Blog | Rochelle Dancel

This blog has moved

2010-04-04T17:41:00.001+01:00

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My blog is moving!

2010-03-28T16:49:00.001+01:00

It has been a bit of a tornado start to the year for me so, with the first sunshine of the year signaling Spring (fingers crossed), I'm extending my Spring cleaning to my sites and blogs.

This is mainly for the handful of you that have actually subscribed to my blogs. I'm transitioning so that the content will be separated out across various blogs as follows:

Rochelle Dancel

In a couple of weeks, this blog will be moving to blog.rochelledancel.com. The reason for the URL change is because it is currently published by FTP to Blogger and, as Blogger has removed support for FTP uploads, it has to be migrated to a new URL via their migration tool to facilitate canonical indexing. My RSS feed is now available via Feedburner, so please update your RSS readers so you'll be up to date when the change happens.

This will remain my principle blog covering all things work-related, as well as commentary and tips on work-related issues. If you follow my blog for posts relating to branding, communications, non-profit and design, this is where it will continue to be published.

Philosophy Times Studio

For the most part, Philosophy Times Studio will be handling my collaborative projects, most immediately production for the new webseries, 2 Girls Kissing. Posts on that blog will cover production updates, as well as updates on forthcoming projects. This site will be available around the end of April.

Rochelle Dancel on Posterous

If you want to know what my favourite meal of the day is, why I think everyone should nap, or a great band that I went to see rock it out, my Posterous blog is where you'll find all the weird and sometimes wonderful life sprinkles in my work/life ice cream cone.

So that's it. The new feed will be available on Feedburner in the next couple of weeks, so follow me on Twitter to catch the announcement and in the meantime update your RSS readers accordingly.

I have finally gotten around to scheduling in some time to develop my own site, so that's in the works, as well as a number of other web properties, so it's going to be a very exciting year. Cheers for your support :)

I need a digital wallpaper designer!

2010-03-10T16:47:00.000Z

This is one of the boardroom walls across from my desk at the PayPoint.net office. It’s about 10ft high and 15ft wide. As you can see, it’s a perfect blank canvass that we need to fill. And we have five other walls of about similar size.

After a quick consultation around the office, we’ve decided that we’d quite like some montages designed around themes related to our business areas, printed on wallpaper (or very large decals) to cover the wall edge to edge.

So, designers and/or printers and/or digital wallpaper specialists – if this is something you’ve done before, please get in touch asap: you can find me on Twitter or email rochelledancel [at] paypoint.net.

Cheers!

Help needed with my identity crisis...

2010-03-08T01:05:00.002Z

Every new beginning is marked with a new name. But I'm having issues selecting one and, as result, it's holding me up somewhat.

I freelance under my own name and will continue to do so in future. However, because of the projects I’m launching this year and the increasing number of collaborations I’m doing I need to form a limited company with a new business name.

I’m not hiring anyone, I’m not looking to turn into an agency at this stage or anything like that – it’s still going to be projects either delivered exclusively by me or led by me. Apart from design and web strategy projects, this new entity will look after all of my web series production, any online properties (including blogs) and a new merchandise line.

My work is ever-changing - it ranges from creative to consultancy to management, whilst my clients range from non-profits to businesses and media publishers - so the name needs to be malleable/vague enough to encompass all of these things. Consequently, I’d like to eschew words like ‘media’, ‘creative’ or ‘productions’.

I’ve narrowed it down to three choices:

Philosophy Studio – ordinarily, I would have passed on this one because it contains ‘studio’; however, it’s currently the name of my work-related blog and most people that follow me know it.

Hey, Squish! – I just like this; I came up with this when brainstorming names for my t-shirt line, but ‘Produced by Hey, Squish!’ sounds pretty good too.

Oli&Chris – Named after the personalities of both of my brothers: fun, witty, courageous, thoughtful, serious, spontaneous, pragmatic, dynamic, juxtaposed…

So, please vote! And leave your comments in the comments… Thanks!

First promo shoot for 2GK

2010-02-28T17:02:00.001Z

Yesterday, we did the first promotional shoot for my new web series project, 2 Girls Kissing.

I have to admit that I was slightly stressed about it all. The location that I chose was the riverside area around the Southbank Centre. For those of you that are unfamiliar with my fair city, the Southbank Centre is a huge complex housing 21 spaces of creativity, including Royal Festival Hall and the Hayward Gallery. The riverside area often has street performers entertaining swarms of families and groups of people enjoying the vibe and the views. And, despite the morning’s torrential downpour, yesterday afternoon was no exception. Add to this two people that I’ve never worked with and that have never done a shoot of this nature before and, well, let’s just say that I left it to fate to play a much bigger part than usual.

I have to say that my fears all amounted to naught – we had a great shoot, it all ran relatively smoothly and everyone was very easy to work with (the pics below are from my Blackberry).

So, on the offchance that any of you have to undertake a similar endeavour of photographing two girls kissing in one of the busiest parts of the metropolis with the ever present threat of rain, here’s what you need for a successful shoot.

A photographer that knows what she’s doing

2GK is blessed with the creative talents of Gerry Alexis. Gerry’s day job involves playing with cameras for Sky. She is also one of the best graphic/illustrator talents that I know – her artwork first graced my schoolbooks when we were eleven years old. I’ve been wanting to work with Gerry for years and until now has only done my promo headshots, so I’m very grateful that she has jumped on board.

Research

I had originally conceived a photo shoot at night, but then I read about the experience of the Seeking Simone team who photographed two of their girls kissing and decided to can that idea. One afternoon, Gerry and I walked down to the Southbank, which is one of my favourite spots in London, and took some photos around monuments and spots that might work for us.

A cute, comfortable couple

I first met Susan and Jasmin at a gig that Greymatter was playing in London last year, and again at an event for Eurout in January. I asked them if they were up for being photographed in the name of furthering lesbian visibility efforts, and the rest, as they say…

They are a very cute couple – I thought it was a good omen that they were, ahem, ‘getting some practice in’ whilst Gerry and I were setting up the first shot – and so comfortable and quite oblivious to us that it was a very easy shoot indeed. I gave them very little direction, save some poses I really needed to get, and Gerry just shot them having conversations and making each other laugh.

An idea of what you need to get

I am developing the look for our website at the moment, so I knew what shots I had to get out of this in order to fit with my concept. But there were a lot of shots that we got out of this that will probably work much better, especially with some of the print materials that I’ll be developing to support our promotional activities.

A flexible plan

We had planned to do the entire shoot around a circular stone sculpture outside the National Theatre. However, when we rocked up, there was a group of free runners practicing backflips off the rocks. Our photographer was running late so we took refuge in the espresso bar at the front of the theatre. Whilst we were sitting there, I noticed that the wall of the National Film Theatre next door was full of circular vents and thought that that would make a great background image. It had the added advantage of being away from the main path of traffic, so we did the bulk of our shoot there and moved back to the stone sculpture later in the afternoon.

A disregard of the weather report

It doesn’t matter if the weather report tells you it’s supposed to rain or shine in the afternoon; it’s sod’s law that the worst will happen (this is London, baby!). We were blessed with no rain and, at around 8 degrees, a positively tropical temperature. But bring a big umbrella, and plastic bags containing towels for your models to sit on, even if you think it’s going to shine all day.

A sense of awareness

Nothing draws more attention to ‘something going on’ than setting up a long shot. There’s no getting away from it – two girls kissing (or even looking like they might kiss) will cause people to slow down and stare or stop and wolfwhistle, both of which we got. In between checking shots, I spent a good portion of the afternoon circling our models and photographer whilst they got on with it, watching for people’s reactions as they walked past for anyone that might kick off, quietly telling everyone to hang on, first when groups of the stag party variety bounded past and then when small children were hanging off the stone sculpture, curious to see what we were photographing beneath it (but that was more because I didn’t want to have to deal with an injured toddler).

For all the planning, the meetings, the concepts, the pow wows that happen when preparing a web series, there’s nothing quite like going out and actually doing something or making something to re-inject your excitement for a project again.

Thanks to Jasmin, Susan and Gerry for chalking up the first ‘making of’ experience of 2 Girls Kissing – here’s to many more!

#nfptweetup - FTW!

2010-02-22T14:57:00.001Z

My favourite social media meet-up is undoubtedly NFPtweetup, a mixer of individuals interested in the potential of Twitter and other social media to further and support the missions of organisations that want to do good things in the world. People are talented, sponge-like, generous, sharing and learning and are ridiculously down to earth; I always leave feeling like I’ve learnt something new and I’ve been given a blessing and the benefit of someone else’s experience to go out and apply it.

A few weeks ago, I heard that they were getting their own t-shirt, so, when NFPtweetup’s Rebekah Hah extended an invitation for me to attend the next event, I leapt at the opportunity to get in the queue for a t-shirt. Rebekah suggested that I propose my own design, so, one snowy afternoon, fuelled by hot chocolate and ice cream, I had fun coming up with the designs below. They don’t exactly fit with the brand, but I’ve always wanted to use my own rendering of a Twitter bird and this gave me a great opportunity to do so.

They are a little varsity inspired because – let’s be real – such t-shirts always end up being worn at the gym. Married with the whole learning theme, it was a bit of a creative fit waiting to happen.

The official t-shirt for NFPtweetup was released last weekend and a very smart design it is too – I want one!!

