Brad Haynes / Blog

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.