Gavin Elliott: My World...

It’s not about the $1 Billion

By Gavin on May 1, 2012 in Articles

$1 Billion. It all came as a bit of a shock, out of left field. Everyone shouted and screamed, concerned that Instagram would be folded under and into facebook. Rightfully so if you’re sitting on the fence about facebook acquisition strategy never mind a fan of Instagram itself which many people are. It is argued that Instagram isn’t worth $1 Billion, a company with no revenue. What has come out since the announcement regarding the quick fire negotiating between twitter / Instagram and facebook / Instagram.

Putting that aside for the moment, let me suggest that Mark Zuckerberg might have paid $2 Billion for Instagram and still not folded it directly in to facebook. Let me further suggest that now the $1 Billion purchase has happened he won’t for the foreseeable future folding it into facebook.

Looking at a small amount of facts;

Instagram is a very strong team, they scaled Instagram to an incredible user base with an incredibly small team.
Instagram now have an incredibly strong design team.
The majority of the Gowalla team was merged in to Facebook, they were also a very strong mobile team with great talent. (Gowalla was an incredibly good product in the early days – my opinion)
Facebook timeline apps are becoming more and more popular.

The Timeline

Predominantly, the timeline is made up of visible content from other sources. Video’s from youtube, music from Spotify, food photos from foodspotting and photos of anything from Instagram and these are just a few. If we look at textual posts, we can pretty much post to facebook from anywhere. ‘Our’ timeline is made up of content from auxiliary apps.

Zuckerberg also said his $1 Billion purchase was probably a one-off and wouldn’t become a habit. $1 Billion purchases might be one-off’s but I can see Facebook buying up experience apps to push to the timeline. It’s those auxiliary apps which make up the pieces of your life. And the more Facebook buys up, the more your life will be complete on the timeline. If all of the experience apps pushing to facebook just stopped for one day, how quiet would people’s timelines be?

NB: This post came from a conversation @alexhorre and I had.

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My City

By Gavin on April 24, 2012 in Articles

Cameron Moll, a man I greatly respect visited Newcastle upon Tyne to speak at a Conference last week. Whilst he was here he created a video which takes an awesome look at Newcastle. My City.

Thanks to Cameron, the video is incredible.

Newcastle from Cameron Moll on Vimeo.

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Designing for who…?

By Gavin on March 26, 2012 in Articles

On the 15 Feb, Paul Boag, who I respect and admire wrote this tweet.

…We need to realign our thinking. Job satisfaction should come from producing design the client loves, not design we (or our peers) love.

This got me thinking.

Job Satisfaction – To love what you do as if you don’t class it as ‘work’, it’s just that thing that you love doing and that thing which you do best. At happiest, I don’t go to ‘work’, I go to a room which some people call an office to do the things that I love doing. If I roll back to previous places of work and answer these two questions;

Do I get job satisfaction from producing design that the client loves? No.
Do I get job satisfaction from producing design that my peers love? No.

For other people it probably depends on the type of work you’re doing. Generally your client isn’t your end user, the end user is effectively the clients client. Design is heavily subjective so designing to the personal requirements of a client is dangerous ground. I believe any good designer can research and plan and then communicate in detail to their client as to why the design need not be right for them but will be for their clients.

My thinking on this is that job satisfaction need not come from producing design the client loves, but more that you’ve created great tangible design that delivers the requirements of its purpose. It could be there to delight, to provide intrigue or as most designs are, to make money.

I think I understand where Paul is coming from, and believe if this is directed to the likes of dribbble et al, then yes, getting the most ‘likes’ isn’t effective design at all. Whilst getting feedback from your peers is recommended and I implore you to do so it doesn’t mean we should be designing for them never mind seeking our own job satisfaction to do so.

I would suggest we all take a sit back and think before we start our next piece of work and think about who we are doing it for and then go from there and communicate that effectively and enjoy what we do for the right reasons.

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Lean Design

By Gavin on March 16, 2012 in Articles

There’s been so much work happening over at happiest over the past month or so and transitioning my design process in to a lean environment has had it’ s challenges but also had some great successes.