** Just to clarify...**
Thanks for the tweets, messages and DMs about these. But just to clarify, these were done on a lark, and the official t-shirt for NFPtweetup was produced by the beautiful people at Beautiful World (and I still want one!). I won't be printing them, however, if an ethical t-shirt company wants to come forward and donate their services, I will happily licence these to be sold in support of NFPtweetup... :)

Design process of the Bee Charmer Productions website

2010-02-08T18:50:00.001Z

Three months in the making, Bee Charmer Productions recently unveiled its first fully comprehensive website showcasing all of their audio and video production work. It's one of the biggest design projects that I've undertaken to date and, I have to admit, has become one of my favourites.

You’ll notice that I appear on the team page; this is because, in my other life, Regan Latimer, BCP’s owner, is also one of my production partners. So it was interesting working with her in a different capacity.

This post summarises the elements in the new design.

Identifying the audience

The first step in my design process isn’t a sketching session, a trip to my mood folders, or even a brainstorm – it’s all about the research.

I jumped online and looked at the websites of audio and video production companies in Toronto to identify potential competitors and to get an idea of the industry standard in terms of design, style and tone.

I then looked at BCP’s clients and spoke to Regan about the clients they would like to attract. BCP has a range of clients, including charities, arts organisations, financial institutions and schools, as well as blogs, productions companies and actors. One of the challenges of the design was to appeal to such a wide range of potential clients while keeping BCP’s personality.

I also went through their visitor data to ascertain which browsers their visitors use in order to identify any coding considerations.

Theme and style

Although I had previously designed landing pages for BCP in keeping with the style of their logo, Regan wanted to move away from ‘Web 2.0, slick and shiny styling’.

Instead, the new BCP aesthtetic needed to be more organic, natural, colourful and creative, reflecting BCP’s way of working.

Headers images

I decided to use the imagery of the bee and its natural habitat. I chose different photographs of beehives for each section of the website.

Homepage header

About Us header

Services header

Portfolio header

Clients header

Testimonials header

Contact Us header

Colour

As the predominant colour in each header is green, I chose a dark green to use in the header text, and blue and yellow as highlight and accent colours.

Hand drawn elements

To contrast with the polished photography, I decided to hand draw elements on the site to evoke a creative ‘work in progress’ feel.

Each bio photo of BCP’s team was made into a Polaroid and I doodled over them different ways of attaching them to an imaginary wall.

Each section of the portfolio has its own hand drawn icon.

The quotation marks used in the testimonials are also doodles.

The footer is the only part of the website in which bees appear. Because actual bees look slightly scary (!), I drew some cartoon bees and placed them alongside photos of flowers.

These bees are also repeated in the header of BCP’s blog, The Beehive. The Beehive is a self-hosted Blogger blog (the URL is seamlessly integrated with the rest of the site) and the theme was adapted from the Blogger Minima theme to fit in with the rest of the site. The Google based platform also allows users to leave comments using their Google user name as well as OpenID.

Layout

One of the challenges of the portfolio was displaying the sheer amount of content without resorting to javascript or Flash carousels. The layout of each portfolio section was inspired by the four column anchor layout of Rob Morris’ Digitalmash portfolio. ‘Back to top’ links improve usability and take the user back to the full portfolio offering.

One happy client

"Our website had a difficult brief - an organic aesthetic with a playful but professional feel - but we are absolutely thrilled with the result. Rochelle was very patient in guiding us through the whole process and suggested solutions to issues that we hadn’t even considered. I was impressed at Rochelle's ability to think holistically about our site's design and her decisions were always well-researched. I am looking forward to working with Rochelle on BCP's next website!"
Regan Latimer, Owner/Executive Producer, Bee Charmer Productions

Why charities should upgrade their browsers

2010-01-13T21:39:00.001Z

Before I start, I should make it clear that this post isn’t just aimed at charities – in fact, everyone should keep their browsers up to date as much as possible for lots of reasons, some of which are outlined in this post.

The two main reasons that I’m talking to charities is that, firstly, smaller charities are more likely to have ‘inherited’ or ‘come by’ their computers and this includes the browser that is on it. Secondly, less well-resourced charities don’t have anyone in charge of ICT, so people are often reluctant to change the set-up of their computers without anyone officially sanctioning it.

Charities are not alone – from personal experience, universities and public sector organisations are among the worst offenders for refusing to upgrade their systems.

The one browser that is the proverbial thorn in the side of web developers is Internet Explorer Version 6, or IE6. Originally released in 2001, it became the standard web browser of choice across the globe until its successor, IE7, was released in 2006. By today’s standards of web browsers, it is clunky, inefficient and insecure, yet, because of the sheer numbers of people that still use it – often by default – website owners are choosing to support it, which is slowing down the implementation of advancements being made in the web development field every day.

Now, you may think that because your browser appears to work just fine there’s no reason to upgrade it to the latest version; in fact, if, after reading this you're still keen to keep IE6, please leave your reasons in the comments because I'd be keen to hear your rationale behind it. But here are three issues that will hopefully make you think again.

Accessibility and usability

Developments are constantly being made in the way websites are coded to improve usability and accessibility which are unsupported in older browsers. Whilst this affects the way the information is displayed on the screen, it can have a knock-on effect in the way screen readers interpret the information for visually impaired users; depending on the focus of your work, this may have an averse effect for your service users.

A lengthy part of developing any website is ensuring it works across different browser types. Increasingly, many web developers are choosing not to support IE6 in the course of their work (or may charge premium to support it) as it slows down the testing process and can restrict the possibilities available in a web design. Worse still, a web developer may have to employ (or overuse) various scripting techniques they would otherwise do without in order for the website to appear the same in IE6 as it does in all other browsers, severely slowing down the website and possibly interfering with screen readers.

As developers are using the latest techniques to ensure more efficient and standards-compliant websites, browsing in IE6 could soon mean that your favourite website no longer displays the way that it used to (YouTube users beware!).

Security

Browser development teams are constantly working behind the scenes to ensure that they stay one step ahead of potential security threats. Anyone that has had a virus on their computer will tell you that the inconvenience isn’t worth putting off that upgrade.

Yes, you should have anti-virus software running on your PC already (if not, you can download AVG anti-virus software for free); however, having the latest browsers ensures that you are up to date with all of the security patches that the browser has issued in order to protect your work and your PC.

Efficiency

Simply put, more up to date browsers are more efficient and more streamlined; they run faster and are often packed with a raft of features that can aid your browsing experience. Updating your browser also opens up the possibility of running free and/or open source applications and plug-ins that won’t work in older browsers as they have been especially designed for newer versions of your browser.

How to upgrade from IE6

If you are still browsing with IE6, you can upgrade free of charge to the latest version of Internet Explorer.

If you’re keen to try something else, you can find a whole host of free browsers that you can download for Windows including

Firefox – a free and open source browser with a plethora of plug-ins
Safari – Apple's browser, although there is a free PC version
Opera – a lesser known but still widely used browser
Google Chrome – offering seamless integration with other Google apps e.g. Google Docs.

In the same way you wouldn’t watch a recent Hollywood blockbuster on a black and white television, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be working on the very latest browser, especially when it’s free of charge and so easy to upgrade.

A sneak preview of the Bee Charmer Productions website design

2010-01-05T18:46:00.001Z

I realised recently that a lot of my 'work in progress' tweets were about the new website that I'm designing for Bee Charmer Productions. I've had a few tweets back asking for sneak previews but, because of my NDA, I haven't been able to share... until now.

Part of the header for BCP's new blog

If you follow my work, you'll realise that Bee Charmer Productions is the production company of Regan Latimer, best known to you as the creator and writer/director of the web series, B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye (on which I am also Associate Producer). BCP's website has taken a number of guises over the past year - first a holding page, now a one page intro site - and I am pleased to announce that we are now in the home stretch of putting together its first full website.

I'm sure I'll write this up as a full case study when it's up, but for now here's a sneak peek of a work in progress...

Part of the main website's footer

BCP's new icon set

2009 as seen from my Blackberry

2009-12-31T23:40:00.001Z

This year, I surrendered to peer / work pressure and joined the ranks of the Crackberry users. One of the nice things about this was that I always had a camera to hand and, as you will see, I got well into recording even the most random of events.

So here are some choice moments from my year as seen from my Blackberry.

January

Saw the New Year in at a house party in Toronto.

We saw snow in London for the first time in years - this is an excited me in front of my house.

March

The opening night party of Priscilla Queen of the Desert - The Musical in London with tiny cupcakes.

Dim sum in Chinatown on Mother's Day.

May

First trip to Prague.

Me and my brother, Oliver, impersonating Japanese tourists in the courtyard of the castle on top of the hill in Prague.

June

Because of the Tube strike, river boats were running free of charge so I enjoyed gorgeous views on my way to work in Tower Hill from Westminster.

July

Summer in the city - people hanging out in St James' Park.

View from the bridge at St James' Park.

One of the many floats preparing to join the parade at London Pride 2009.

The 2009 London Pride March reaches Oxford Circus.

August

Dessert with visiting family members in Paul's near Covent Garden.

Me and my mohawk at the fancy dress 30th birthday party of my friend, Caroline (left), with our friend, Siobhan (right) - although from this picture you would've thought it was my birthday!

Hanging out with designer and photographer, Gerry Alexis, in Soho Square followed by our routine trip to Ed's for gravy fries.

September

Hanging out with Shirin Papillon (founder of One More Lesbian) at Eurout's first birthday in Hamburg; needless to say, much alcohol and jetlag played a part in our dishevelled state. The next day I made friends with a statue in the courtyard of St Nikolai's church.

The old PayPoint.net office in Tower Hill shortly before the move.

November

A rainbow graces the view from our new office in Finsbury Square.

Inspecting the new business cards that I designed for Regan Latimer at Bee Charmer Productions.

Me in Budapest for my Mum's birthday weekend.

December

Celebrating my brother's 27th birthday near Covent Garden.

