We have just launched a new website for our sister company Subcom. The website needed a redevelopment as Subcom’s services have developed considerably since incorporation last summer. Subcom specialises in touch screen solutions, and after starting out purely selling screens now works with clients on bespoke solutions including touch screen development, kiosk systems, EPoS and digital signage.
Subcom has started colloborating with Substrakt on a regular basis offering clients both the hardware development and the software applications. Recent colloborations include kiosk development for West Midlands Police (see image below) as well as the upcoming Golden Square project.
The Subcom website features the latest Wordpress plugin to come from Substrakt. This is an e commerce plugin called Shopstix and will be available in beta by the end of July.
A good foundation is the best way to start any project, that’s why a few months ago we started looking at how we could improve the default templates we use to build the majority of our sites. We decided to take the awesome WP-Blueprint and put it on a diet, compressing and combing the default stylesheets into a single lump. This made quite a bit of difference. Next we streamlined some of the JavaScript libraries that we used and looked at the fastest and easiest way to serve them up.
What we ended up with is Redprint a blank but incredibly fast WordPress template for building great sites.
Redprint gets a an A Grade on all Client Side YSlow tests.
It’s total size is only 52.5K on an empty cache.
Uses sensible CSS defaults from Blueprint, so if your familar with these it’s very easy to get started.
We’ve added in support for jQuery, SWFObject and all the hooks for Google Analytics, plus there’s a neatly defined functions.js to keep all of your jQuery out of the way.
We’ve been using Redprint in house for the past couple of months, now we’ve decide to open it up to outside contributors, this means that you can use the same superfast template that we do and share your modifications back with the rest of the world.
Visually Redprint isn’t anything special but under the hood it’s a well formed blank canvas ready for your theme to take shape.
If you’d like to get notified when the template is updated start Watching the project and finally if you’ve got ideas for additional features or would like to make some changes Fork the project and start hacking.
We have just had news that we won the international design competition for the design of Golden Square, in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, as part of a team led by Capita Lovejoy’s Birmingham office, beating over 100 international practices in the process.
Golden Square is being created as one of the first new projects in Birmingham City Council’s ‘Big City Plan’, which will see the city centre transformed over the coming years. The proposals for this new public square seek to create an exciting, iconic and inspiring space, which would act as the focal point to the Jewellery Quarter.
Our part of the proposal was to implement digital media technology, providing visitor information facilities as an integral component of the scheme - connecting users of the square to the facilities and businesses within the Jewellery Quarter. This is a great opportunity for Substrakt to work closely with sister company Subcom to provide innovative touch screen display solutions.
We are working with Birmingham based blogger / social media consultant Chris Unitt (Meshed Media) to develop a West Midlands creative jobs board.
The primary aim of the website is to advertise jobs within the West Midland’s creative industry, but it will also be a blog detailing latest news within the industry, tips from industry leaders and interviews to help potential employees improve their skills and industry knowledge.
The website has been launched, but is still a work in progress so feedback is welcome.
It was nice to see Substrakt featured in the Birmingham Post, the Metro, and PR Week today.
The Birmingham Post article is about the recent relaunch of walkit.com while the Metro mentions our house warming party at Fazeley last Thursday.
PR Week publishes our recent collaboration with Big Cat Group:
Big Cat Group, the Birmingham-based creative consultancy, has collaborated with online/web services expert Substrakt to create a social media consortium in the Midlands. Big Cat has previously worked on social media campaigns on behalf of the West Midlands Police and Birmingham City Council.
We had a bit of a knees up last night which was great fun, so thanks to all who made it.
The main excuse was an office warming party, we have now been in Fazeley Studios for over 5 months so decided is was about time to celebrate the fact.
Other reasons to party included the recent upload of walkit.com, the development of a 2 new personal projects (launches imminent), a new personal photography project from Kate Beatty, and Chris Unitt’s recent company formation, Meshed Media.
