Brad Haynes / Blog

Saying I was a bit shocked is putting it mildly. This week I was introduced to Sainsbury’s To You‘s ‘new’ website design, and my chin almost hit the floor. How can such a big company have the balls to blatantly copy just about every aspect of Ocado‘s website? Having been the only web/user interface designer at Ocado since the website was launched I know exactly how the Ocado website design evolved and where all the ideas have came from, and there really is nothing original about the Sainsbury’s To You design. Earlier this year Tesco‘s largely plagiarised Ocado too (even using some dubiously identical graphics), but Sainsbury’s have taken it one step further and really ripped-off the design completely.

I guess there are several ways of looking at this:

1. The Ocado website design is perfect (which it isn’t) and can’t be improved (which it definitely can)
2. Ocado is such a threat to other supermarkets’ online services that they are scared to do anything different to Ocado
3. Sainbury’s To You and Tesco are lazy
4. It’s a compliment

Thankfully the coding behind Sainsbury’s new site isn’t great, accessibility, speed and browser compatibility are still problems for them.

Well this seems to be how the other half lives. I got invited to a ‘do’ which was basically The Science Museum and a bunch of Catering companies trying to show off their best food, service and the venue to companies that are likely to book them for corportate events. I had to pretend to be in Public Relations a couple of times, which is about as far from my skill-set as you can get, but several glasses of wine and much poncey food later, I’m pretty sure that if I was going hold an event for hundreds of people with a very large budget, I’d go there. This will never happen.

This week I have mostly been drinking Old Bob. Don’t mistake this for some sort of dodgy pass-time, it’s simply a bloody fantastic real ale. Brewed by Ridley’s of Essex, I’ve yet to find a better pint in a London pub. Sadly Ridley’s has just been sold to Greene King, so the beer is bound to take a drop in quality if they decide to brew it in the sugar-beet hell that is Bury St. Edmunds. I’m thinking of joining CAMRA and growing a beard so I can blend with real ale aficionados – I already have a battered corduroy suit jacket, so the look will almost be complete.

I saw ‘40 year old virgin‘ at the cinema which I’m going to have to recommend. It could have been really fucking awful, but it’s not. I cared about the characters and it even had me laughing, which is rare lately.

I finally got around to working out how to copy DVDs onto my mac – not as simple as it sounds as you’ll know if you’ve ever tried. I won’t go into great detail as I’m sure it’s not legit, but I want to keep the movie’s I’ve bought on my computer. I’m not really sure why copying ripping CDs onto my iPod is okay, but copying a movie from a DVD isn’t? Anyway, Mac The Ripper works a treat for extracting the DVD content, removing the region code and macrovision protection. FFmpegX (after a fidly installation) will encode your VOB files into just about anything you want, and for any device. I’ve been going for the H.264 format as at 1/10th compression with very little loss in quality it’s a minor miracle. Sadly, I need a bit more oomph in processing power than my powerBook can muster as currently the average DVD encoding process is taking about 8 hours.

It is definitely taking me longer to recover from a night of drinking. This time not even heavy drinking. Four pints of beer (ale actually) and a relatively healthy curry seems to have wiped out my Saturday morning. Anyway I watched a Japanese animated movie called ‘Tokyo Godfathers‘ on DVD which was pretty unusual and well worth the £7 (yes, I’m a big spender). It’s the sort of film that could easily be made with actors, but just works really well with realistic background illustrations and character drawn anime. The story is of three homeless people: a transsexual former nightclub singer, a washed-up bicycle store owner, and a runaway girl who stabbed her father find a baby and go to great lengths to find it’s mother. I’m definitely going to have to recommend this.

I’ve recently discovered Safari (Apple’s web browser) has a hidden debug menu which along with some useful JavaScript features, can pretent to be a whole selection of other browsers. Most noteably it can declare itself as Internet Explorer 6 on Windows, which is really handy for all those badly written websites which can’t be bothered to write standard code or test on other browsers. Once Safari is pretending to be IE6 Win, you can pretty much guarentee everything works fine.

Just type this into a terminal window and then restart Safari to reveal the debug menu

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

I’m not sure how this differs from how most people create digital black and white images, but I’m pretty happy with the results from this method. It’s pretty easy and fast and gives you plenty of flexibility along the way. This method does assume you have photoshop and a colour image. I’m not sure if Photoshop Elements has all the bits needed.

1. Take a look at the red green and blue channels to work out which holds the most and nicest information.
2. Create a channel mixer adjustment layer and mix the channels into monochrome remembering which channel had the most information from step 1.
3. Add a curves layer and make the curve into an ‘S’ shape so that there is plenty of contrast in the midtones.
4. The image will be looking pretty stark at this point, so fade the Curves layer until the image looks good and you are getting the most detail.
5. Apply an unsharp mask to the image layer, I find that setting the threshold to 0 or 1, and the radius to between 0.8 and 1 works well. Adjust the percentage until the image is as sharp as you can make it before it starts to look too rugged.

Not the New Power Generation, but the National Portrait Gallery. Went to see an exhibition called The World’s Most Photographed. Muhammad Ali, James Dean, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Queen Victoria, Mahatma Ghandi, Adolf Hitler, and John F Kennedy are the subjects. I really enjoyed seeing these high quality images of legendary people, where it would usually be fuzzy images on TV or only average quality versions in books. I actually found the Hitler display to be the most interesting and in some ways, the most revealing. He looks truly awkward in front of a camera and was clearly having photographs taken because he needed to rather than wanted to. I’ve never seen him look so real before, it was quite chilling seeing such an evil man looking so vulnerable and in the candid shots, so totally normal.