My neighbourhood sprinkled with the sudden snowfall.

Anticipating Secret Santa in the office.

Anticipating Christmas at home.

Who knows what my Blackberry will see in 2010...?

My great Christmas giveaway

2009-12-21T14:40:00.001Z

Christmas is a great time of the year to volunteer for your favourite cause, charity or community group. I used to volunteer several hours a week but, like a lot of people, my work schedule has overtaken me somewhat and I have not been able to offer pro bono hours for the last three months.

So, in January, I am giving away chunks of half days of my time to charities, social enterprises or community groups based in London.

Projects I have previously worked on in this time include

designing flyers for training
facilitating project planning for new websites
putting together a marketing plan for a web series
performing user scenario testing on existing websites to increase positive user experience
brainstorming online marketing strategy for new blogs
building a three page microsite for an event
designing skins for Blogger, Twitter and other online platforms in keeping with existing brand colours and style (like I did with WRC's blog).

I'm open to most projects that can test and utilise my background in design, web strategy and marketing, so feel free to contact me with your idea.

Compliments of the season to you all and a very happy 2010!

**Update - 18 January 2010
I have had an amazing response to this, so much so that I'm scheduled deep into February. Needless to say, all of my pro bono hours have been pledged for this window of my year. Schedule permitting, I plan on opening up the calendar again in the Spring, so watch this space!

Why I’m not applying for my dream job

2009-11-20T15:36:00.001Z

A few weeks ago, the Women’s Resource Centre announced they were looking for a new Head of Communications as their current post holder, the incredible Leah Williams, is moving on to pastures new. I have to confess that I looked at it with great anticipation, because back in the day, when I was the information co-ordinator at a small domestic violence charity, if I could have had any job in the voluntary sector then Leah’s job would have been it. WRC was – and still is – a dynamic organisation staffed by superwomen and that team does amazing things.

In the two years since, I have often said that I would never go back to working for a charity. Don’t get me wrong: the last charity I worked for was far from being a bad place. They were at the forefront of creating policies for addressing domestic violence in London and worked with a large number of organisations at all levels to get these policies embedded. But, like most charities, they were small and underfunded. There was a lack of development opportunities and my very limited knowledge on all things techie was still the most advanced within the organisation with no one to mentor me. And as our workload was always immense, projects that I wanted to develop always took a back seat.

Most frustratingly, looking at all the organisations we worked with back then, many of them had to be dragged kicking and screaming to try out new tools, always too busy, too underfunded, or – the worst thing of all – too closed minded to see their potential.

To everyone’s benefit, in the last couple of years the development and availability of free and fabulous tools, especially in social media, have made information sharing easier than ever to seamlessly integrate into your daily workflow and engage with a new audience in networking and campaigning activities.

The one thing that I realise now that I have always carried since leaving the sector is the perception of charities in the dark ages who perceive email as being the most advanced method of communication, of having to battle with organisations to simply try a new idea. Consequently, in retrospect, I’ve realised why I have always been surprised when the charities for which I now consult have welcomed some new ideas on getting their messages across.

I had the privilege of attending my first NFPtweetup a couple of weeks back. NFPtweetup is a meeting of Twitter users who work with or in non-profit organisations and are interested in harnessing the potential of social media for campaigning, fundraising and supporting activities that do good things in the world. I met consultants, social enterprises, CSR professionals, agencies and people who have responsibility for communications, information, digital, fundraising and campaigning at their charities. And they weren’t in the least bit stuffy, skeptical or ignorant of new tools. They all worked for organisations that were excited about the potential of social media and were embracing it to great benefit for their organisations. A shining example was I CAN’s Adopt A Word initiative that exploded when Stephen Fry tweeted about it.

I left feeling incredibly inspired by all the organisations present. I learnt so much about how they had gotten their organisations to buy in to the benefits of social media and what they do to keep their activities current and relevant. Most staggeringly though, it really made me want to work with non-profits full time again.

One of the interesting people I met was Jack Wilson from Leap Anywhere, an organisation that I can best describe as 'Time Out for good'. Leap promotes and creates video content of events for good causes all over the country. This week, I did a brainstorm with Jack and Tom Robbins, Leap’s Head of Content, at their office on some forthcoming activities they have planned. Their Soho office had a great vibe; their team was huddled around the main table with their laptops, bantering and editing, whilst we were bouncing around ideas on their sofa. We really had a great meeting.

Much of the advice I was able to give them was gleaned from experience working in the private sector. I’ve been able to take advantage of training budgets, work with people that have more knowledge and experience of all things online, learn efficient business processes and how to run effective marketing campaigns, and develop and launch projects with all the resources that most charities don’t have.

And that’s exactly why I won’t be applying for the Head of Communications job at WRC. I realised that I have more fun and I’m much better at working with organisations that do good things, as opposed to in them. This way, I get the best of both worlds; I’m constantly learning and developing through the work I do with private companies and advising non-profits on how to use what I’ve learnt to move their projects forward.

I hope WRC gets someone good. If you know anyone, you have the weekend to get your application in!

Design process of branding a non-design student's website

2009-11-09T14:07:00.001Z

A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting to a PhD student who is looking at getting a job in the financial services sector when he graduates in a couple of years’ time. Now is a great time to start networking, making contacts, learning about what’s going on in the industry and making yourself known to people that could help you get a job when you graduate.

This PhD student attended a conference in California last week and, in order to kick-start the job hunt, I suggested that he get some business cards to pass around and a website to give himself an online presence and a point of contact.

As my pro bono schedule is on hold at the moment due to a spate of 10 hour days, I made an exception to take this one on as, apart from the fact that the said PhD student, Christopher Dancel, is my youngest brother, I took it as a challenge to design for an individual that wasn’t directly selling a product or service and/or that wasn’t a creative professional.

The brief

As I’m not au fait with all the science content and we didn’t have time to go through it all before he had to leave, we decided a one column layout would suffice for now; I set him up with Amaya and Filezilla so that he could finish writing the content on the plane or in his hotel and simply upload it himself when he was done.

As Christopher will still be using it as a point of reference for his research with his academic peers, it needed to fit alongside academic themed websites (e.g. websites of super traditional universities), while presenting a professional image for potential employers.

Brainstorm

So ultimately, Christopher wants to get a job in the financial services industry. I got online and looked at the websites of the type of company for which he wants to interview.

PricewaterhouseCoopers UK

UBS Warburg

McKinsey

Deloitte

Barclays

There are many design features that these sites have in common. The layouts are clean and very functional – almost no-nonsense - with the navigation placed at the top. They are square, eschewing the rounded corners favoured by their Web 2.0 counterparts, and for the most part, favour the colour blue.

Networking

Christopher is not a huge fan of social networking (don’t worry, I’m working on that one) and integrating many social media functions can do a disservice to someone that has neither the time nor the inclination to keep them updated. But I persuaded him on the benefits of joining LinkedIn. Working for a financial services company and having been on the tail end of some great job offers via LinkedIn myself, it’s a great way of putting yourself on the radar of recruitment consultants that are increasingly using LinkedIn as a source of talent.

Christopher is at Imperial College London. Heavy on the sciences, many of its alumni go into the financial services sector, so adding a link in the footer flags this for anyone for whom this is important.

Design

When asked for his thoughts on a logo, Christopher’s only instruction was, “Just do something plain and simple.” So I went for a simple type based logo header.

Although I went through a few variations for his name, including my favourite, Helvetica Neu, I opted for News Gothic because it has a little more personality than Arial or Frutiger without being too self-conscious (yes, I do think fonts have personalities!). The strapline – PhD Candidate 2012 – is Rockwell as a nod to all things collegiate and varsity.

Christopher’s main research interest is around the movement of the ocean and its affects on climate change. Although I had anticipated that the main colour on the site would be blue I was inspired by the blue-green colour in this photo that he took near Espegrend outside Bergen in Norway during summer school there this year. It has a lot more energy than a plain navy or Facebook blue.

I added a blue-green active state to the buttons that appears when you click them, just to add a little more interest to the grey hover.

The overall design is fresh and clean. I’m sure it will continue to be a work in progress for both of us. When Christopher gets back I’m looking forward to creating a proper resume layout for his ‘About’ page.

The branding has been carried over to his business cards (thanks to moo.com for getting those out in time!).

Why charities need to stop emailing and start linking

2009-11-03T00:13:00.001Z

In the last month I’ve received a number of emails from charities typified by the following:

An email about a conference with an attached pdf conference programme and Word document booking form.
An email from a young people’s charity asking me to vote for their organisation to receive funding from a statutory sector body. It contained instructions for the various steps on how to find their organisation from the voting website’s homepage.
An email from an organisation wanting me to support a change in some government legislation with an eight page pdf attachment of background information.

The end of each of these emails asked me to forward the information to my network. I have yet to be able to conveniently do so.

On a daily basis, when I am talking to someone about any new subject, somewhere in the conversation they will say, “Forward me a link.” Now, an email is not the same as a link. An email, compared to a link, is big and clunky. An email with attachments is clunkier still, and relies on the recipient having the time, inclination and software to be able to open your attachment, read it, and forward it on. I once sent a 12 MB document (it was picture based) to 40 people in the same organisation and managed to crash their mail server.

In order to get a link, the information needs to be on a website. So I emailed each organisation back asking for a link. The organisation running the conference didn’t have a website. The young people’s charity had put it on their website but in such an obscure place that only the administrator could find it. The lobbying organisation was waiting on ‘the person that looks after our website to come back from leave’.

