Brad Haynes / Blog

I took the plunge and coughed up £200 for Apple’s Aperture application because the combination of iPhoto and Photoshop really just isn’t a useable option for a keen amateur photographer like myself who shoots more than a handful of images at a time.

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I’m really impressed with this website — and it’s free. Basically, it’s a bunch of templates for paper lens hoods. Download the PDF for your lens, print it out, tape and attach.

I’ve recently finished some work something called Ocado Lite, which is designed to cater for as many different browser platforms, devices and users as possible. Primarily, it’s reason for being is to allow customers with mobile phone web access to be able to create, modify, cancel or check orders.

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Creates great images and is better for managing sets of Raw digital images than Photoshop™, but totally lacks a useable user interface. I don’t think I’ve found a more unintuitive piece of software on OS X before, and yes that even include the rather dire Microsoft Office suite of applications.

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I was asked today what my design philosophy was. I must have one, I’m pretty opinionated and definite when it comes to design. But nailing down what exactly it is has proven to be a quite a challenge. I’d never considered myself outspoken enough to formulate and write down any philosophy I might have. So far I am pretty confident in falling into the category of Modernist with all the ethics that back it up, and a minimalist in terms of aesthetics, although perhaps not in terms of functionality. I believe that good design should be entirely fit for purpose, and should selflessly consider the user over aesthetics.

Last week Ocado picked up Visionary Design award from the NLB. I don’t really have any idea how many visually impared people use the website, but since we enforced a few rules and made the semantic markup more strict, it seems to work pretty well.

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Whilst doing some cross-browser testing, I fired-up Internet Explorer 5 for the mac (yes, it would be totally retarded to actually want to use this browser) and was seriously amused to see this messge as it downloaded the default msn.com homepage:

“Why does MSN look like this?
…If you are using Internet Explorer for Mac, we recommend that you use another browser to have an optimal experience on MSN.”

Microsoft default msn.com homepage

Let’s hope this means they aren’t going to write another crappy browser for the mac.

• Drinking: Hop Back Red Devil Ale, Highgate Highland Whiskey Ale
• Watching: Broken Flowers, Ghost In The Shell 2
• Listening: Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken? – Lloyd Cole & the Commotions

Looking forward to Wetherspoon’s Autumn Beer Festival, really enjoyed watching Broken flowers, lost something important.

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.