blog.strakt

mfg! is a great funk (soul, gospel, northern soul, afrobeat, dance-floor, jazz, rare groove, boogaloo and latin) night held on the last Saturday of every month at the Bull’s Head, Moseley. I would highly recommend a visit.

They also have a nice new blog.

We were very pleased to help them with their flyers…

I have just been chatting to a friend about developments in the eastside of Birmingham, a subject that I am keen on as it is home to our design studio. Our creative director, Jim, has also recently moved to a new flat in Avoca court, as too have several of my friends over the past couple of years. I have limited knowledge of the Eastside plans, and have just heard various rumours and plans. I haven’t managed to find any concrete information or facts informing me of development plans or timescales. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, or maybe there is nothing to look for at the moment? Please excuse my ignorance if so, and help guide me.

The Council’s link to information appears to be broken.
There is information about Eastside sustainability:
Eastside Sustainability Advisory Group (ESAG)
This site links me to the official Eastside site to find out more, but it’s the council one, that I already discovered does not exist.
Sustainable Eastside
An interesting ‘vision for the future’ document pdf here, from 2002!

As a ‘creative’ area I think it is important to involve all residents in development plans in order to retain the businesses and take on board peoples ideas. I have enjoyed attending events such as the lower eastside dialogues, as they offer an opportunity for people to get their heads together and share interesting ideas.

Manchester’s ‘New Islington’ plan has a web site that communicates (albeit slightly too flashy for my liking, although they do offer an alternative display) the project in a good level of detail and involves the community.

I think the Council should consider producing a web site that keeps the public fully informed of plans, and enables discussion and feedback. I am excited to be in Digbeth and watch it develop, but would like to see this development (or at least the plans and timescales) and feel in some way that we can make influencial decisions.

The working draft of the HTML 5 standard was released a few days ago. HTML 4, the current standard, hasn’t really been reworked in 10 years - a long time in the relatively short lifespan of the modern web.

Much has changed since the early dot-com days of December 1997 when HTML 4 was published, as developers, designers and users have unlocked the web’s potential. Web sites have moved from being a collection of static pages to media-rich communities leveraging participation.

HTML 5 is designed to reflect this, with APIs for drawing two-dimensional graphics, embedding and controlling multimedia, managing client-side data storage and editing parts of documents. Turning to more bread-and-butter stuff, HTML 5 will also make it easier to represent familiar page elements. A full list of changes can be found here.

“Ajax and related innovations have propelled demands for a new standard that allows people to create web applications that interoperate across desktop and mobile,” the group said.

A drawing API? It will be interesting to see sites that use no graphics at all, just typography and browser-rendered graphics. Speedy. Though would this be regarded as presentational markup? - something we’ve been told to separate from our content? Either way, I don’t think we need to start making flashcards for the array of new tags just yet.

Read more here: Reg Developer

Birmingham was host to CABEs (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) Urban Design Summer School in 2007.

We produced the yearbook… (more pics/info here)

I returned back to the studio yesterday after a fantastic holiday in Australia. Now feeling fully refreshed! although i’m already missing the sun and surf.

Here’s a couple of photos to make you jealous!