I’m not saying that you should abandon email altogether; after all, there are many Crackberry and iphone users amongst us that will flick through it on our long commutes, and there are many people that are not au fait with social networking tools. I’m just saying that, instead of preaching to the choir – as is often the case with email communication – you can reach out to a much wider audience, who can in turn reach out to their wider audiences, and so on, to get your message out there. And isn’t that the point?

So here are five tips to effectively sharing your information with minimal effort.

1. Consider getting a blog

Blogs don’t cost anything. The Women’s Resource Centre has a blog on Blogger. You can also get a free blog on Wordpress. Or your website package may come with a blog option that you haven’t yet discovered.

And before you say, “It doesn’t go with our branding,” or, “It looks free and unprofessional,” it is possible to skin it so that it looks like your website. I recently helped WRC out with their blog.

WRC's old blog design with one of Blogger's templates

WRC's updated design, skinned to fit their brand, but still on the Blogger platform

2. Get a news section on your website and train everyone (or at least a few different people) in your organisation on how to use it

When you’re putting out a new piece of news, people who have heard about it but don’t have any information will head straight to your website. If they can’t see a link on your homepage, the most obvious place for them to look will be your news section, so ensure it is clearly labelled.

Now I know your website has templates and that only one person in-house has responsibility to update it to ensure quality control, etc. etc. However, if you train everyone in-house to update only that section of the website i.e. they can’t touch anything else, you’ll share the workload, stop the incoming email and telephone requests for more information, and ensure that your information is linked to and shared faster and more accurately. And from past experience, an interesting by-product in having more people empowered to update the website is that more people in-house will be invested in your website as a working resource for your organisation.

3. Find out about the social networking tools that can help you spread your information

Think Twitter is just for the Stephen Frys (or should that be Fries?) of this world? Consider this tweet that went out yesterday from Twitter user @CathElliot to her 1,842 followers...

... that was re-tweeted by @whywomen (Women’s Resource Centre) to their 1,417 followers...

... that was re-tweeted by myself to my 460 followers...

... that was then re-tweeted by Twitter user @bjfletcherpi to their 522 followers.

That’s potentially 4,241 people in the space of around six hours that read that message (and more if you count all the people that re-tweeted after that); a healthy slice of that number are probably not involved in the women's sector or voluntary sector and so would have heard about this organisation and their campaign for the very first time.

From microblogging aps like Twitter to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon, all wrapped up with a healthy dose of RSS, there are a plethora of social networking and syndication tools out there to help you spread your information, and the best thing is, you don't have to use them all in order to start spreading your information.

To find out which ones would be the most helpful to you, select a group of people that would be the most useful in spreading your information and find out which channels they use. They could be journalists, Government units or prominent voluntary sector organisations. As most people or organisations use the same user name (know as a ‘tag’ or ‘handle’) across all their social media channels, a quick search in Google should bring up their accounts. When you’re all set up, tell these people that you are now on Digg / Facebook / Twitter so that you can join each other’s networks, keep up to date with your news, and spread it accordingly.

4. Write a news release, article or blog post and send it to someone that will publish it online for you

It is generally always worthwhile building relationships with blog owners for future promotion of your service, organisation or campaign. Think about the websites and blogs of organisations that you read to keep you informed.

If you still can’t be persuaded to get your own blog or add a news section to your website, write out your information as if it were a blog post, news release or article, send it to someone that has a blog and ask them to publish it. You get your link to distribute and, by posting on their blog, you have the added value of reaching out to their readership.

Here’s a little secret: blog owners love relevant content. It saves them from having to come up with new content and still results in more traffic to their blog. However, they will not take too kindly to an eight page thesis with multiple bullets and clauses explaining the nitty gritty of a particular law, so keep in mind their readers while you’re preparing your article.

5. Have a clear call to action to share your information

‘Please support us’ is all well and good, but specifying how people can support you is better. ‘Tweet this article’, ‘Email this article’ or ‘Share this article on Stumble/Digg/other social bookmarking site’ are all clear calls to action. You can add free buttons from Add This or Share This to your blog or website to make this easy.

People love sharing information – it’s in our nature to talk and communicate, and in this super networked age, aided by all the free tools out there, it’s quicker and easier to distribute over a wider geographic, demographic and sector spread. And a greater distribution means more people getting your message, more people that are informed and consequently more people that have the opportunity to respond to your call to action.

Update - September 2009

2009-09-20T02:45:00.001+01:00

It has been a pretty busy, very fruitful summer, leading in to what’s shaping up to be an exciting autumn for me. Here’s what I’ve been up to and what’s coming up next!

Web Series

B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye

Last July, Regan Latimer, the genius behind creating and making B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye, signed a development deal with Toronto based production company, Matter Of Fact Media. The announcement was covered by Tubefilter.tv and you can read the announcement on our blog.

Regan is currently working on the pilot script to be included in a package that will be shopped to broadcasters. Whilst we’re keeping our fingers crossed that it will be picked up, we’re continuing to produce content for the website and engaging in other promotional activities. Recently, Regan and the cast did a series of interviews for SistersTalk Radio and I giggled my way through them.

So far, I’ve loved working on Fletcher and, wherever the show goes during this exciting period, I’m looking forward to continuing to contribute to its success.

People often ask how I can manage to work on Fletcher when I live in London and the show is made in Toronto. This shot of a typical meeting was taken whilst we were drafting the media release announcing the development deal.

Such concentration...

2 Girls Kissing – The Web Series

You didn’t think one web series was enough, did you!?

We’re still in early days with 2GK. Like many good things, it was conceived in some moments of silliness during an ichat with (who else?) Regan Latimer. We knew we were on to a good thing when, the next morning, we were talking online whilst at our respective day jobs and we both confessed that we’d had a number of ideas for the show.

We’re still working on the concept and operationally how we’re going to produce it and make it, but I’m really looking forward to sinking my teeth into something creatively again. So watch this space…

Confessions of Indie Web Series Creators

My first article for Tubefilter News was posted last August. It’s an article that I really enjoyed putting together because it gave me the chance to connect with other web series producers that I had previously ‘met’ on Twitter. The resulting article is called Confessions of Indie Web Series Creators: Things They Wish They Knew (I’m sure you’ve already read the complete contributions to the article on my blog!).

Events

London Pride 2009

This one is a little hard to believe, but until this year the closest I’d gotten to a Pride event was shopping on Oxford Street last year and trying to find a way to cross the road whilst the parade went by.

This year, I volunteered with Amnesty International and spent the afternoon walking alongside the float, putting stickers on anyone that moved (and some who didn’t) and passing out flyers. It was pretty hot and we were exhausted by the end of it, but it was a not-too-shabby way to properly enjoy my first Pride.

With fellow Amnesty volunteer, Maite Morren

Eurout’s 1st Birthday

eurOut offers its readers the latest news about European lesbian and bisexual women in entertainment and politics in the English language. Now the biggest blog of its kind in Europe, eurOut celebrated its first birthday last weekend with its supporters and fans, and I was privileged to be able to join them in their birthday celebrations in the beautiful city of Hamburg.

Having tweeted with them pretty much on a daily basis this year, it was great (and slightly weird) to finally meet online their founder and Editor in Chief, Sandra, Entertainment Editor, Natazzz (right, leading our walking tour of Hamburg), Political Editor, Maxime68, eurGeek herself, Tedoe, and new eurOut vlogger, Zasquia.

Much chocolate was exchanged, much steak was eaten, much drinking was done responsibly (!) and many new friends were made. More pictures can be found on eurOut's website.

One of the highlights of the weekend was a concert by the amazing chicks of Greymatter, a British five-piece flown over especially to play for us. They were absolutely incredible and I'm looking forward to catching them live in the UK.

Enjoying post-concert drinks with some of the chicks from Greymatter

I admire the talent behind eurOut immensely. It is yet another example of what can be achieved with no budget and no resources but a talented group of motivated, exciting individuals. I’m looking forward to next year!

Back to school!

Every good media professional endeavours to keep their skillset current and sharp, so, aware of the start of the upcoming school year, I started to look at training courses that I wanted to do based on requests that I get in my various projects. Completely unplanned (and definitely unintended), my schedule this autumn returns to that of my university days as I take on two modules at City University, where I first learnt HTML back in the day (image credit - City University).

I will be taking a module in Flash & ActionScript as part of the training and development that goes with my role as Online Marketing Specialist at PayPoint.net. Whilst I have a working knowledge of Flash, it’s always a blessing to be able to learn something old school, so look out on the website after Christmas for the fruits of my labour!

The second module is in PHP. I have to admit that, as my strength and passion lies more in design, I never thought that this is something I’d ever take. However, Six Revisions put out an article earlier this year arguing that designers should learn to code and, whilst I didn’t agree with all of it, I think knowing more about how your designs will be interpreted and coded can only make you a better designer.

Back in the day, I worked in the voluntary sector and, to this day, I still get a lot of requests asking for advice on ‘techie things’ from voluntary sector organisations with which I’m still in touch, or that got my email address from someone… Anyhow, I’ve recently been involved in much discussion and projects recently in the way that open source tools can help non-profit organisations. Add all that to my burgeoning interest in Wordpress and the fact that I aim to do a day of pro bono work every month, and it makes sense that I learn the nuts and bolts of how to properly set up dynamic, database driven websites using open source content management systems.

I was going to leave this module until January, but I’d like to get started on developing the 2GK website as soon as possible, and I’d like a clean schedule in January – who knows what the New Year will bring! I’m actually looking forward to being back in the classroom again. And come the New Year, my CV and portfolio will be in such amazing shape.

So, busy summer - sooooo looking forward to the rest of the year. Have a great autumn!

