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Creating, or being part of a creative process is rarely a seamless activity. There are a number of factors that can make or break a project – particularly when there are numerous people involved in the process. Web Design and Development is one of the areas I have gained reasonable experience in, especially working with others to deliver a product. Throughout this experience I have worked with designers of all skill levels, different people liasing with clients, adapted existing sites into content management systems and designed for other developers. Each new project brings a new set of problems to solve in order to deliver the best result; however, here are my thoughts on what can help a project to run well when working with others.

Esentially, it all comes down to one point: every project has constraints

Each person involved in a project gets involved for different reasons. Maybe you are a designer with a keen eye for detail. Maybe you are a developer who values optimisation and clean code, or maybe you are a project manager who, at the end of the day, just wants the client to be happy. Not that all of these approaches are mutually exclusive, but generally everyone has a different focus. The key thing that determines which of these is dominant are the project constraints. Maybe its time, maybe its the budget – but theres always factors that determine how a project gets done, what gets cut and what makes it.

When working in a team during this process its crucial that everyone understands the constraints of a project, and understands the limitations and perspective of the other people in the team. Without this mutual understanding, projects can fall over or people leave disatisfied with the end result – something that no creative person likes.

Late last year some group members and I (see credits) put together this educational video on what happens to the body during Acute Radiation Syndrome.

This is the first time I have used Adobe AfterEffects. I was very impressed by its usability and features which made creating this video a lot simpler than in a program like Flash.

I don’t think ‘enjoy’ is the right word, but I hope you appreciate this video.

This week, Google announced the release of their “+1″ button to rival Facebook’s “like this”.

Now, when I first heard about this idea I thought “What a good idea, Google is in a really good position to offer something like that, given the amount of people who use their products for a wide range of web services”. And it is a good idea. Or rather, it was a good idea 5 years ago, and then Facebook did it, and since then it’s been working pretty well for them. If you can’t already tell, I’m fairly pessemistic of the popularity that the Google +1 button will garner.

This is one of those interesting situations where a better product exists, but people still use an inferior alternative. I’m terming the Google +1 button as superior because Google has a wider use group, and the +1 button has the potential to have exposure to a wider user group than Facebook’s ‘like’ button. The most obvious use is the ability to see what your friends +1 in your search Google search results.

I’m kind-of perplexed by this. Because I really like Google and their products. I love the way they are always expanding and coming up with new innovations. But when it comes to social media services they seem to be a number of steps behind their competitors. It’s almost like Google is to Facebook and Twitter what Microsoft has been to Apple over the past 10 years, not leading the innovation and generally being perceived as “less cool”.

In February 2010, Google released Buzz – intended to be a “new way to start conversation about the things you find interesting”. Again, Google was in an excellent position to offer this service, because they built it into Gmail, a service which a heap of people already have, so theres no need to have an alternative site open to do your online social network. You just load up gmail.com and you get your email and social network in one place. Great idea in theory, but in practice I know of only 2 people who have used it over the past 14 months and have used it very little myself.

I think that their choice of colours and branding has some sway in this. Take the Google Buzz logo for instance:

…its awful.

I would suggest that Google has missed the boat on establishing a ubiquitous platform for online social interaction and should stop trying to compete. Twitter and Facebook (and to some extent LinkedIn) are, and will continue for a long time to be, the market dominators in this regard. Instead they should concentrate more on their kick-ass products and ideas, like Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google Earth, Appinventor, Scholar and Gmail.

For now, I’m giving +1, -3.

Google buzz logo: Creative Commons Image by Topgold

Self interested multi-national corporations abuse public relations practice to make a quick buck out of global sustainability and social responsibility movements.

An article published in the Harvard Business Review by Andrew Winston last October reported the corporate sins of “green” marketing which came out in the latest “Sins of Greenwashing” report. The report showed alarming figures of the number of products that make faux “green” claims on product packaging. In the age of ethical consumerism, global awareness and public conscience, it seems that the practice of public relations (for some) has simply become about convincing shareholders that they are “doing their bit” for these noble causes, while changing nothing in practice.

These marketing tactics may seem harmless enough, as they try to appeal to those sensitive to the softer side of capitalism, but at what cost do these artificial claims come? For a critical consumer of “ethical” products, this seems to raise one major question: Can ethical public relations practice be implemented when it is tied to the corporate agenda of financial profits at any cost?

Back in 2005 it was already evident that the green and social responsibility movements were being abused to serve the profit driven agenda of large multinational corporations. An article published that year in the Public Relations Review detailed how public relations campaigns used these movements to reinforce corporations’ reputation at the expense of marginalized publics (p. 515, 518). For public relations practice to be conducted ethically however, it must embrace all stakeholders of a company, despite if they serve the financial agenda or not. Time will tell if public relations practice for large multinational corporations can be used for more than just a tool to help “knife poor nations in the back, and offer a band aid for a photo opportunity” (p. 516).

I began this site as a small test to see what wordpress was like. Over the past 2 years I’ve become very familiar and comfortable with Joomla 1.5 and more recently 1.6. I’ve been putting off getting to know wordpress because Joomla has always served my needs well. But in the interest of being diverse I decided to branch out and learn some new things. I have to say I’m really impressed with the usability, template support and plugins available. I’d like to do a more details summary of what I think about Joomla vs. WordPress soon once I get a better handle on things. I’m also going to play with buddypress and see if that can serve the needs of dowhatyoucan better.