It’s the start of a fantastic new voyage for Thin Martian. Not only will our combined experience and expertise enhance the services we provide, it will pave the way for further expansion.

The new agencies’ head office will be based at our Shoreditch Studio by Silicon Roundabout with all staff retained. The combined team will total around 40 people worldwide.

About Codegent
Formed in 2004, Codegent is a digital design, UX and build agency with offices in London and Bangkok. Codegent’s clients include BBC, Channel 4, Nestlé, the British Library and Skechers.

In addition to its agency work, Codegent has also built up a thriving mobile apps business, achieving over 5 million downloads of its mobile apps in the last 18 months.

codegent.com

You might have read a lot about Cookies and the Cookie Law in recent weeks. And with less than three weeks before it comes into force, you should be asking yourself what is it, how is going to affect your website and what do you need to do to be compliant?

What is the EU Cookie Law?
The EU Cookie Directive 2012 is an amended piece of privacy legislation that came into force last year. It requires website owners to make significant changes to their sites, forcing them to obtain informed consent from visitors prior to storing any information on any device connected to the web via the use of Cookies.

By 26th May 2012, all UK websites must offer users the opportunity to opt-in to the use of Cookies and their passing information to third parties, so as to stay on the right side of this ‘Cookie Legislation’.

The impact of the Cookie Law could fundamentally change the whole web browsing and shopping experience for all users.

What is a Cookie?
Cookies are used by many websites and are deployed for a variety of purposes. This includes page personalisation, retention of visitor preferences, shopping cart management within e-commerce sites and tracking users. In addition, they can also facilitate the analysis of visitor behaviour.

Complying with the Cookie Law
To ensure a website is fully compliant with the EU Directive, The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) advises all organisations to take the following three actions:

1. Carry out a Cookie Audit to check what type of cookies and similar technologies are in use and how they are deployed.

2. Assess how intrusive the use of cookies is.

3. Where consent is required, decide what solution to obtain consent is best for the website in question.

The Cookie Collective
As a founding partner of The Cookie Collective, an organisation set up specifically to provide information and solutions to website owners, we can help you ensure your website is on the right side of the Cookie Law.

To find out more and to ensure you are Cookie Compliant, visit www.cookielaw.org or Tweet us at @TheCookieCrunch and our pals over at Governor

Don’t wait. Act now. The law comes into force on 26th May 2012.

“I wasn’t the original designer who worked on this project and was actually taking over from someone else’s work. Pete designed the characters, Elmer and Brad the Cat, as an advert for HUP that would go into newsletters for Microsoft. The characters gave the HUP product a more human and fun side to it. The brief was then to further this with an animation which was started by Pete and then completed by me. Taking over from Pete wasn’t as difficult as it sounds as I had watched him design the characters and then worked out how I wanted them to move and interact with both each other and the situations that we were coming up with.

‘The basic story had been done by Pete which is that Elmer doesn’t have to be at work to save the day; he can be at home and yet still access to work files etc so something that I added in to the animation was coming up with new environments to show the versatility of the HUP programme such as the restaurant and the end scene with the water skiing and the parachutes. I really liked animating Elmer and Brad and making them move in the little ways that they do; Elmer cocking his head, blinking, Brad moving his tail. I just felt that it brought it more to life and was another fun element that I could bring to the animation and the product.

‘Overall, I think I’m pretty happy with the way that it turned out. I gained more experience using Illustrator and After Effects and it was also interesting to work with and use other people’s visuals and ideas.”

Below is the evolution of Elmer and Brad, from Pete’s first animation to Adam’s final piece.

To find out more about the HUP animation check out the showcase blog here and make sure to watch the animation video.

Dominique Falla is a designer and illustrator who spends her time between Brisbane and Byron Bay in Australia. When I first saw her typographic poster “We are all a part of the same thing”, I was instantly captivated by the ‘woven’ inscription and after writing about it I realised I wasn’t the only person to be enamoured; it received the most ‘likes’ and ‘re-blogs’ of any Type Worship post; nearly 22,000 and counting!