Making old images relevant to new designs: the London Centre for Personal Safety stamps

2009-08-25T00:43:00.001+01:00

Updating (or overhauling) a web design is a big deal for most organisations. More often than not, ‘out with the old’ brings a welcome breath of fresh air. But with organisations with a long and significant history, integrating specific elements – especially specific images - from their old site into the new one can be a bit of a challenge. Especially when at first they don’t have a place in your vision.

I recently completed the site re-design for the London Centre for Personal Safety, an organisation that provides gender-aware personal safety training, as well as advising organisations on personal safety issues and campaigning with like-minded organisations to end violence against women.

LCPS' old website

There was no design brief; they simply wanted to reflect the organisation in a more professional light and appeal to organisations not just in the voluntary/non-profit sector, but in the public and private sectors as well. During the brainstorming process, I asked their Director, Claudia da Silva, what was the main characteristic that embodied the organisation’s work. As well as safety and security, she said, “The feeling of freedom, like a bird being set free and flying into the sky.”

LCPS' new website

A number of years ago, LCPS found out about a programme where you could get some postal stamps printed to support your organisation. They created some mock-ups of the stamps and, although nothing ever came of them, they have been used in the organisation’s materials ever since. One of the organisation’s early requests was that these stamps be incorporated into the site’s design in some way; this was especially important given that this organisation has yet to have their logo designed, so I was keen to keep any existing branding collateral that would identify them to the organisations with whom they already work or want to work with.

After many consultations, I was left with the impression that the people they work with are as integral to the organisation as the unique training programmes for which they are known.

Although the website’s defining image (which you can see on the homepage) is a woman in silhouette, arms raised in celebration against a sunrise, capturing the spirit of liberation and freedom that the organisation embodies, I wanted to incorporate photos of the organisation’s target groups. It was a perfect opportunity to incorporate some of the photos from the original stamps.

A mock-up of LCPS' stamp for their children's projects

The header on the children's projects page incorporating the stamp's photo

Their legacy stamp, used almost in place of their logo, was somewhat more difficult to incorporate. It’s a very definitive style from a very specific period – completely unlike the clean, bright images of the people in the headers.

LCPS' legacy stamp

I decided to keep the image intact and place it on a background of clouds in a blue sky. I tweaked the original strapline so that it read ‘Over 25 years of preventing, protecting, empowering and liberating…’

LCPS header on the 'About Us' page incorporating their legacy stamp

The new header now underlines the organisation’s status as an established authority that only age can bring, while the blue sky background represents its innovative approach (literally, blue sky thinking!) and the feeling of freedom and liberation that it seeks to impart to all of its project participants.

From 7 web series producers: what we wish we’d known before making our web series

2009-08-09T16:03:00.001+01:00

A few weeks ago, I was putting together a post intended for the Life On Fletcher blog. It was going to be a bit of a how-to based on our experiences of making the show. As we’d just announced our development deal, we were feeling a little reminiscent, so the angle changed to ‘what we wish we’d known before making our show’.

I opened out the question to a number of web series producers whose shows I’d discovered via connecting with them on Twitter. Within a couple of weeks I had accumulated six great responses that needed to be shared with an audience wider than our blog. The resulting article, Confessions of Indie Web Series Creators: Things They Wish They Knew, ended up on Tubefilter.tv (thanks to Tubefilter’s Marc Hustvedt for having us!).

That was last Tuesday; today is Sunday, and a lot of the emails and messages I’ve received since then have been requests to see, in full, what everyone sent in. Their contributions were very different from each other. I have to say that it was quite overwhelming in the first instance to receive it all, but then to read it all…

Susan Miller, Executive Producer & Writer of Anyone But Me

“Here’s what I wish I’d known:

“How freakingly awesomely totally cool this would be, dudes! Could have saved me hours of sitting on my shrink’s well worn couch crying over the terrible state of the world and where to relocate my lost place in it and how ever would I make my voice heard again.

“But, then, if I had known then what I know now I might have been just a little too happy. And, after all, it was my discontent with the confines and dictates of the mainstream that moved me to venture into this great unknown. To say yes to this web series madness. To say yes to Anyone But Me.

“Of course, there are things I wish I’d known, only because I would have prepared by taking vitamins, going to the gym, getting an MBA and learning how to talk in P.R:

“That you have to ask. A lot of people for a lot of things. Favors. And how to’s. And please watch and please, please, please.

“That you have to scour web sites and blogs to find other web sites and blogs to make connections. You have to get your schmooze on and walk into rooms and hand out cards and be able to describe your show in one sexy killer sentence.

“That you have to reach out. To CEO’s and store owners and people walking down the street and sell them your wares and not be daunted. Even though you used to sit alone in a room or café and just write or think all day and talk to no one. You do it all for the show. And the show becomes all that you do.

“That there are remarkably generous people out there. That the fans make you. That we are a community. That we have to keep the faith.

“Whatever I didn’t know, I’m learning. Which makes me feel forever young. And part of something. Something uncharted. Something without rules. Something we’ll define for ourselves. Something big. And something freakingly, awesomely, totally cool.”

David Nett, Executive Producer, Writer, Actor, Director, Boom Operator on GOLD

“The thing that I knew, but didn't really comprehend fully was, since Season 1 of GOLD was a deferred pay gig (basically, everyone was a volunteer), we'd have a lot of drop-outs and last-minute replacements, and a lot of scrambling to fill gaps. I knew it would be rough, but wasn't really prepared for the sheer amount of wrangling I'd have to do, during both production and post. I now know, if I can't scrape together strong pay packages, to line-up back-ups for my back-ups.

“But I guess the biggest thing I wish I'd known (and better prepared for) was the long-term commitment to the project after shooting was complete. I come from the world of theater -- however rough the production is, once a play closes and all the bills have been paid, it is all over, save the fond (or not so fond) memories. Not so with web series, I found.

“I came into GOLD with a pretty decent shooting plan and a rough post production plan, but no real understanding of the massive amount of ongoing promotion, paperwork, decision-making and just plain grunt work that would continue not only after shooting was done but even after our Season 1 finale dropped last month. It is certainly not all bad, and I have a deep commitment to my series and doing everything I can to keep it going into Season 2, but it is a little more than I bargained for. Had I known those things ahead of time, I'm not certain what I'd have done differently, but at least I wouldn't have kept saying to my wife, "we'll have our life back soon, I promise." I didn't mean to lie to you, sweetheart. I swear.”

Robb Padgett, Creator & Actor, Life From The Inside

“How do you get people to WATCH?!

“Not as if we've figured this one out exactly. But we sure know more now than we did. Of course, back when our show first hit the web in January of 2007, there weren't as many shows online. It was easier to get the attention of web show watchers (though there were fewer web show watchers back then too). But it still took us a while to figure out how to get noticed. In fact, I'm not sure we ever really DID figure it out. If it weren't for the help of people like the producers of Break a Leg mentioning our show in interviews and people like Sunny Gault noticing our show and profiling it on her old show Viral, we might not have ever gotten noticed.

“I guess what I should say is that I wish I would've known how to PROMOTE the show before we started making it. It took us WAY too long to do stuff like tell the good people at Blip.tv about our show. And they've been some of our biggest supporters of all (Blip is good to a lot of shows. I sure wish Felicia Williams was still at YouTube though, she was a true champion of independent content).

“We're still learning how to get our show out there. And we've discovered just how big a task promotion actually is. I'm not a huge fan of publicity, but I like having people watch our show so...

“Oh, one other thing I would've liked to have known is that it's much easier to shoot your entire season ALL AT ONCE than to shoot it as you go. Though our current show with it's full-length episodes might have been hard to do that way.”

Justin Marchert, Creator of Big Bother

“The most helpful piece of knowledge that I could have used before making Big Bother is that everything takes longer than you think it will. I had the initial idea for my web series in May 2007. I was an actor-turned-filmmaker who thought I'd have a finished product ready in two months. Oh, was this the underestimate of a lifetime. I spent nearly a year writing the script and doing preproduction. Then, the two weekends I'd initially allotted for principal shooting somehow stretched into several months. Next, I thought I was ready to go to the editor and put it all together. But, you then learn that there is a whole phase called "capturing." This means spending months digitizing, logging and filing all of the footage. Your editor won't even speak to you before this is complete. Alas, we come to editing. We average 15 hours of editing for each 3-minute episode of Big Bother.

“Consequently, most episodes are finished the night before they're released (feel free to read the chronicles of creating Big Bother on our Bblog).

“In hindsight, I'm actually glad no-one told me it would be a two-year process. Otherwise, I don't think I'd ever have begun.”

Renée Olbert, Actor & Co-Creator, and Rosemary Rowe, Writer & Co-Creator of Seeking Simone

Renée and Rosemary pointed me to this article that they had written on their blog entitled Things We Learned About Making a Web Series – no sense in reinventing your wheel, right!?

This is my favourite tip from their list:

“7. You will not have time to knit. You just won't. So give it up.”

Regan Latimer, Creator, Executive Producer, Director, Writer, Editor of B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye

“If you had asked me a year and half ago if I'd ever considered making a web series or producing web content, I probably would have responded with something very close to, "the what?". My knowledge of web series, or producing any kind of content for the web was in it's absolute infancy. That said, I believe that my ignorance on the subject probably worked in my favour. Having no idea just how absolutely all encompassing and life absorbing it would become is probably one of the main reasons Fletcher came into being. Not to say that if I had known then what I know now I wouldn't have done it, more that I certainly would have adjusted my expectations and game plan accordingly…”

You can read the rest of Regan’s contribution on the Life On Fletcher blog.