Party highlights include the awesome food of Sabai Sabai (thai restuarant in Moseley) and the Bright Size Gypsies band.
ASOS have been making it big recently. I also noticed that their online efforts are second to none, at least in the fashion retail sector. Their website is top-notch. Nearly all their items of clothing have a gallery of images and (impressively) a catwalk video to match. Their email newsletters are far more comprehensive than that of rivals Urban Outfitters or Topshop/Topman. Nearly all their employees keep an active commentary of fashion on Twitter. They’ve recently launched a community arm of their website called ASOS Life. I wagered, albeit with myself, that ticking all these online ‘boxes’ was, at least in part, reason for their great success. It may be a few months old, but I stumbled accross this article today by Ilana Fox (the Community Manager at ASOS), which seemed to confirm my thoughts. A section from it:
Wherever you look there’s news of job cuts in the press. No newspaper group seems to be able to escape from it, so why are they still spending thousands and thousands of pounds launching social networks and new platforms for their users to talk to each other, when they’re not actually joining in with the conversation themselves? We know the main reason is money, resource, time and effort. We all get that, and it doesn’t need to be spelled out. But could it also be that newspapers like to be the authority, and don’t want to put themselves in a position where that authority is questioned? Newspapers are facing a difficult future, and no matter what a few web-savvy commentators say, newspapers still don’t like - or get - the internet. They don’t want to have a conversation with their users. They want just want them to be readers, and to make sure their opinions are pigeon-holed carefully in selected areas of the brand. For them it’s not a real community - it’s an easy way to look like they want opinions, even if they don’t do anything with them. But where’s the proof that their readers are influencing or helping to create the future of their newspaper brands? I’ve not seen evidence of it. That’s why I’m so excited about what I’m doing at ASOS.com. We’ve not launched the community platform yet, but that hasn’t stopped us from talking to our community already - they were talking to each other anyway, and we’ve started to join in - on our blogs, via Facebook, via Twitter. We want to open up that conversation, and we genuinely want to get know our customers. What we’re launching is a way for our customers to talk to us directly and transparently, to talk to each other, and to help develop ASOS into something even better - something that they want.
We have just launched a website for the Hare & Hounds in Kings Heath. This is a great venue and has been transformed since Adam Regan took over and started bringing some great live acts and opening it up to some fab promoters. This pub also happens to be my local, so it was really cool to be able to help with a new website and some ideas for online marketing and promotion.
The new website has a blog which aims to provide insight into the venue, its history and some extra information on some of the artists and local community. Chris Unitt will be helping to kick this off with a few guest posts.
The gallery section feeds images directly from Flickr, allowing the host of talented photographers who take photos at the venue to easily get their pics on the website. These photographers include a Substrakt HQ resident Kate Beatty, who took some great photos of legendary reggae singer Horace Andy on Sunday night.
Focus on the frontend, increase percevied performance.
Script block page execution, they block document.ready event. Cuzillion is a tool to test execution flow. There’s a set limit of requests for each domain, ‘connection pool’ is the tech term, so use domain sharding. images.example.com/ scripts.example.com point to the same resource. Then you can queue up resources and they won’t block, because they served from different domains.
There’s a full breakdown of techniques in the slideshow but using JS to insert JS into the head won’t block, so you can use a main script to trigger loading other scripts. Useful but it gets tech if you need to load a library before another script, e.g. jQuery before jQuery UI. Suspect somebody needs to write a library to do this better. Pay attention to race conditions.
iframes the most expensive DOM element another excuse not use them. iframes also block document ready, which is hard when your serving 3rd party ads. A way around this is to wait for document ready then insert the iframes, they load after the important JS and don’t block your UI. Just bundle them in with (#foo).html = “adcode”
There were also some recommendations about using mod_delate although that spends CPU time, so if you’ve got heavy traffic it might not be applicable. Also Google do some clever stuff with flushing, where part of the page is sent to the browser even if the rest of the page is in flux. It’s interesting, but then they’ve got control of the whole stack. They could/do probably run a modded up apache which is speed focused.
