mrben.co.uk

Product Design Site

May 14, 2011

I recently made a new portfolio site for budding young product designer Emma Claire Stopford. Designed by the two of us and built by me all the in same day I'm happy with the result — especially given the speed we managed it in.

It's a simple 2 page site that uses jQuery to show and hide the products. All content is managed by Emma.

Was quite a fun little speed-project really!

Categories: News

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Shall I Go To The Pub?

April 21, 2011

Last Friday someone asked "shall we go to the pub?". I thought it was a great idea, but as I feel I've lost my own identity and become a conduit for the Internet I thought I should check with it first. Whacking shalligotothepub.com into Firefox I was shocked to find no answer. I couldn't possibly go to the pub without the Internet sanctioning it, so Pawel and I spent 20 minutes creating http://shalligotothepub.com.

It was done for our own amusement, but after Patrick submitted it to StumbleUpon the hits started rolling in, and in, and in. Thousands and thousands of visits within a couple of hours was NOT what we were expecting! (So we quickly stuck a Facebook Like button on there.) And they continued. Over 11k on the first day, and half that the next. Monday and Tuesday saw an unexpected resurgence in people wanting to go the pub with the Internet's permission. Tuesday being the busiest day yet with 11.5k visits.

We've had around 40k unique visitors, over 2k Facebook likes and 56k page views. Over 75% of traffic came from StumbleUpon, and 8% from Facebook. Overwhelmingly, our visitors choose Firefox and Chrome to browse the web - perhaps the high Firefox percentage is linked to the handy StumbleUpon toolbar.

This has certainly been an interesting lesson.

Categories: Fun

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Spring 2011 Redesign

April 13, 2011

While watching Scott Pilgrim vs The World I gave this site a face-lift based on the colours of Ethan Schoonover's Solarized colour scheme. Such a beautifully done project, I think I'll be using the colours for a while!

I had originally used the amazing Raleway Thin font for the headings, but changed it after a week or so as it just wasn't rendering well enough on non-Macs! Today I swapped it out for Terminal Dosis Light from Google web fonts. It's not perfect, but it's more readable on Linux machines than Raleway Thin.

I'm pleased with the face-lift — the old site was looking dated and a bit crap — especially considering how quickly it was done.

Maybe now I'll actually update the blog inbetween redesigns…

Categories: News

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What's the world listening to?

July 8, 2010

A while back I crafted a Processing sketch that displayed a map of the world and popped up the most popular artist for the country the mouse was hovering over. Bored last night, I decided to give the newish Google Maps API a whirl and see if I could recreate the sketch for the web.

It uses fxb's javascript-last.fm-api library which made the artist lookup incredibly easy. The whole thing took no more than 2 hours.

Categories: Fun, Programming, Visualization

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