And in case you were wondering…

Rochelle Dancel, Associate Producer, B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye

“I’m actually glad that I didn’t know what I know now because I would have said a resounding, “No!” - not only to the sleep deprivation that comes with being ahead in the five hour time difference, the elevated stress levels and having to be the go-to person on subjects that I know fuck-all about, but also to the education I received, to the opportunity to push myself beyond what I thought were my limitations and the richness of my new community, the people I have met, and the new opportunities in my life that this show has brought.”

Artwork is copyright of their respective shows.

Web series 'B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye' gets development deal with Matter of Fact Media

2009-07-21T22:21:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, we announced our development deal with Matter of Fact Media. As you can imagine, we're all super excited! Read the coverage on Tubefilter.tv.

In case you've been too busy to watch it yet, this is the trailer to our second season.

You can catch all of Season 1 and Season 2 on bjfletcherprivateeye.com

Thank you to everyone for your messages of congratulations! The media release is below.

***

Regan Latimer, creator and producer/writer/director of web series B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye, has signed a development deal with Toronto-based production company Matter of Fact Media. Under the terms of the agreement, Latimer will work with MoFM Executive Producer Vanessa Dylyn to develop a television broadcast proposal for the web series, including a new pilot script based on the hilarious characters and adventures from B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye.

The online team behind the web series will continue to produce original content for the show’s website and blog during the development period. Regardless of the format in which it continues, unique content from the show will continue to be made available online.

Latimer announced, “It’s an exciting time for everyone involved with B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye. We need to thank our wonderful fans and viewers, whose tremendous support has been a huge part of this development. We’re also very grateful to the blogs and websites that have actively promoted us.

“We want to say a special thank you to Sarah Warn and all of the team at AfterEllen.com for giving us our break and supporting us through the first two seasons. They are very much part of the Fletcher family and we have learned so much from them.

“Our talented cast, including Lindy Zucker, Dana Puddicombe, Vanessa Dunn and Karim Morgan, and all of our production team, including Rochelle Dancel and Rikki Zucker, are committed to supporting the show as it develops and we are confident that our partnership with Matter of Fact Media will take Fletcher in a positive new direction. We look forward to bringing Fletcher back to your screens in the near future, more wicked awesome than ever!”

10 tools to get your web series website online

2009-07-15T23:03:00.001+01:00

One of the fastest growing forms of online entertainment is the web series. As an industry yet to fully mature, the majority of web series’ are homespun labours of love, produced by groups of friends and collaborators eager to showcase their talents. Despite the wealth of professional experience in their current or day jobs, a web series enables many creators to take the reigns for the first time.

I’ve put together a list of ten tools that we use to put our web series, B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye online compiled from the many ‘how do we get a website for our show…?’ themed emails. Bear in mind that there are more complex and more expensive ways of going about achieving what each of these tools does for us. This list is neither exhaustive or original, but if your expertise lies solely in producing your show, you’re a novice in the world of putting up a website and your budget is the sum total of the change in your back pockets then this is a not-too-shabby way to go.

1. Dreamweaver

Yes, our site was put up in Dreamweaver! Dreamweaver is an example of a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor.

Dreamweaver is not free, but there are any number of free WYSIWYG editors out there. Check out this article by thefreecountry.com on free HTML editors, web editors, and WYSIWYG web editors and site builders.

You might also want to check what free software comes with your computer; for example, Mac users should find a version of iWeb on their computers. The website for one our favourite web series’, FEED, is built in iWeb and also features a number of widgets and tools, including Site Meter for all your traffic stats and a PayPal Donate button for fundraising.

FEED

2. Blogger

Life On Fletcher is powered by Blogger and we chose Blogger for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to keep the existing site intact and I didn’t want to do a big integration or move it off Dreamweaver. Blogger allows us to update the blog online and publish it to our site via ftp. Secondly, I wanted the blog published on our URL i.e. www.bjfletcherprivateeye.com/blog as opposed to, for example, bjfletcherprivateeye.wordpress.com, so that it would be search engine friendly.

Instead of adding a blog to your site, you can follow the example of some of our favourite shows and put your show straight onto a blog. For example, Seeking Simone is powered by Typepad, while GOLD is powered by Expression Engine (with comments powered by Disqus, natch!).

Seeking Simone

GOLD The Series

I’m a big fan of both of those sites. They’re both very clean and easy to navigate. Most of all, the style of their sites is in keeping with the theme of their shows.

3. Daily Motion

Our episodes are available on Daily Motion’s player. We chose Daily Motion after signing up to the Motion Maker programme, which allows us to upload videos of a higher file size and of any length compared to their standard offering.

The main advantage to having a third party video player is that we don’t have to utilise our bandwidth or server space to allow you to enjoy our episodes. There are many video hosting services out there with embeddable players. Look for one that gives you a nice encode, might offer you quicker upload times and allows you to upload videos suitable for the file size and episode length of your show. Vimeo, another one of our favourites, is used by We Have To Stop Now, and blip.tv is used by Anyone But Me, as well as Seeking Simone and GOLD.

4. Picasa

We chose Picasa because you can upload and create photo galleries in five different sizes, something we were quite keen on to show off the skills of our photographer, Jonathan Thomas. Other free, popular, embeddable photo gallery sharing aps include Flickr and Photobucket.

There are many advantages to hosting your pictures in an online slide show. The main one is that, if you have a gazillion behind the scenes pictures like we do, as with video you don’t take up valuable storage space and bandwidth when people view your high res images. The fact that it’s also embeddable means that people can embed them in their blogs and on their sites – free publicity for you!

5. Zoomerang

Have you taken one of audience surveys? If so, you’ve already been introduced to Zoomerang, a free online survey tool. We’ve used it to put together demographic surveys of our viewers to give potential sponsors a better understanding of who watches our show.

Another popular survey tool is SurveyMonkey. However, Zoomerang allows you 30 questions for free where as SurveyMonkey only allows you 10. Although the basic version of both of these tools is free, any reporting functionality is not, so if you have a few surveys on which you need to report it may be worthwhile taking out a monthly subscription to save yourself the time of manually compiling everything in a spreadsheet.

6. Google Analytics

If you're serious about developing your site and attracting advertisers, you're going to need the stats to back up your pitches, and that's where Google Analytics comes in. It’s a free service that tracks not only the number of visitors to your site and where they came from, but also where they go once they get to your site – very useful when you’re trying to work out where to place one of your sponsor’s ads so that the most people see it, or to track whether anyone can find your deeply buried FAQ page. How else would we know that, in the month of June, the most popular link on our homepage was the Season 2 link in our tag cloud?

7. Add This

Make it easy for people to share your episodes, interviews and all the other cools stuff on your site with their friends on all of their social networks. On our site you’ll see a handy little ‘Share This’ button courtesy of Add This on most of our pages that will allow you to share our content across 55 (and counting) different social networks.

8. Twitter

And speaking of social networking, I couldn’t let it go without mentioning the latest pretender to the social networking crown – Twitter. We’re big fans, and it has allowed us to connect with some new friends, including the editors at Eurout and Cherrygrrl; some old friends, including the teams at AfterEllen and One More Lesbian, and some other web series talents including Mel Robertson from FEED, David Nett from GOLD, Renee Olbert and Rosemary Rowe from Seeking Simone.

Twitter allows you to keep your fans and supporters posted with up-to-the-second news on anything to do with your show. On Fletcher, we tweet interviews, episodes, reviews and updates to do with the development of our show. The Twitter widgets on our homepage and blog are from Twitter’s own site, and the ‘follow us’ tab that you see on every page comes courtesy of Go2Web.

9. ichat

Ok, so ichat isn’t strictly one that powers our website, but it is super useful when you’re talking to producers, other team members, PR people or journalists in far flung locales. Fletcher is made in Toronto and I live in London (UK, not Ontario!) so mounting phonebills is one cost I was keen not to incur. Luckily, all our producers come equipped with their own Macs (it’s almost a pre-requisite for joining our show) so very important video chats are powered by ichat. Skype is a popular alternative.

10. yousendit

The only tool that we pay for, yousendit allows us to send, receive and track large files – incredibly important when emailing entire episodes or photo galleries for review. Yousendit’s free service allows you to send files of up to 100mb. However, we will soon be trialling Dropbox, a free file sharing service across computers that will hopefully relax the strain on our threadbare pockets!

So that’s 10 tools without which we couldn’t put our show online. There are many more out there we’re currently playing with that you might see on our site in future, including Nabble, a free online embeddable forum where all of you can gather to ponder whether George will pick Fletcher or Jenna. There are some incredible web series websites out there, ranging from sites that were put up on a wish and a prayer and absolutely no coding knowledge, to sites that were built by marketing powerhouses. Take a good look at them all for inspiration for your site – just don’t forget to watch some incredible shows too!

What tools have you found useful for your web series website?

Five ways that charities can build their brands online

2009-07-05T21:07:00.001+01:00

I recently spoke to a communications volunteer at a community group who had been tasked with looking at ways of increasing the group’s profile online. When I asked what kind of activities were being done to promote their profile online, she responded, “Well, we have a website…”

I have news for you – that’s not enough. ‘Brand building’ may sound like a term that’s too corporate or too ‘marketing’ to have any place in the non-profit / voluntary / charity sector(s) but there’s a lot that we can learn from our corporate relatives.

Before I give you five simple ways to build your brand online, here are five reasons why you should build your brand online.

1. It establishes you as an authority in your field

Ever feel frustrated that the bigger, better resourced organisations get all the media attention, are asked to speak at more events, are given the opportunity to work on projects on which you know you’d do a better job? The reason they get these opportunities is because they are perceived as authorities in their fields, whether they are or not.

