S*T*U*F*F* Reloaded

I’ve succumbed to Twitter (alarmingly, for both G-RAFF and personal). I actually find it quite lightweight and fun, in the same way I find Facebook utterly invasive. I’ve actually started writing a Flash API wrapper for it, just for a bit of fun on the side. Hopefully, FlashTwitter will make it easier for people to use Twitter in Flash apps, with features like being able to add TwitPic (listen to me!!! What have I become?) images right into the posts.

In days gone by, I used to write letters. It took most of an evening, often accompanied by a scotch and music… but I enjoyed it so much. The person to whom I was writing would become my evening. The ritual of sealing the letter in an envelope (I was a bit of a geek with stationery) and heading off to post it was always something to look forward to - particularly when I was living in Japan, and the postbox took me on a night walk by paddy fields filled with that most romantic sound of the cicadas chirping, some fireflies in the sky.

Then email came along, and it was much easier to “drop someone a line” - much shorter, quicker. Now we have updates that are a couple of lines long, in Facebook and Twitter etc. Your day mapped out in chunks of 140 characters, filled with shorthand and crunched links that are meaningless until you click them. This post’s URL is http://bit.ly/BzsS for example. Clever but ugly. People laud it as a business tool, but I don’t buy it.

Actually, I am beginning to think that my approach to web design is so far away from the current trend as to be laughable. Call me old fashioned, but I actually think that striking designs and memorable ideas are where we get our inspiration, not tactically thought-out sites where the information is presented in a clear, easy-to-follow fashion which has been rigourously tested in Google Analytics to make sure it gets the most clicks. To put it bluntly, fuck that… I have no interest. If everything in our lifetimes had been designed like people approach websites, the world would be a pretty dull place.

One of the sites we did that still gets us a lot of referrals is the site we did for Rhubarb Food Design a few years ago. Its completely OTT - even we knew that as we were doing it (a gold-leafed theatre - in Flash - made of rhubarb leaves with curtains made of rhubarb and all kinds of mayhem). But at least it was a memorable homepage. No trace of “We are a food design company based in London. We really do wonderful canapés” in large text. There’s too much of that around right now.

Music has been great. Jules Maxwell and I have been working on a new record for Burning Codes and its been inspirational. Leo Abrahams came down the other night and did what Leo does best - bamboozle you with a heady combination of outrageous wizardry and earthbound humility. Jules’s brief to encapsulate “the spirit of a provincial firework display” was handled with grace, elegance and yielded a marvellous result. Jules’s description reminded me of a time when a singer (now excellent artist) Louise Wallace asked me to create a sound on my SH-101… “You know if a comet was approaching the earth and you were out in the desert. And just as it was approaching the edge of the atmosphere you began to hear something, but as the sound formed in your head, it turned and flew away… can you get that sound?” She was incredible.

I’ve been asked to go on tour with the mighty Brendan Perry later this year, which should be amazing, if I can just figure out a way to do it. The old “where there’s a will there’s a way” adage will hopefully come to my rescue. I’d love to do it. At least it would give me something to Twitter about.