I 'made' a thing

In the usual run of things, I didn't make it - many people made it. Jawad Ahmed did a great job in design and Thom Heslop managed to make sense of a ragbag of disparate elements, to make what was basically a shambles in to a well ordered and structured suite of tools for Orange customers.

I, being me, wanted to go the whole hog down the branding route, and have a black site, with all images black backgrounded and the design structure accommodating enough to give things (on section front pages at least) a fluid, almost hand-built feel - as if it wasn't being generated from a CMS in to a formal blocked out piece of real estate. Unfortunately (or fortunately!) I did not win the day but at least my insistence that black is good had some influence. the thing I like about black is that it gives what we traditionally call "white space" much more visibility. Actual 'white' space we tend to discount and ignore, unless the design is very clever at creating that floating sense of calm that you want from backgrounds. With black, one is forced in to recognising backgrounds immediately, and conversely, the text of course becomes super-important, and you want it to be as minimal as possible. I've always tried to do slides on black or at least, not white for exactly those reasons.

Anyway, I started it in May, and it is, as I said to someone earlier today, the size of a small town. It gives us room to grow our tools suite without breaking the structure - given that as part of it we have allowed single concepts to sit alongside aggregate ones dependent on the importance of the tool.

I'm pleased with it.  My next thing is a lovely project with Orange's Corporate Responsibility team, helming the product management of an iPhone app suite thing for volunteering, which should be a lot of fun. Going to iPhone first then Android, hopefully in a swifter time frame than originally thought.

I don't often talk about work, do I? There you are, I have now.

There are things that have come out a bit funny in the CMS, and a relatively new way we've worked out to make some small areas of text work better, so for the next few days I'm going to be post-launch tweaking. Feel free to suggest anything bar major changes in navigation ;)