The piece was created with tiny nails and wound cotton during Dominique’s ‘Year of Helvetica’ (to prove a point, she committed herself to using the ubiquitous font exclusively for 12 months); a period that ended last month with a ‘Goodbye Helvetica’ exhibition. She’s now “kicking up her heels with joy” at the freedom of being able to use and draw any type she likes.

I recently had the opportunity to ask Dominique about her unique typographic approach of bringing words and images together in a way you can feel.

After illustrating for 20 years, hand-drawing type comes naturally to her: “I don’t think I could ever be bothered scrolling through hundreds of typefaces on my computer anymore. It’s just easier for me to get out the sketch book. I also think typography is a passion that once you develop it, it becomes an obsession. I have that obsession now but when I was a student, I hated type. I just didn’t understand it, but something clicked along the way and now it’s all I want to use in my work.”

She was always a “crafty kid” and as an only child, had to entertain herself. “I remember long hours of sewing, knitting, crochet, and macramé projects as a ten year old. When I hit 15, I started getting more interested in drawing and painting, and let the craft go, but obviously the skills have remained.
“I’ve also renovated two houses with my husband so I’m pretty bloody handy with a hammer as well now.”

This taps into a resurgence of interest in hand-crafted skills among designers and illustrators of my generation, which has prompted an evolution of manual image making using media like letterpress, screen printing and darkroom photography. These relegate the use of computers to simply draft, composite and publish.
“The tactile thing came about because I’m just hankering for a lost age where design was felt as well as seen. Now everyone just looks at computer screens and I enjoy it when people get so excited about touching my work.”

As part of her current doctorate studies on the subject of Tactile Typography her research is exploring why people respond so positively to type that you can touch, play with and sit on etc. yet completely ignore a piece of vernacular typography, such as a road sign. It asks the question;
“At what point does the typography stop communicating language and instruction and start becoming “art”?

This inevitably opens up a world of different mediums for Dominique’s style of work:
“I get bored very easily, and I also think if there’s a concept behind what the piece is saying, the way it says it should also reinforce the concept. My thought process usually goes “what am I trying to say?” and then once I devise a quote or statement, I try and work out if anything in the statement suggests a medium or technique. So far thankfully, it has.”

Trying new things each time however doesn’t come without risk of failure:
“Oh yes, I’ve had many false starts, pieces that didn’t quite work, pieces that needed fixing and so on. Sometimes they’re so bad that I’m forced to change my concept mid-project. I read somewhere it’s called ‘confusion endurance’. You don’t always know what you’re doing but you need to cultivate the energy to just keep going anyway.”

I had read elsewhere about Dominique’s grit and determination to create her work despite uncomfortable conditions requiring protective equipment such as knee-pads and goggles:
“The gaffer tape typography on the concrete floor of the ‘Goodbye Helvetica’ installation was definitely the most painful. I couldn’t walk properly for a couple of days. The 4.5m x 2.4m Goodbye Helvetica string and pin piece completed three metres up in the air on a scissor-lift was the scariest [Dominique doesn’t like heights] and I recently made a portrait of a man’s face out of 8100 squares of paper and that was the longest. I don’t think I will be doing another large-scale paper mosaic any time soon. I have a lot of patience for tedium, much more than anyone I know, but boy did that test it.

So what’s next? Dominique has been invited to attend a Masters workshop on Typography in Rome later this year and one of her heroes, Louise Fili, is one of the teachers. To fund the trip she’s planning a large-scale public typography project. Stay tuned!

Follow Doinique on Tumblr and see more of her work here.

Simple tips for everyday typography by Jim Williams

The publishers Merrell kindly sent me an advance copy of their book to peruse. I felt obliged to ask “what makes this guide different from all the other typography reference manuals?”. The excellent Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style and Felici’s The Complete Manual of Typography are certainly not lacking as guides.

The response: Simplicity.