2. It’s cheaper than building your brand offline

Whilst it’s no substitute to running television, radio or newspaper campaigns, there’s no reason why you can’t establish your organisation online where, in this day and age, more and more people are looking for their information. And that which you establish online will see results offline.

3. Everyone else is doing it

Whilst this alone has never been a good reason for doing it, consider this: if three similar organisations are very visible, why should anyone go to the bother of finding one that isn’t? More to the point, how would anyone know that there are alternatives?

4. It drives traffic to your website

Essentially, this is where you want people to go online. Your website is your organisation’s online presence and should contain everything that people need to know about you.

5. It puts your organisation into the mind of potential service users

With the explosion of social media and cheaper data packages for wireless and mobile broadband at home, whilst travelling and on our mobile phones, people are spending more and more time online. If potential service users can find you in avenues that they already access, or if they are generally more familiar with your brand, they’re more likely to use you.

So that’s why you should build your brand online. Here’s five ways you can do it.

Make it easier for people to find out about you

Get a blog and/or a website. Contact everyone you know and ask them if they can put your web address into the links, resources or directory sections of their websites. Make sure you include any resource centres, associations or councils that operate in your area or are relevant to your sector.

Ensure that when they get to your website there is quite clearly a section labelled ‘About Us’ and / or ‘What We Do’. Sound simple? You’d be surprised at how many organisations assume that people already know this.

Connect with people online

Social media isn’t just for planning your weekend. It enables you to connect to people to whom sometimes you wouldn’t ordinarily have access.

There are a plethora of social media networks and communities and it can be overwhelming to select the ones that are most relevant to your organisation. Put yourselves in the shoes of those that you are trying to reach and then consider – or better still, ask them – which outlets they use.

LinkedIn – more likely to connect with second tier, corporate or public sector people – think anyone with an office-based job

Facebook – because of its social nature, great for reaching potential service users

Twitter – the latest pretender to the social media crown. Leah Williams, Communications Officer at the Women’s Resource Centre, has written a great article on the benefits of Twitter to women’s organisations although they very much apply across the board.

Engage with other blogs

Commenting on other blogs shows that you are engaged and up to date with all the developments of your sector or field. You have the opportunity to put forward your organisation’s point of view, which will in turn be read by your peers and by those interested in the issues in which you engage (e.g. journalists or researchers).

Identify, say, three blogs that people in your field read the most. Whenever a new story is posted, comment on it. Your comments don’t have to be very long – just informed and well written.

When you comment on a blog post, you state your name and your organisation’s web address, so if people are interested in what you say they can click on the link back to your site. Ensure that if you can upload an avatar (an icon or picture that represents you online) you use your organisation’s logo. Whatever image you use, keep it consistent across all sites in which you engage online.

If you comment a lot it is worthwhile getting a Gravatar. A gravatar, or globally recognised avatar, allows your posts to be recognised by the same avatar across any website, blog or forum that supports them. You register your website and email address in the Gravatar database along with your image and any blog, forum or website that doesn’t offer the option of uploading your own picture but still supports gravatars will display it alongside your post.

The next step after commenting is to offer to write an article for the same blogs. This is particularly useful if your organisation has taken a particular stance around the development of a current policy or is promoting a new publication or forthcoming event.

Distribute information or news relevant to your sector

Don’t restrict yourself to distributing news and information solely about your organisation. The point in this exercise is to establish you as an up-to-date source of information for your sector.

Distributing information isn’t just about sending out an email to your mailing list, although if you do that already that’s still an effective way of getting to people. A more efficient way is to get your own RSS feed.

An RSS feed is a function on your site that allows people to sign up to receive information either straight to their inbox or via a dedicated feed reader. I have to admit that an RSS feed is something that I know how to use and manipulate… but ask me to explain it and I’m at a loss. So here’s a video:

The BBC published their simple guide to RSS feeds that you may find useful.

Getting your own RSS feed is simple. If you use any of the popular blogging tools, such as Wordpress, Blogger or Twitter (yes, Twitter is a microblog!) then RSS feeds already come built into them. If not, you can build your own. Either type ‘setting up an RSS feed’ into any search engine to come up with several pages of tutorials, or create one with Google Feedburner.

Here’s the great thing - tools such as HootSuite for Twitter allow you to subscribe to a number of RSS feeds associated to your sector and output their news via your feed. It’s a completely automated process so once you’ve set it up, you don’t need to do anything more.

Get advice on your online strategy

If you are serious about getting a more holistic, integrated approach to your online strategy, speak to a professional. Online strategy is a bit of an obsession for me, so feel free to contact me if you have any questions; if you make great coffee, I may be persuaded to come in to talk to you!

Alternatively, I’m a big fan of the wunderkids at Beautiful World, an agency that works somewhere between the digital and non-profit worlds. They are currently offering time on their now famous beautiful sofa to get advice on any subject you want.

Building your brand online doesn’t cost a penny. It will raise your organisation’s profile head and shoulders above those that haven’t whilst capturing the attention of potential stakeholders who might prove beneficial to you in the future. These brand building activities will also keep you informed of developments in your sector which will put your organisation in a better place to respond to them. And then you can tweet about it.

See your world from another perspective

2009-06-25T23:29:00.001+01:00

See your world from another perspective

During the recent tube strike, I took advantage of the free river boat service that was running from Westminster Pier to the Millennium Pier at Tower Hill where my office is. Despite the stress on the streets of resigned city workers trying to get to their offices, there was relative calm once people had boarded the boat. In fact, once we got going, many of us turned into excited tourists, pulled out our camera phones and started snapping at the London landmarks that we usually pass every day – just on the Tube, underground.

It struck me that there are things that we do every day that are so habitual that we don’t realise we’re doing them, and in doing so, we may close ourselves to the possibility of a new experience and a different perspective.

Finding a new perspective on a well-trodden path or a clichéd theme is a common challenge, whether you’re a designer, a copywriter in a particular field, or even if you’re a speaker at events that the same people attend all the time: how do you not give the same speech on the same subject over and over again? More challenging still, putting yourself in the shoes of your client’s target audience with whom you have absolutely no connection; how do you know what a refugee, newly arrived in a foreign city, feels like? Or a victim of rape or violence?

Changing the way that you do things in your every day routine has its benefits. For example, I’ve started to eat lunch away from my desk with my colleagues. Not only do I get a break from my screen, but I’ve been privy to the water cooler chat on work related topics (and some not so work related!) that has made it easier to understand why certain projects are meeting barriers, or they’ve offered suggestions to in-house resources I didn’t know existed. I decided to work out of a different café right across the street from the one that I usually frequent and discovered that they have a writers group that meets every week; I now have cards from two great copywriters.

It’s difficult – we are creatures of habit. But changing up the way that you go about your daily routine makes it less… routine, enabling you to connect and actually engage away from the mundane. And if you can apply this attitude to your work, putting yourself in the shoes of your client’s target audience won’t be so difficult, it will be a challenge that you’ll relish.

How to tender for a designer

2009-06-16T23:21:00.004+01:00

Here’s the situation: you’re the Information and/or Communications Officer of a small non-profit organisation. You need to get some artwork designed – perhaps your annual report, an information flyer or even a toolkit or an entire website – and your Director instructs you to ‘get a designer’. You have no clue where to even begin looking and even less idea of how to choose a designer once the offers come rolling in (they will).

When I was at the Greater London Domestic Violence Project, I lead the tendering and commissioning process for the layout and design of the Stella Project toolkit. In the end, it was a fairly painless process once it got going; however, I had to put in a lot of research online to find out the best way of executing this process. Now, having been on both sides of pitching table, here is a guide for tendering for a designer that should cover most types of projects.

Tendering for your creative

Write your brief

Agree in-house what it is you need and put together a detailed design brief. You can read about what should go into your design brief here. This is the stage at which you should consult any stakeholders. However, going forward, agree a signing off process for each stage of your project. Nothing is more frustrating, holds a project back or guarantees an end product that no one is happy with than something ‘designed by committee’. I recommend no more than three people should have a say in signing off each stage or each proof that comes back. Nominate one person who will be the point of contact for the designer. Where possible, going forward, no one else but that person should need to contact the designer.

After you have integrated or packaged your design brief to the other standard documents that your organisation issues when tendering for contractors, you have your invitation to tender.

Distribute your tender

It’s quicker and cheaper to distribute your brief online and electronically so, if you can, upload the brief onto your website. If your organisation itself does not have a website, ask around for anyone that does – a board member, a member of staff, a local association or membership group to which you might belong. It is always useful, and more accessible, to distribute a link rather than a document e.g. a Word file.

There are a number of ways to distribute the link to your brief. You can get recommendations from other organisations in your field and send it out to their designers. If you have seen work that you like, find out who did it and send it out to the relevant designer.

If you use any kind of social networking tools, like Twitter, post the link, and get other organisations to do the same.

You could search online for designers in your area. A more specific but wildcard approach would be to search for graphic design, web design or web developer forums, and post the link to your brief there. These forums are optimised for social media purposes so designers should pick up on your post quite quickly.

Although there are many others, these forums attract UK based designers.

Forums for web design
Web Designer Forum
Web Design Forum

Forums for graphic design
UK Graphic Design Forums
Graphic Design Forum
Freelance UK Graphic Design Forum

Forums for graphic & web design
Design Forums

Collect your responses to tender

If you are tendering for print work, be sure to clear some space in your office to store the responses to your tender; I’ve previously had boxes of examples of work delivered. On an associated note, hard copies of previous work may be the only samples that the designers have so they will want them back. Instructing them to include a pre-paid self-addressed envelope will cut down on your costs and admin time, or you can stipulate a time and date when they can come and collect their work from your office.