“Google want the web to be instantaneous” interesting choice of words, not fast, or quick but immediate. It’s a utility.
SXSWi: Everything You Know About Web Design Is Wrong
We kicked off our first Substrakt SXSW with Everything You Know About Web Design Is Wrong, I think we came out of it with a fresh perspective and focus on a very familiar topic.
Here’s a quick video summary:
raw notes: (my comments in bold)
media driven by tech not artists
master the tech and have good content = win
web needs to develop a language/grammar, film used to suck but then we developed ideas about how to use the camera to tell a story
artist driven instead of tech driven
list of sites that would be just as good if they were printed
above the fold is a big fail won’t be the last time I say that
don’t know what the grammar will be, but here are some emerging patterns
random voyerism
examples like flickrvision because we like to watch see also: flickr.com/explore/clock/ which I think is the best example of this atm
we like to watch people, even if were not connected to them people are all the same
another example is found magazine, which is a collection of found photographs we have the ability to construct a narrative from non-narrative forms
self-aware, but controlled, content (i.e. content with metadata)
Metadata is content that knows itself better than we do.
user created content
The web is about a single user and the choices they make.
They control the content
ambient awareness
trival and profound
twitter as a portrait again with the network narrative thing, also relevant to Transaction Analysis
experiential content
Rollercoaster is not the track, it’s the experience
Experience as the content
Design is not about making something look pretty, it’s the whole stack, visual design is a means to an end, real design solves problems. Design needs to happen at the beginning not just at the end, and it needs to be jambalaya mix everyone in. Use an expert in the context to explore and protect the user experience
Here’s the answer but your asking the wrong question
there was a bit of talk about being allowed to fail and this usual learn from your failures vibe, I don’t agree, you need to learn from success not how to get it wrong
If you’d like to digest the whole thing on your iPod then grab the podcast, everything was filmed but actually I can’t seem to track down the full version anywhere.
Found an interesting design based application for the iPhone; KERN, a game similar to Tetris but focussed on typography. Created by Jason Franzen and Adrian Johnson, in the game a word with a missing letter drops down the screen. You position the letter at the bottom of the screen appropriately before it reaches the bottom, and then it’s scored by how appropriately it’s kerned with the other letters in the word. Check out a video of the game in action at FORMation Alliance.
In March, Jim and I will be off to SXSW. There’s some fantastic panels lined up, I’m already having a hard time picking which things to go to, everything sounds a bit too interesting.
I know that Pete Ashton and Antonio Gould are headed in that direction, but who else from around Birmingham is going over? It would be nice to have a bit of a meetup in Austin.
If you’re headed over then add me on Dopplr so we can start making plans!
We have just relaunched Kate Beatty’s website. Kate is a good friend of ours and works with us here at Substrakt HQ. She is working with some exciting clients as well as working on various personal projects that sound very intriguing, so watch this space.
It seems like old factory’s make for successful ‘creative hubs’, although I am only basing this on the two examples of The Custard Factory here in Birmingham, and the Tobacco Factory in Bristol.
So how about the Tea Factory?
Typhoo Tea’s premises on Bordesley Street were in use from 1892 to 1978 and now remains largely unoccupied. I believe it is owned by Mohammed Latif (owner of the cash and carry in Digbeth), but have no idea of his intentions, if any. If anyone knows anymore i’d be very interested to hear.
The Custard Factory is obviously a great asset of Digbeth, but the retail element suffers due to lack of footfall. Developing the Tea Factory could provide an enticing link from the city centre to Digbeth, and it stands proud at the end of Fazeley canal which could be an awesome feature.
We have recently moved from the Custard Factory to just round the corner at Fazeley Studios. We made a conscious decision to remain in Digbeth, despite serious thought to move to the very appealing Jewelery Quarter, where we would enjoy the luxury of good bars, restaurants, and cash points! The main reason for our residing was that we have built good contacts in this area, and are excited about the potential of Digbeth, although we have been slightly frustrated by the lack of progress to date.
