerging designers and businesspeople who have made an outstanding contribution to the industry this year." source
We wanted to extend our congratulations to the Blacklocks; we're excited about where you're heading and look forward to what the future holds.
On a personal point of chuffedness, the shooting location selected for the magazine spread was sourced by Paul Evans our Creative Director. "Art direction for the win!"
New face for the BBC News website
Over its lifetime, the BBC News website has won four BAFTAs, nine Webby awards of various flavours, and some serious love from the online design industry generally. We remember the early 2000's when pretty much every proposal document we produced for an information driven website referenced the BBC site of the time as a shining example as to how the web should be done. Its use of space, early adoption of technology, uncompromising usability hand in hand with quality stylings; it was hard to fault it.
Today, version 4 of the site has been released into the wild. There's some really interesting details in there, but on first impression, it feels a bit, well, floaty. One of the defining features of the last few iterations of the site, has been its amazing use of space. The pages were incredibly rich and dense with content; the new site by contrast welcomes a lot of empty space. And not in that cool Swiss-type sense, but in a kind of 'we were expecting more content in this space than there actually is available' sense.
We look at the BBC News site at least a half-dozen times a day, so we'll give it a going over in the next few days and consolidate our thoughts - for our benefit, if nothing else. What can we learn from the new skin of this revered archetype of solid UI IA design? Time, of course, will tell.
Blacklock website shortlisted for “Best Jewellery E-tailer of the Year”
We're over the moon! April 2010 saw the fruit of 6 months of hard graft on the Blacklock Jewellery brand and website project. We loved every moment of the job, and we knew when it went live we'd been involved with something special. That's now been formally recognised by the UK Jewellery industry, as the site has been shortlisted for “Best Jewellery E-tailer of the Year” at the UK Jewellery Awards 2010.
We won't know whether we've won until the night of July 15, but in the mean-time our Creative Director, Paul Evans, needs to go and source himself a tuxedo. Nice.
WinPho7 interface development
Heart on sleeve time: We love Apple. We're unapologetic iNerds, we're proud of it, and we'll happy bore you to tears over it as soon as look at you. Let it never be said though, that we can't apreciate innovation and creativity from its competitors...
Towards the end of 2010, Microsoft are telling us that they'll be releasing the next iteration of their smart phone operating system; Windows Phone Series 7. Forgoing the contrived name, Microsoft seam to be doing something their critics have accused them of failing at for the better part of a decade, innovating. Over the last month or so, we've seen a swath of previews and screen-shots trickle out from Redmond, and we have to give it to them, we're excited about a Windows phone for the first time since - well, the first time ever, really.
The latest previews present some quite granular detail around the way the OS will handle users' interactions with email functionality, and the mobile flavours of the Office suite. It's typographic, it's simple, it's fluid, and we're seriously hoping Apple are watching carefully.
Our new website is live...
...but you've probably already noticed that!
A year after starting to operate under the banner of Red Green & Blue, we've finally managed to get this new site live! Mad props to our creative development partners at Hawkz who, once again, have come up trumps in delivering a CMS driven site that looks exactly how we styled it, and does everything we'd hoped it would. Have a wander around, and we look forward to hearing from you!
Red Green & Blue appointed by the Consortium of British Humanitarian Agencies
We’re really excited; "On the 1st of March 2010 the Consortium of British Humanitarian Agencies (CBHA) [was] formally established. Consisting of 15 leading, UK based NGOs, its main purpose is to pioneer new approaches to fund and resource quicker humanitarian responses to an even higher quality in the immediate aftermath of a disaster or crisis, to reduce the suffering of those affected." -Reuters