Selecting your designer

One of the age-old questions is freelancer v big design firm. Whilst the most obvious answer may be ‘big design firm – capacity in abundance’, Jacob Cass has written a great article on what freelancers can offer that big design firms can’t.

When reviewing all the supporting materials and examples of work, bear in mind the requirements of your project. With each particular example, ask yourself if you like their work and why. Is it effective in getting a message across?

Call their referees and ask them what they were like to work with: did they respond to emails and phonecalls promptly? Did they communicate with such jargon that they had to have a glossary on standby? Have they used them since?

Be thorough – if you have any questions that aren’t answered in their tender package, feel free to pick up the phone and ask them. You want to pick the designer that you feel the most comfortable working with, that can work independently and efficiently and that is the most effective at conveying your message. Bear in mind that, at this stage, they have yet to put the proverbial pen to paper on your project.

A note about ‘designing on spec’

‘Designing on spec’ can be summarised as ‘Design something – we’ll pay you if we like it.’ It’s a practice that any legitimate or serious designer will refuse to enter into and one that, as an ethical organisation, you should refuse to support. As summarised by the AIGA, the professional association for design professionals, there are three main reasons for this:

The quality of work that you receive is compromised, as little or no time has been put into submitting speculative work; often, the most important elements of the design process – research, development and testing – are negated.
The value of the designer’s work – and consequently of work across the industry as a whole – is reduced. Designers are also at risk of organisations taking advantage of them by seeing this as a way of getting free work done.
Both parties may be subject to legal implications further down the line, including copyright and intellectual property disagreements.

Consequently, be very thorough about reviewing the responses to your tender as you are picking the designer that you feel has the best chance of being the most effective based on what they have previously demonstrated.

Working with your designers

Find out what everyone does but get a single point of contact

You should know who is working on your project, especially the person/people that will actually be designing your artwork. However, ensure that you have one single point of contact. This is especially important if you are working with a big team. It will also help that team if they have their own internal production sign-off processes. Your single point of contact is that person that you bug, the person to whom you send any changes and the person that you cc on any communications pertaining to your project.

Let the designers… design

This may seem like an obvious point, but please try to remember why you hired a designer to begin with! While feedback is always useful, try and refrain from telling your designer how they should go about doing something - after all, you wouldn't tell your dentist how they should extract teeth, or a pilot how to fly a plane, so refrain from 'advising' your designer on how they should do their job. Even though you may have a strong idea of what you want – which you should have put in your design brief – keep your mind open to new ideas, as it may set you aside from your competition in the long run.

Give useful feedback promptly

Saying ‘I don’t like that’ or ‘That’s not working for me’ is not useful. Saying why you don’t like something or why it’s not working for you – even if it’s just in abstract terms – is more helpful in getting back a more satisfactory result quicker.

Get your feedback back as quickly as possible, even if it means grabbing the other sign-off people whilst they’re making tea. If you tell your designer you’ll have feedback to them by Friday, make sure you do, because they will plan their next step around it. Remember the person that you nominated as your point of contact? Ensure that only that person is communication with the designer. I once had six different people email me six differing critiques on a website header - it wasn’t useful.

Thanking your designer

If you like your designer’s work, be sure to mention them and recommend them to other colleagues and organisations.

If you had a website designed, allow the designer to keep the ‘designed by’ line in the footer or credits of your site. If you had print work design, see how feasible it is to have a ‘designed by’ strapline in superscript in an unobtrusive part of your artwork.

And make sure you pay on time. A great designer is likely to drop you or de-prioritise your work next time you come calling if they’ve had to wait several months for your last cheque.

The process of securing a new designer may be daunting but the end product of having something designed from scratch is highly satisfactory, and often a moment of great pride for most organisations.

How have you handled tendering for a new designer?

Putting together your design brief

2009-06-09T23:03:00.005+01:00

I was recently contacted by a community group who wanted to issue an invitation to tender for a designer to work on promotional materials for a project that had just secured funding.

Whilst their steering group had, in their various professional capacities, tendered for various services – cleaning services, printing, stationery suppliers – none of them had ever put together a tender for a creative agency or briefed a project into a designer.

An invitation to tender for a designer or creative agency includes one very important component – the design brief.

There is no set formula or standard format for putting together a design brief. Some designers have their own pro forma brief that they have their clients complete.

In this article, I’m going to cover useful information to put into your brief to get the best out of your project and your designer. You can either append or integrate this into your invitation to tender, along with the other information that your organisation needs as part of your tendering process, or, if you already have a designer in mind you can use this guide to brief them in directly about your project.

Information about your organisation

Do not assume that the designer responding to your tender knows anything about your organisation, or even the field or sector in which you work. Explain what you do, where/how you work, your stakeholders, your organisation’s size and mission statement. You may also wish to list other organisations active in your field as this will help your designer contextualise your organisation. Try to be as concise as possible and avoid using jargon.

Details about the project itself

Provide as much information as you but be specific. What are you trying to achieve with what you’re commissioning? Who is the target audience? Where will it be seen or distributed? Does it need to be evaluated and, if so, how? Is this project simply following on or slotting in with existing materials or is this something brand new and/or standalone?

Identifying all the possible uses for your artwork also lets your designer anticipate how they will create and prepare your artwork files so that you have what you need when they hand them over at the end of the project.

Context of the project

Will your new artwork be used in a campaign that you are launching? Are any of your ‘competitors’ launching campaigns at the same time or do they have similar materials already out there? Has anyone done anything that you particularly like/dislike? Remember, whilst a good designer will undertake their own research of your field, no one knows what’s already out there better than you because you see it every day.

Any specifications

The design may need to fit on a lip balm case because it’s being distributed to domestic violence victims, or the design may need to fit on a specific size of card to fit into pre-cut folder pockets in your conference packs. Your target audience may be colour blind or visually impaired. You may also have existing branding guidelines around your logo, so make your designer aware about anything related to size, colour or any other specifications.

Text and pictures

If you’re having your annual report laid out, your designer will obviously need your text, or ‘copy’, sent over. If you have yet to finish writing it, realistically estimate how long it will be either by the word count or number of A4 pages. The reason for this is that the designer needs to work out how long it’s going to take them to lay out x number of pages.

If your copy serves more as a strapline or a tagline on a postcard, ask them if they think it works. Your designer may be able to recommend a copywriter that can help you.

If you are using any photos, your designer will assess how they will print or if they need to be saved/converted to another format so that they load quicker online. If there are people in your pictures, ensure that their permission has been obtained to be used for your project. This is particularly important if you are using pictures of children, victims of violence or other at-risk groups.

A timeline with clear milestones

A timeline is especially important if you are working towards a launch date. Start at your launch date and work backwards.

3 March: final proof delivered

7 March: final proof sent to printer

17 March: flyers delivered to office

20 March: launch date

Before you set your timeline, make sure that you check the availability of all involved parties, including your printer or programmer and anyone in the organisation involved in signing off any proofs. Don’t forget to include school holidays and religious festivals – I’ve had more deadlines moved because of these two factors!

No one produces their best work on a tight deadline, so give your designer as much time as possible – we’ll thank you for it!

Budget

Some people may think that not including a budget will mean that designers will tender at all points of the price scale and you can just pick the lowest. However, different designers have different ways internally of pricing their work. Established agencies may overcharge their corporate clients so they can afford to work for charities for next to nothing whilst freelancers may quote more because they work on a smaller volume of projects. The inverse is true as well. The bottom line is to set your bottom line, however low. I’ve also found it useful to include a sentence stating that the budget includes the designer’s expenses e.g. travel, which may be a sticking point if you are several hours by car/train away from each other and many physical meetings are required.

Append or integrate your brief into your invitation to tender. As well as the other required information that your organisation needs for good practice e.g. the company’s equal opportunities, diversity or environmental policy, be sure to request references and examples of work, and set a clear deadline by when the tender needs to be returned.

It may seem like an awful lot of work, but a great briefing document returns greater design work and it will save you time answering questions over the phone in the long run. A thorough, concise briefing document also tells a prospective designer that you have seriously thought about the requirements of your project so are therefore less likely to encounter problems working together.

Why blog?

2009-06-08T22:42:00.000+01:00

A few years ago, just after I was out of university the first time around and about to spend a year in Canada, a friend suggested that I keep a blog to keep everyone posted about what I was up to. Back then, I didn’t really have anything to blog about other than my travels, and really, no one needed to know about that.

When I got back from Canada I spent three years doing everything ‘techie related’ working for a charity that worked on policy and good practice standards for agencies addressing issues around domestic violence in London. I got my MA in Media & Communications, focussing on alternative politics and new media, and then I went freelance.

Now, because of the projects that I have been blessed to be a part of, I get a lot of emails from friends, colleagues – old and new - asking me how I put a certain website together, or how a particular film project came about, or what my thinking was behind a certain design. I also get emails from people I met in my non-profit days asking for advice on all things ‘techie related’.

In part, this blog is a place to put all those emails that I have forwarded several times over, like how to manage a tendering processing for a piece of artwork or how I deal with working across different time zones.

I am currently the Associate Producer on B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye, a lesbian comedy web series filmed in Toronto. I am developing a follow-up to Brent Talking Heads, a documentary that I wrote and directed for the London Borough of Brent around the specialist domestic violence court process. I continue to work on design and media projects in a freelance capacity and I am the Online Marketing Specialist at PayPoint.net, a role that has been, and continues to be, an incredible learning curve for me.

So whilst this blog has no one particular focus – design, media production, alternative politics, or just life as a creative freelancer – I hope that someone somewhere finds some part of it useful. Or amusing. Or supported in the knowledge that there is some other freelancer somewhere trying to make it all work!