The information has been distilled right down and is presented in a well designed format. At just over 150 pages (many of these containing just one finely honed example) it is aimed at all users of typography, from students and professionals to anyone who produces layout design on a computer.

The book has an interesting back story too. It came about when the author, Jim Williams, was asked by a design company in Manchester to give a series of talks, one of which was about tips that could help designers with day-to-day typography. The presentation sat on his desk for months afterwards until Staffordshire University, UK (where Jim lectures part-time) provided funds for the presentation to be printed for use by his students. It was then featured by Creative Review following which he received lots of requests from all over the world. He was then encouraged to develop a book, and here it is.

It has been designed like a Moleskin notebook with a wonderfully tactile faux-leather cover, ribbon placeholders and an elastic enclosure strap. It feels like a book that will wear well rather than require being kept pristine.

If you want a comprehensive grounding in the fundamentals of typography or an accessible, concise reference guide, this book is for you.

Published 2nd April 2012. More information at: merrellpublishers.com

We see Windows 8 as a huge step in the digital world, merging the world of desktop, mobile and tablet. Building on our strong understanding of Windows Phone (see our work with The Guardian, British Airways and Metro Newspapers) and a great history of designing and developing across multiple Microsoft products, we’re excited to be at the forefront of mobile development and design.

This is an all day event that will take place in Covent Garden, London. It is going to be led and conducted by experts of the field who, like us, have been designing, developing and working with Windows Phone 8 software from early on in the platform’s beginning. There will also be Windows team members and other Windows 8 UX Training companies present who will be sharing their experience and expertise.

To find out more, check out the website.

Thin Martian’s relationship with Microsoft HUP is a long-running one, many users have come to love Elmer and Brad, the characters we designed to bring the productive elements of the product to life.

Microsoft sought to further this idea by commissioning an animation which highlighted the ease of functionality of the Microsoft HUP. The result is Elmer in motion!

Our designers incorporated the key unique selling point of HUP – its ease of use, within the animation to demonstrate the versatility and flexibility of the programme. The fact that Elmer is able to access the programme anywhere and any time is an important feature and his knowledge and skill set is improving, so much so that he can assist at the office remotely!

Thin Martian are proud to have worked again with Microsoft on this exciting project and we hope you enjoy the result:

Find out more about Microsoft HUP for your office and home: here.

Below are images of how the apps are presented in the advert:

The Metro WP7 application is their latest release, on a device which replicates the easy to use and simply designed Metro newspaper online. The app is created with the user in mind, whilst making sure it retains Metro’s well known style that is already enjoyed by so many. The main sections: news, sport, showbiz, music, games, tech and those weird and wonderful articles that you don’t get anywhere else, are there complete with pictures and videos giving the user a whole new experience for reading news on the go. The app is a first with multi-live tile news functionality.

The Guardian Windows Phone 7 app presents constantly updated news, sport, comment and reviews in a logical display. It effortlessly integrates videos, podcasts and picture galleries allowing an expanded user experience. By using Mango’s Live Tiles, users can even place their favourite section within a single touch on the home screen.

The British Airways application takes full advantage of the Windows Phone 7′s unique panoramic menus, a progressive step in Windows Phone design. It allows the user to check their flight times, get updates of delays and receive maps of each airport terminal with the greatest of ease. The app also comes with great additions; it can double as your boarding pass for the flight and it can be your ticket to BA’s executive lounge.

James Clarke, Co-Founder and Director of Thin Martian, talks about the experiences of creating the British Airways application for Windows Phone in the video below. The video was specially commissioned by Nokia to showcase their key design and development partners.

To see the Nokia Lumia 800 advert in full, click here

Profile of Price, D

Full Name: John David Price
Nickname: Disco Dave
Job Title: Developer
Current Project: Windows Phone 7 project
Favourite Task: Building websites
Favourite Childhood Cartoon: Count Duckula

To find out more about our Disco guy, check out his A Team page

Join us next week to see whose file we are going through.