Thanks to bigcitytalk.org.uk I have read the Big City Plan options for Digbeth and personally believe a ‘Business Digbeth’ would be a good way to roll. As a growing media business based in lower Eastside this is the option that would best suit us.
Business Digbeth: Digbeth would become a modern city centre business quarter, involving refurbishment of the best buildings and redevelopment of the remainder. The emphasis would be on growing small to medium enterprises including high grade manufacturing, media and services which desire a city centre location. The area would become the focus for international business connected with Birmingham’s diverse working population and would be supported by a high speed next generation fibre optic network. Residential development would have a lesser role but it could include historic / iconic building conversions, live-work studios and other innovative means of enabling industrial, creative, and residential uses to work together. Improvements to the public realm would be encouraged, particularly along Digbeth High Street and High Street Deritend. This option could involve ring-fencing small areas for creative industries and developing more facilities like the Custard Factory.
Improvements to the Digbeth high street are essential. I don’t really need to highlight the fact that there are 6 lanes of traffic in some parts, and pavements that you can’t even walk up when they are crammed full of people waiting at the bus stops. It doesn’t make walking to and from Digbeth from the centre much of a pleasure. Fazeley Street and Bradford Street also have much potential for developing a link that would encourage footfall. I really like the idea of using the waterways more, and this is something that would be ideal in these areas. I was excited about the ‘Warwick Bar’ project, but massively disappointed when i heard it wasn’t going ahead.
I imagine this sort of development would be much more feasible if we were in a ‘Business Digbeth’, offering thriving SMEs a place to spend lunchtimes and evenings.
Iconic building conversions will really help get Digbeth on the map and generate the footfall that it is so desperately in need of. I believe this development would encourage restaurants, good bars and cash points(!) to the area the fastest.
Start-up Digbeth. This option would enable Digbeth to evolve as a neighbourhood where business ventures can begin. A significant proportion of the existing building stock would be protected as a way of harbouring creative and start up industries. The character of the area would continue to be derived from the industrial architecture, reusing buildings where possible, keeping the variety of small workshops interspersed with larger warehouses. Refurbishment would be confined to keeping the space operational in order to keep rents down. The streets would remain functional in character and the amount of new residential development under this option would be limited.
Isn’t this what Digbeth is at the moment? The Custard Factory alone offers start up businesses space at reasonable rates, and aims to facilitate the opportunity for creatives to work in an environment with like minds. The Gray’s already have, and are aiming to, reuse existing buildings to create studio and workshop space. In my eyes this option is already happening. A ‘Business Digbeth’ would no doubt have areas where this development would still facilitate start up businesses, and offer these businesses a network to accelerate business growth.
Living and working Digbeth: Digbeth would accommodate a significant amount of housing as a result of the redevelopment of some of its poorer industrial areas. The area as a whole would retain distinct areas of housing and employment but there would be an increased emphasis on residential. This might include student housing (if there is a continuing demand for such accommodation; demand is forecast to ease somewhat), which would help to support local activities such as the music scene and other creative industries. This option would bring more people into the area to support its local services. Digbeth would go some way towards contributing towards Birmingham’s brownfield housing needs.
Nice idea, but the existing residential areas remain largely unoccupied, and some residential development has been sat unfinished for several months. How would developing this even more help, if the current housing and live/work facilities have limited uptake? The area is directing itself towards a more commercial route, so if this is implemented effectively then eventually the residential aspect will benefit.
Our creative director Jim has just moved up to the Rotunda in the centre, after being fed up with the lack of facilities and the desolate environment he encounters in the evenings (the fact that his flat mate got beaten up and had his Christmas shopping stolen off him outside his front door didn’t help their decision much!) Is this a welcome that new residents would want?
These are my current thoughts, updates are likely to be made.
